This popular and engaging text, now revised in a second edition, offers readers a social perspective on food, food practices, and the modern food system. It engages readers' curiosity by highlighting several paradoxes: how food is both individual and social, reveals both distinction and conformity, and, in the contemporary global era, comes from everywhere but nowhere in particular. With updates and enhancements throughout, the new edition provides an empirically deep, multifaceted, and coherent introduction to this fascinating field.

Each chapter begins with a vivid case study, proceeds through a rich discussion of research insights, and ends with discussion questions and suggested resources. Chapter topics include food's role in socialization, identity, health and social change, as well as food marketing and the changing global food system. The new edition gives more focused attention to labor (both paid and unpaid) in all aspects of the food system. In synthesizing insights from diverse fields of social inquiry, the book addresses issues of culture, structure, and social inequality throughout.

Written in a lively style, this book will continue to be both accessible and revealing to beginning and intermediate students alike.

Amy E. Guptill is Associate Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York

Denise A. Copelton is Associate Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York

Betsy Lucal is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University South Bend

1. Principles and Paradoxes in the Study of Food

2. Food and Identity: Fitting In and Standing Out

3. Food as Spectacle: The Hard Work of Leisure

4. Nutrition and Health: Good to Eat, Hard to Stomach

5. Branding and Marketing: Governing the Sovereign Consumer

6. Industrialization: The High Costs of Cheap Food

7. Global Food: From Everywhere and Nowhere

8. Food Access: Surplus and Scarcity

9. Food and Social Change: The Value of Values

References

Glossary

Index