Eating Iran: From the delicious to the inedible
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my esteem in the eyes of those…
Tag: food
Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
[no-caption] sodapix/Getty Images Northern Ethiopia was once home to a vast, ancient lake. Saber-toothed cats prowled around it, giant crocodiles swam within. The streams and rivers that …
CFP: AAA/CASCA 2019 in Vancouver, BC
ATTN SAFN MEMBERS: Start planning your sessions for AAA/CASCA 2019 in Vancouver, BC! The time has come to start planning sessions for the annual AAA meeting – this…
CFP: Mediations of Food: Identity, Power, and Contemporary Global Imaginaries
Call for Papers 2019: Volume 11, Issue 1 Mediations of Food: Identity, Power, and Contemporary Global Imaginaries The Global Media Journal — Canadian Edition Guest Editor: Dr. Tina…
Who Decided It Was Bad to Be Fat?
In 2009, supermodel Kate Moss caused a stir when she categorically stated that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” As jaw-dropping as the sentiment might have seemed…
Fat Gets No Respect (But That Should Change)
Every human has it. But nearly every human society sees it differently. Fat. What purpose does it serve? In this video, a collaboration between SAPIENS and Aeon, anthropological…
What’s the Cost of Quinoa?
SAPIENS host Jen Shannon goes on a mission to find out how quinoa travels from farmers’ fields in Huanoquite, Peru, to markets in Lima and the U.S. She…
Why Don’t More Humans Eat Bugs?
Ten years ago, toiling in scorching heat on the parched Fongoli savanna in southeast Senegal, anthropologist Julie Lesnik faced an unpalatable task. She had to taste a termite.…
Mukbang is Changing Digital Communications
How a global internet phenomenon is foreshadowing the effects of virtual reality and changing the way strangers connect online. Sitting in a home office filled with stuffed…
Thick Data in Product Development: The Go-Gurt Case
Thick Data refers to all those data obtained in an immersive/ethnographic way aiming at revealing the cultural, social and emotional contexts of one or several study groups. Thick…
Thesis Review and Interview: Deorukhe Women’s Agency in the Making of Bodies, Cuisine, and Culture in Maharashtra, India
Photograph: Gauri A. Pitale – Waterlogged rice fields of rural Konkan, Maharashtra Please note: As Associate Editor, I am soliciting reviews of recent dissertations in the Anthropology of Food….
Why Can’t Most Humans Drink Milk?
[no-caption] Axel Schmidt/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. A solid white mass found in a broken jar …
Why Don’t Westerners Eat Off One Plate?
The Hadzabe share food and daily tasks. Ryan Jarvis “Why don’t your students love each other?” asked Kaunda, a Hadza hunter, as we sat around the campfire overlooking…
Bracing for the Vanilla Boom
Vanilla beans are dried in the sun as part of the curing process. George Zhu As the vanilla market opens in northeastern Madagascar this season, some local farmers…
The Milk of Human Kindness by Penny Van Esterik
Sour Milk At the World Health Assembly (WHA) meetings in late May, 2018, the US delegation tried to water-down or dump a very mild resolution to confirm and…
The Hidden Resilience of “Food Desert” Neighborhoods
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Even before Ashanté Reese and I reach the front gate, retired schoolteacher Alice Chandler is standing in the doorway of her brick home in Washington,…
Peeling Back the History of the Banana
[no-caption] Kevin Gorton/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. In a globalized world, we routinely move …
How an Archaeological Experiment Revealed California’s Ancient Past
San Nicolas Island, the most remote and one of the smallest of California’s Channel Islands, is more than 60 miles from the mainland. The seas around the island…
Ep. #18 What taste is made of: Brad Weiss talks pig farming and the meaning of food in America
“Livestock are essential to our lives. We live in a world that is saturated with livestock, and not just with the food that we eat, but with the…
Following a New Trail of Crumbs to Agriculture’s Origins
The world’s oldest bread crumbs found to date were excavated from the stone-lined fireplace in the center of this photo. Alexis Pantos It’s mid-August in 2013, and we…
Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food, Second Edition
Feast on this! We have just published a gorgeous new edition of Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food, with a full-colour interior and a range of new…
Digital Food Activism – a book review by Michelle Pentecost
Digital Food Activism Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan and Stanley Ulijaszek (eds.) Routledge Series in Critical Food Studies, 2018, 234 pages A Swiss academic scans the…
Anthropology Bite Club
The first rule of Bite Club is that we’re going to talk about cookbooks. The second rule of Bite Club is I need some of ya’ll to…
What Clam Thermometers Tell Us About Past Climates
It’s mid-August, 2017, but the temperature in Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands that trails off of the western Alaskan coast, is a brisk 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Christine…