The Agency of Eating - (Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics) by Emma-Jayne Abbots (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Deciding what to eat and how to eat it are two of the most basic acts of everyday life. Yet every choice also implies a value judgement: 'good' foods versus 'bad', 'proper' and 'improper' ways of eating, and 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies. These food decisions are influenced by a range of social, political and economic bioauthorities, and mediated through the individual 'eating body'. This book is unique in the cultural politics of food in its exploration of a range of such bioauthorities and in its examination of the interplay between them and the individual eating body. No matter whether they are accepted or resisted, our eating practices and preferences are shaped by, and shape, these agencies.

Abbots places the body, materiality and the non-human at the heart of her analysis, interrogating not only how the individual's embodied eating practices incorporate and reject the bioauthorities of food, but also how such authorities are created by the individual act of eating. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from across the globe, The Agency of Eating provides an important analysis of the power dynamics at play in the contemporary food system and the ways in which agency is expressed and bounded. This book will be of great benefit to any with an interest in food studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography.

Review Quotes

The Agency of Eatingchallenges readers to think about food as both meaning and matter; as cultural practice but also as, well, food - "we also eat it", Emma-Jayne Abbots reminds us. This discussion is animated by interventions into the subject of agency, who (and perhaps even what) has it and to what effect. Abbots' book is not simply about food but also about life itself and the struggle over the type of lives deemed worthy of living...and eating.
Michael Carolan, Colorado State University, USA

An original contribution is in the way the book analyses the food/body relations across a range of 'authorities'. Such a book is needed.
Susanne Højlund, Aarhus University, Denmark

About the Author

Emma-Jayne Abbots is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK and Research Associate at the SOAS Food Studies Centre, UK.