Urban Foodways and Communication - (Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy) by Casey Man Kong Lum & Marc de Ferrière Le Vayer

About the Book

Urban Foodways and Communication is a collection of ethnographic case studies that examine urban foodways around the world as forms of human communication and intangible cultural heritage.

Book Synopsis

Urban Foodways and Communication is a collection of ethnographic case studies that examine urban foodways around the world as forms of human communication and intangible cultural heritage.

Review Quotes

Lum, de Ferrière le Vayer, and their collaborating authors provide an exciting new perspective on foodways as dynamic forms of communication within and among contested urban spaces. Sophisticated yet accessible, diverse yet coherent, fresh but well grounded, this volume dives deep into the material, symbolic, and political complexities of food as cultural heritage.

This book about culinary cultural heritage contains a wealth of original research from regions that have been under-represented in previous collections on culinary culture. The introductory essay provides an original synthetic conceptualization of culinary culture as communication and ties this to the context of the globalizing city. Overall this book is a significant and original contribution to the growing literature on urban foodways with a particular focus on the social mechanisms and politics of urban culinary heritage.

This book identifies and explores issues crucial to understanding how food is being used today to represent identity and heritage. Using ethnographic studies from urban contexts around the world, it sheds light on the implications of recognizing food's potential for such communication and offers a glimpse of the diversity of responses by actual communities and individuals to this attention to food. An excellent introduction to the ideas and challenges of approaching food as communicative medium and intangible heritage!

About the Author

Casey Man Kong Lum, PhD, is Professor of Communication, William Paterson University. A member on the Board of Directors of the Urban Communication Foundation, Casey is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in urban food cultures, media and culture, intercultural communication and diasporic studies. His book In Search of a Voice explores the role of karaoke singing in the social construction of identity. His authored/edited volume on The Media Ecology Tradition was the winner of the 2006 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics by the Media Ecology Association. He teaches graduate and undergraduate-level courses in media studies, food studies, and intercultural communication.

Marc de Ferrière le Vayer, PhD, is Professor of Modern History at Université François Rabelais de Tours, France. A scholar in food heritage studies well-known around the world and an author of numerous publications, Marc is the Chair Holder of the UNESCO Chair in the Safeguarding and Promotion of Intangible Cultural Food Heritage at the University of Tours since 2011.