The Practice of Eating - Softcover

Warde, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745691714 ISBN 13: 9780745691718

Publisher: Polity, 2015

Synopsis

This book reconstructs and extends sociological approaches to the understanding of food consumption. It identifies new ways to approach the explanation of food choice and it develops new concepts which will help reshape and reorient common understandings. Leading sociologist of food Alan Warde deals both with abstract issues about theories of practice and substantive analyses of aspects of eating, demonstrating how theories of practice can be elaborated and systematically applied to the activity of eating. The Practice of Eating will become required reading for students and scholars of food and consumption in a wide range of disciplines, from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to food studies, culinary studies and nutrition science.

About this title

Review

"Over the course of his exemplary career Alan Warde has emerge as an important - perhaps the important - theorist of eating and dining. In The Practice of Eating Warde provides a detailed analysis of the practice of dining and culinary production. Building on the centrality of consumption as a form of action, Warde synthesizes a wide range of theoretical approaches, applicable not only to the gastronomic world but in all corners of sociability. Warde has developed an approach to foodways as practice that belongs with the most trenchant works of contemporary theory."
Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University and author of Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work

"Rejecting conventional accounts of consumer choice, Alan Warde examines the routinized and habitual character of eating as a social practice. In a field that is prone to political rhetoric and media speculation, The practice of eating offers conceptual clarity and empirical rigour, a compelling synthesis of more than a decade's research on the sociology of consumption."
Peter Jackson, University of Sheffield

"In this accomplished new book, Alan Warde conducts a substantive analysis of aspects of eating situations and performances in the light of theory, paying due attention to its various contexts. The growing ranks of sociologists in the broad area of food studies will welcome this ambitious attempt to unify a hitherto dispersed and disparate field by devising an comprehensive theory of how we eat."
Christel Lane, University of Cambridge

"The book serves as a solid, multi-disciplinary bibliography of food studies. It can be acclaimed for its presentation on a versatile set of themes from various levels and domains of eating (from a very close up look at the orchestration of a restaurant menu to the aggregate level phenomena such as the obesity crisis and the spreading of taste for 'exotica'), which are noteworthy and relevant for sociologists of eating."
Acta Sociologica

About the Author

ALAN WARDE is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He has held visiting positions in Adelaide, Mannheim, Sao Paolo, Paris and New York, and is part of the European Sociological Association Research Network on Consumption.

Edition details

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745691714
• ISBN 13: 9780745691718
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212