Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies

"Food is important. There is in fact nothing more basic. Food is the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our greatest export, and our most frequently indulged pleasure," writes co-editor Warren Belasco in the Introduction to the third volume in the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture series. Americans are food-conscious like never before, and consequently, books about food are some of the most popular non-fiction selling today.Food Nations, however, abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity. International in scope, this anthology offers a diversity of examples from the discourse of food like the marketing of the California avocado, multiethnic "foodscapes" in Los Angeles, fast food in Berlin's Belle Epoque, the consumption of canned food in France, and the cultural subtext of Gerber baby food. Food Nationscollectsnew essays from the leading scholars in the emerging field of food studies like Sidney Mintz, Donna Gabaccia, and Amy Bentley and offers a rigorous and entertaining history of all that we eat.

Warren Belasco is Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food industry. Philip Scranton is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University, director of research at the Hagley Museum and Library, and coeditor of the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture series.