"Food Nations is a cornucopia of fascinating information about why we eat what we eat. There is much in this wide-ranging book to stimulate anyone with an interest in the past, the present, and even the future of food."

--Harvey Levenstein, author of Revolution at the Table

"That food and drink are at the very center of the body politic is dramatically enforced in the revelatory collection of essays, unified by the proposition that food is power and power, food. If anyone can doubt that food is as serious a subject as politics or business, let him read any one of these essays and stay amazed."

--Betty Fussell, author of My Kitchen Wars

"Food studies is serious business and Food Nations is a major contribution to our understanding of the business of food. This meticulously researched book is a most welcome addition to an exciting new field."

--Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture

"Until recently, American consumers have limited their concerns about food to additives and pesticides. But to be truly responsible and healthy consumers, they also need to know something about food business, politics, science, history, aesthetics, and traditions."

--Nancy Ralph, Director, New York Food Museum

Publisher Web Site, February, 2003

"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 Nations collects new 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.

Part 1: Contexts

1. Food Matters:Perspectives on an Emerging Field, Warren Belasco
2. Food and Eating:Some Persisting Questions, Sidney W. Mintz

Part 2:The Construction of National Cusines

3. Rituals of Pleasure in the Land of Treasures:Wine Consumption and the Making of French Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century, Kolleen M. Guy
4. "Eddie Shack was No Tim Horton":Donuts and the Folklore of Mass Culture in Canada, Steve Penfold
5. Food and Nationalism:The Origins of "Belizean Food", Richard R. Wilk

Part 3:The Business of Taste

6. Inventing Baby Food:Gerber and the Discourse of Infancy in the United States, Amy Bentley
7. How the French Learned to Eat Canned Food, 1809-1930s, Martin Bruegel
8. Searching for Gold in Guacamole:California Growers Market the Avocado, 1910-1994, Jeffery Charles

Part 4:Ethnicity, Class, and the Food Industry

9. Untangling Alliances:Social Tensions Surrounding Independent Grocery Stores and the Rise of Mass Retailing, Tracey Deutsch
10. As American as Budwiser and Pickles? Nation-Building in American Food Industries, Donna R. Gabaccia
11. Comida Sin Par. Construction of Mexican Food in Los Angeles:"Foodscapes" in a Transnational Consumer Society, Silivia Ferrero

Part 5:Food and National Politics

12. Industrial Tortillas and Folkloric Pepsi:The Nutritional Consequences of Hybrid Cuisines in Mexico, Jeffery M. Pilcher
13. Berlin in the Belle Epoque:A Fast Food History, Keith Allen
14. Food and the Politics of Scarcity in Urban Soviet Russia, 1917-1941, Mauricio Borrero

Notes on the Contributors
Index