ABSTRACT
I know from personal experience that among the uninitiated confusion can follow hearing the title “sociology of food and agriculture” for the first time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to field the question, “So what exactly does it mean to think about food and agriculture sociologically?” I have no standard boilerplate response. And the two or three sentence answer never seems to do justice to the field. What I tend to do is quickly explain how varied the literature is, in terms of subject matter, theoretical approach, and method. As the reader will quickly learn, one’s sociological imagination can truly run wild thinking about food systems. Even a question as seemingly simple as “What is food?” proves to be exceedingly complex once exposed to sociological treatment. As Harris (1986: 13) reminds us, “[w]e can eat and digest everything from rancid mammary gland secretions to fungi to rocks [or cheese, mushrooms, and salt if you prefer euphemisms].” Anyone who has traveled to another country – or spent much time watching, say, the Discovery Channel – knows the label “food” is a terminological box that can be filled with wildly different phenomena depending on culture, circumstances, and time period.
