ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book highlights a multidisciplinary network of scholars who have helped to develop food studies by knitting it to one or more of these theoretical areas. It explores how literature, capaciously defined, invites scholars and students to view matters of producing and eating food simultaneously through aesthetic, cultural, and ecological lenses. Taking food seriously as an area of inquiry within literary and cultural studies, moreover, invites one to posit ethical questions. While such questions may foster transformation at the level of individual eaters, food is inextricably entangled with issues of social and environmental (in)equity and with collective cultural histories. The book argues that the project of apprehending the sociocultural alongside the ecological facets of agricultural and eating cultures is a promising avenue for future work in critical food studies.
