ABSTRACT

Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ’why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what ’eating’ and ’caring’ are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

Reflecting on the Embodied Intersections of Eating and Caring

part I|66 pages

Eating to Care

chapter Chapter 3|20 pages

Caring about Careless Eating

Class Politics, Governance and the Production of Otherness in Highland Ecuador

part II|60 pages

Embodied Encounters between Eating and Caring

part III|72 pages

Caring to Eat: Distances and (Dis)Connects