Academic discussions of ethnic food have tended to focus on the attitudes of consumers, rather than the creators and producers. In this ground-breaking new book, Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur.Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste...

To most of us the food that we associate with home—our national and familial homes—is an essential part of our cultural heritage. No matter how open we become to other cuisines, we regard home-cooking as an intrinsic part of who we are. In this book, Krishnendu Ray examines the changing food habits of Bengali immigrants to the United States as they deal with the tension between their nostalgia for home and their desire to escape from its confinements.As Ray says, "This is a story about ric...

Although South Asian cookery and gastronomy has transformed contemporary urban foodscape all over the world, social scientists have paid scant attention to this phenomenon. Curried Cultures–a wide-ranging collection of essays–explores the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food, covering the cuisine of the colonial period to the contemporary era, investigating its material and symbolic meanings. Curried Cultures challenges disciplinary boundaries in...

An introduction to the burgeoning field of food studiesPopular and intellectual interest in food is on the rise. The breadth of concerns surrounding food ranges from animal welfare and climate change’s impact on food production to debates on the healthfulness of carbohydrates and fats, and fair compensation for restaurant and farm workers. Not only is there an expanding conversation about the ways in which we produce and consume our food, but there is growing atten...

Winner of the James Beard Award for Best Book in Food Issues and AdvocacyImmigrants have left their mark on the great melting pot of American cuisine, and they have continued working hard to keep America’s kitchens running, even during times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. For some immigrant cooks, the pandemic brought home the lack of protection for essential workers in the American food system. For others, cooking was a way of reconnecting with homelands th...

Examines the ways our conceptions of Asian American food have been shapedChop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food.Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asia...

For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted. Culinary Fictions provides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. When an immigrant mother in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake combines Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chili peppe...

Exotic Appetites is a far-reaching exploration of what Lisa Heldke calls food adventuring: the passion, fashion and pursuit of experimentation with ethnic foods. The aim of Heldke's critique is to expose and explore the colonialist attitudes embedded in our everyday relationship and approach to foreign foods. Exotic Appetites brings to the table the critical literatures in postcolonialism, critical race theory, and feminism in a provocative and lively discussion of eating and ethnic cuisin...

In its new Second Edition, the innovative and ever-popular Investigating Culture has been updated and revised to incorporate new teacher and student feedback. Carol Delaney and Deborah Kaspin provide an expanded introduction to cultural anthropology that is even more accessible to students.Revised and enhanced new edition that incorporates additional material and classroom feedbackAccessible to a wider range of students and educational settingsPro...

"Chicken fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and an order of onion rings, please."Chinese restaurants in small town Canada are at once everywhere - you would be hard pressed to find a town without a Chinese restaurant - and yet they are conspicuously absent in critical discussions of Chinese diasporic culture or even in popular writing about Chinese food. In Eating Chinese, Lily Cho examines Chinese restaurants as spaces that define, for those both inside and outside...

The most essential insight that Buddhism offers is that all our individual suffering arises from three and only three sources, known in Buddhism as the three poisons: greed, ill-will, and delusion. In The Great Awakening, scholar and Zen teacher David Loy examines how these three poisons, embodied in society's institutions, lie at the root of all social maladies as well. The teachings of Buddhism present a way that the individual can counteract these to alleviate personal sufferin...

First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured aga...