Main description:

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.

Contents:

Contents: Introduction: reflecting on the embodied intersections of eating and caring, Anna Lavis, Emma-Jayne Abbots and Luci Attala. Part I Eating to Care: Proximities and Productions: Multiculturalism as work: the emotional labour of ethnic food tour guides, Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan; Is sharing caring? Social media and discourses of healthful eating, Signe Rousseau; Caring about careless eating: class politics, governance and the production of otherness in Highland Ecuador, Emma-Jayne Abbots. Part II Embodied Encounters between Eating and Caring: Careful starving: reflections on (not) eating, caring and anorexia, Anna Lavis; The sweetness of care: biographies, bodies and place, Tanya Zivkovic, Megan Warin, Vivienne Moore, Paul Ward and Michelle Jones; Food, weight and care in the consultation, Antje Lindenmeyer. Part III Caring to Eat: Distances and (Dis)Connects: Placing security: food, geographical knowledge(s) and the reproduction of place(less-ness), Benjamin Coles; Configuring relations of care in an online consumer protection organization, Karin Eli, Amy K. McLennan and Tanja Schneider; Children's engagements with food: an embodied politics of care through school meals, Monica Truninger and Jose Teixeira; Afterword: the everyday biopolitics of care-full eating, Michael K. Goodman. Index.