Food, Morals and Meaning

Following on from the success of the first edition, John Coveney traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, he explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This up-to-date edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about...
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Following on from the success of the first edition, John Coveney traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, he explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This up-to-date edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about the obesity 'epidemic'.

Focusing on how our food anxieties have stemmed from social, political and religious problems in Western history, Food, Morals and Meaninglooks at:

• the ancient Greeks' preoccupation with eating
• early Christianity and the conflict between the pleasures of the flesh and spirituality
• scientific developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and our current knowledge of food
• the social organization of food in the modern home, based on real interviews
• the obesity 'epidemic' and its association with moral degeneration.

Based on the work of Michel Foucault, this fresh and updated edition explains how a rationalization food choice - so apparent in current programmes on nutrition and health - can be traced through a genealogy of historical social imperatives and moral panics.Food, Moralsand Meaningis essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.