Difficult to think of something more central to our lives than food. For we digest symbols and myths as much as fats, proteins and carbohydrates. At one and the same time food is both nutrition and a mode of thought. It enables us biologically, and structures our life socially. As both fuel for our bodies and ideas for our minds, food is common to every single one of us.

Given this, it is all the more surprising that a recognizable ‘food studies’ did not arise within academia until the closing decade of the last century. Economists and geographers might have paid attention to its production and distribution but the great majority of political scientists, historians, sociologists and literary critics stubbornly avoided serious work into the topic. Even anthropologists outside of Third World village settings tended to quietly pass over it. For reasons which are still unclear, these attitudes have dramatically reversed, and today a host of academics from a range of disciplines produce monographs, textbooks and readers in this new field, edit book series, hold conferences in it, and head organizations dedicated to its furtherance, such as the Association for the Study of Food and Society, in the USA, or the seminal Oxford Food Symposium, in the UK. They have come to realize the insights a study of food and foodways can give.

In some societies the foods valued and the ways they are prepared are codified into a cuisine, which may even become a central symbol of the society itself. In this way a discourse of food and food practices, open to multiple interpretations, can assist in both the construction and sustaining of national community.