Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice - Anthropology of Food & Nutrition

Publisher Marketing: ..".contains fascinating material on the social, political, nutritional, and evolutionary aspects of human food choice... Scholars and students in food studies will find Consuming the Inedible useful for its variety of approaches to 'unusual' eating practices, and several of the chapters should also find their way onto reading lists for courses in the anthropology of food." . JRAI Throughout the world, everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners. This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices, and vice versa. Ranging across a diversity of disciplines Consuming the Inedible surveys scientific and local views about the consequences--biological, mineral, social or spiritual--of these food practices, and probes to what extent we can generalize about them. Jeremy M. MacClancy is Professor of Anthropology, C. Jeya Henry is Professor of Nutrition and Helen M. Macbeth is an Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology, all at Oxford Brookes University. Review Citations:

Scitech Book News 06/01/2008 pg. 5 (EAN 9781845453534, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  MacClancy, Jeremy Jeremy MacClancy is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Anthropological Centre for Conservation, the Environment, and Development at Oxford Brookes University. His publications include Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena (James Currey, 2007); Centralizing Fieldwork: Critical Perspectives from Primatology, Biological and Social Anthropology (co-edited, Berghahn Books, 2011); and Anthropology in the Public Arena: Historical Contexts (Wiley 2013). Contributor Bio:  Macbeth, Helen Macbeth is principal lecturer in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University.