The Rhetoric of Food: Discourse, Materiality, and Power (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication) - Softcover

"The aim is a laudable one, as this emerging intersection is worthy of scholarly attention. Pairing a discussion of food politics with a rhetorical perspective is a beneficial way to explore the symbols surrounding food and food itself as a symbol...The variety of approaches, guiding theories, and topics makes this book an interesting and entertaining read concerning the intersection of food and power...this book’s offering of prominent and meaningful inquiries would aid both classes and research into relevant topics." --Emma Frances Bloomfield, University of Southern California, International Journal of Communication

This book focuses on the rhetoric of food and the power dimensions that intersect this most fundamental but increasingly popular area of ideology and practice, including politics, culture, lifestyle, identity, advertising, environment, and economy. The essays visit a rich variety of dominant discourses and material practices through a range of media, channels, and settings including the White House, social movement rhetoric, televisual programming, urban gardens, farmers markets, domestic and international agriculture institutions, and popular culture. Rhetoricians address the cultural, political, and ecological motives and consequences of humans’ strategic symbolizing and attendant choice-making, visiting discourses and practices that have impact on our species in their producing, distributing, regulating, marketing, packaging, consuming, and talking about food. The essays in this book are representative of dominant and marginal discourses as well as perennial issues surrounding the rhetoric of food and include macro-, meso-, and micro-level analyses and case studies, from international neoliberal trade policies to media and social movement discourse to small group and interactional dynamics. This volume provides an excellent range and critical illumination of rhetoric’s role as both instrumental and constitutive force in food representations, and its symbolic and material effects.