Fast Food/Slow Food

Setting out to explore the range of food markets, Fast Food/Slow Food reveals global and corporate connections in the slow food movement and local and regional variations of the fast food industry. More than that, this collection looks at food in the middle, where Russian culinary tours meet Lao survival food in trendy American chefs' offerings, ancient Japanese fast foods enter Seven Eleven and transform it, and food of moderate pace is consumed in everyday spaces. Wilk and the contributors make accessible for the rest of us how economic anthropology pulls back a layer in our conversation about transnational food and foodways. -- Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt, Department of American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Fast Food/Slow Food provides a provocative series of scholarly essays that address some of the myriad issues concerning food and culture in today's world. We are at an important crossroad in the way we eat and grow food both locally and globally. We need to think about our relationship to food and how we have gotten to where we are as well as where we need to go in the future. This book raises issues that need to be taken very seriously and discussed at all levels of society. -- Antonia Demas PhD, president, Food Studies Institute; author of Food is Elementary
This is an excellent book....Richard Wilk's introduction to the volume makes a series of clear conceptual points indentifying how economic anthropology and food studies today contribute to each other. -- . * American Anthropologist, March 2008 *
[There] is an important momentum of compelling case studies here to make the argument plain to see that the simplistic slow/fast divide should be abandoned. * Journal Of The Royal Anthropological Institute, June 2009 *
From the standpoint of economic anthropology, the papers in this fascinating volume look at the simultaneous intersection of the global and the local in diverse food cultures around the globe, from Mali to Japan, Mexico to Laos. Challenging a homogeneous model of food commodification and dietary globalization, papers explore how people in diverse cultures balance contradictory culinary forces by localizing fast food, integrating modern foods into culturally meaningful diets, revitalizing dying food practices, and resisting the loss of rich traditions centered on foodways. Papers consider topics as diverse as fast food adoption in the Philippines, the Chinese vegetable trade in New York City, community supported agriculture in New Mexico, artisanal cheese production in New England, and the co-evolution of food and cars in Australia. Lively writing, rich detail, and insightful perspectives make this a valuable book for students and scholars all across the social sciences. -- Carole Counihan, Professor of Anthropology at Millersville U