Careful Eating: Bodies, Food and Care

’Careful Eating is a timely and innovative volume that creatively rethinks relationships between food and care. Through thoughtful and rich ethnographic case studies, the contributors move beyond care as a form of labor or sentiment and instead reveal deeper concerns with caring as an ethical, affective, and even phenomenological project. Ultimately, the volume raises critical questions about why caring matters in everyday life.’ Melissa L. Caldwell, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA ’How wonderful, frightening or both for someone to take the care to make sure we eat properly, an interaction potentiated with both love and power! This engaging and diverse collection beautifully shows how - whether in families, clinics, schools or many other contexts - there is much more to the intimacies created through food than one may often imagine and sometimes more than we might care to think about.’ Jon Holtzman, Western Michigan University, USA ’This timely volume creatively extends current interest in eating practices, in contrast to studies on diet or food, by exploring the links between eating and caring. Consisting of chapters that reflect a range of disciplinary perspectives and diverse fieldwork locations, the inherent relationality and politics of eating and care are revealed, discussed and critiqued. Whilst each contribution presents its own argument, through the careful juxtaposing of chapters the book overall presents eating as an inherently ambivalent activity; not only one that is both an individual and a social practice, but also one that can produce, maintain and sometimes disrupt boundaries and relationships. Careful Eating is consequently not only a rich resource for some fascinating case studies but also a text that engages in more general and novel explorations about the entanglement of eating and care.’ Simon Cohn, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK ’This volume takes the reader on a fascinating journey about eating