Good Taste: A Reader on Dietary Factors Affecting Global Cuisines

Good Taste: A Reader on Dietary Factors Affecting Global Cuisines provides students with engaging articles that explore the relationship between food, nutrition, and culture. Readers are challenged to consider a variety of issues about food systems worldwide, including how food culture influences health and well-being, how food production affects the environment and our health, how human biology determines the foods we are able to process, and how the indigenous food past affects contemporary dietary patterns.

The collection begins by defining culture, exploring the relationship between biology and nutrition, and highlighting some of the ways in which food and religion are intertwined. In subsequent sections, readers visit countries and contexts in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas to examine the ways in which culture guides and constrains nutritional intake. The second edition features new readings that examine food and Islam in Morocco, English cuisine through pudding, millet grains in Africa, pastoralists in Iran, hunger in Saudi Arabia, rice in China, and Mexican food as identity.

Designed to help students strengthen their bio-cultural understanding of food and nutrition, Good Taste is an ideal resource for introductory courses in anthropology and nutrition.