The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) is grounded in the biocultural, materialist, and feminist origins of our subfield with multiple modes of investigation exploring diverse notions of good food with one eye on justice and the other eye on nutrition. The articles in this issue were drawn from three panels during the 123rd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropology Association, which also marked the 50th Anniversary of our section's founding. By way of introducing the essays in this collection, I identify three throughlines and two underlying qualities that demonstrate how our origin in biological and nutritional approaches remains influential to the subfield, despite the valid impression that the section has moved away from its early focus. The first throughline in the subfield is food anthropology's enduring attention to injustice and harm in unfair political and economic conditions, a trend that is represented by Miriam Chaiken's early work in Mbita Province and noted in her essay in the first section of this special issue. In studying the high rates of malnutrition and child mortality, her research identified the underlying causes as derived from an erosion of the traditional roles of clans under the interlinked effects of colonialism, privatization of land, and shifting gender roles. Penny Van Esterik argues that Thomas Marchione–one of the pioneering voices in food anthropology–framed our understanding of food access through the lens of human rights. Ellen Messer also shares that her work in the 1980s, like that of Marchione, Elizabeth Colson, and others, was concerned with human rights. The continued focus on unjust political and economic systems remains a core productive concern in our field. For example, David Beriss, in his review of research related to restaurants, notes the tension between the cultural goals of hospitality and serving guests on the one hand, and capitalist exploitation and profit-seeking labor practices on the other hand. Even in studies with a more explicit biocultural and evolutionary approach, such as Andrea Wiley's essay in this issue, the focus on injustice produces insights that impact well-being. Contemporary food anthropologists still center justice in our research. The studies found in the later sections of this special issue illustrate this continuity. For example, Wiley points out that dietary guidance reflects Eurocentric cultural assumptions and the political and economic power of food industries, a critique that directs us toward more economically and socially just policies. The intersection of food and racial justice is at the heart of Carolyn Mason's contemporary study of markets in marginalized areas of Dallas. Sucharita Kanjilal's contribution demonstrates the role that anthropology of food has in challenging unjust essentialist and nativist analyses. Looking beyond the present moment, Van Esterik identifies several key themes for the future of the field moving forward, including human rights, food as commons, terroir, food security and insecurity, sovereignty, emergencies, climate change, and commensality. Nearly all of these are aligned with food anthropology's orientation toward issues of justice and unfair economic and political conditions. It is worthwhile to note that this call also advocates for the return of “human rights” as a framing concept. While a concern with justice has remained central to our work from the start, the framing has shifted over time, and “human rights” is no longer as common as it once was. Framing these issues within the concept of human rights may still offer a universalizing perspective to something that actually is a biological universal among humans—access to adequate, nutritious, culturally appropriate food. The essays also critically engage popular assumptions about what food means and how it should be prepared and consumed, which I see as a second throughline. The deep roots of a questioning and critical mindset remain at the heart of food anthropology today. Beriss notes that anthropology is necessarily multifocal in its approach to studying food. Obviously, a holistic view of human nature and behavior is the calling card of anthropology. However, food, even more so than many other aspects of human life, is frequently taken for granted when not subjected to careful consideration. In her essay, Kanjilal considers how the conceptual and methodological openness of studying food in the multifocal manner Beriss suggests allowed scholars like Sidney Mintz to revise the unidirectional assumptions about globalization in anthropology more broadly. Drawing on Akhil Gupta's work, Kanjilal urges food studies to be carried out without a center, in contrast to the Euro-western and masculinist conceptions of political economy. This would see the practices and ideas of women and colonized nations as origin points of culture, rather than viewing global processes as deriving from cultural transformation in the capitalist core and material production in an exploited periphery. So too, Janita Van Dyk adopts this decentered viewpoint by recognizing how food in her research site is a nexus for placemaking, identity, and notions of value in ways that are always in flux and locally distinct. Mason's essay shows that new techniques, like sensory ethnography, may allow us to expand what we capture to include more of what food means to the people we work with by engaging in the embodied experience of food. The third throughline is the persistence and centrality of a biocultural approach. Indeed, Messer and Van Esterik both suggest that food anthropology is necessarily biocultural. Within the discipline, the study of food anthropology began under the Society for Medical Anthropology, and therefore had a natural concern with nutrition, diet, and culture as central subjects of study. The subfield advanced nutrition studies by innovating methodologically and theoretically in diverse cultural settings with unique conditions and histories. Wiley recounts how Sol Katz's early work on the preparation techniques of corn led to a breakthrough in understanding the way nixtamalized corn makes niacin bioavailable—demonstrating the innovative link that food anthropology made between cultural and biological factors. Wiley further illustrates how we employ a biocultural lens by tracking the health and access implications of traditions and policies even in studies where human biology and biosocial data collection methods are uncommon. And with her story about the different cultural approaches to vending machine soft drinks, Cheryl Ritenbaugh reminds us that our investigations of culture and meaning can provide insight into the underlying causes of community health and wellness, beyond the value of understanding culture and meaning for its own sake. The overlap in the Venn diagram of biology and culture in food and nutrition studies remains substantial and the intersections between culture and biology are multifaceted. In addition to these descriptive throughlines in food anthropology research, these essays demonstrate the ongoing influence of our foundations in contemporary research conditions. First, the anthropology of food and nutrition has an underlying foundational quality of being materialist, even in cases where the research is squarely oriented toward a conceptual or ideological analysis. Beriss poses the question of whether the critical turn was a source of conflict for SAFN. The conflicts of the critical turn at the end of the 20th Century tore the field apart, dividing anthropology departments into separate academic units in some cases. Because of that, it is remarkably reassuring to see that food anthropology has held onto our materialist origins and integrates this into even the most ideational approaches. That is, the actual material reality of food is still something to be addressed in all of our work, not merely waved at. Van Esterik directly suggests that the materiality and meaning of food cannot be separated and believes that this creates the theoretical openness that enriches our subfield. Because this enduring quality in our subject necessitates that we engage with both the interior lives and external realities of the people we encounter at our field sites, food anthropology remains a holistic field of study. Chaiken shares that being trained in classical anthropology topics with holistically materialist and ideational elements such as kinship and social systems allowed her to articulate the deeper cause of food insecurity in a society undergoing rapid changes in social structure and mobility. Amanda Green's work on campus food insecurity illustrates this integration well. Her meta-analysis of campus hunger shows that food anthropology easily works interdisciplinarily using mixed methods, with research questions that allow statistical integration with the larger USDA food security quantitative datasets. Yet, these studies typically also include detailed ethnographic analysis such as an investigation of stigma and the meaning of “deserving” in the context of access to food. Kanjilal's study, in the third section of this special issue, directly advocates for contemporary food anthropology to continue to employ a blend of analyses of material relations and symbolic meanings of consumption. Based on the essays here, food anthropology remains an excellent representation of one of the most distinctive and valuable qualities of anthropology: a holistic integration of materialist and symbolic elements of human lives. The second reverberation from the earliest days of our field is our founding by mostly women working in male-dominated fields. To this day, our matriarchal lineage has shaped the character of our studies, regardless of the gender identity of the researcher. Anthropology and Nutrition Studies at the time of our section's founding were overwhelmingly represented by male researchers. Messer directs our attention to this in using the phrase “founding mothers” to describe the early years of SAFN. We should therefore recognize the importance of our foundations being shaped largely, but not exclusively, by the insights and wisdom our founding mothers cultivated in male-dominated fields. They used their gendered lived experience to correct blind spots that men were unaware of, opening fresh areas of research. They were both sensitive to and prepared to account for the fact that food was not seen as a serious topic because their lived experience already included men dismissing their interests and concerns as less serious. They collected data rigorously and were scrupulous methodologically as a bulwark against being dismissed. Messer notes that institutional settings began to open up to anthropologists and food anthropologists took advantage of this opening, moving into applied work. These applied food anthropologists needed to demonstrate the value and rigor of their work to non-anthropology scholars, whose lack of familiarity with anthropology led to a failure on their part to grasp the validity of our research. Carole Counihan's research on food in Italy was also initially treated as less serious by other scholars and she responded likewise by developing even more robust research methods and analysis for food studies. This investment was rewarded as she and other feminist ethnographers revealed rich material in women's experiences and struggles. Because of the insights and challenges of our founding mothers, Food Anthropology has an ethos of rigorous research, well-reasoned defenses of the importance of our work, and insights that challenge prevailing views. Food Anthropology has stronger theoretical insights and methodological rigor for having been led in the early days by women navigating the gendered reality of having one's work treated as less serious. The continuities in our research approaches and motivations that this special issue illuminates do not indicate that the field has not evolved and changed. They remind us that food anthropology builds on long-established traditions that emerged from the brilliant founding mothers of our field. Because of these throughlines and shared characteristics, SAFN remains an important incubator for robust, multidisciplinary research. Our deeply rooted, continued focus on justice and holism, as reflected in the research articles in this special issue and the history that the articles in the first section demonstrate the inclusive, ethical orientation of our food and nutrition subfield.
Ryan Adams (Mon,) studied this question.