The Rhetoric of Food Discourse, Materiality, and Power [Hardcover]

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 rhetorics role as both instrumental and constitutive force in food representations, and its symbolic and material effects.

Foreword Raymie E. McKerrowIntroduction  Joshua J. Frye and Michael S. Bruner  1. The Operations of Nature Sir Albert Howard  2. Exposing Empty Bellies/Empty Calories: Representing Hunger and Obesity Jean Retzinger  3. Politics on Your Plate: Building and Burning Bridges across Organic, Vegetarian, and Vegan Discourse Laura K. Hahn and Michael S. Bruner  4.  Food Talk: Bridging Power in a Globalizing World John R. Thol$