We are happy to announce the 3rd place winner of this year’s SAFN Anthropology Day photography contest. You can see the overall winner’s work here and the second place winner’s pictures are here. Third place goes to Mecca Howe Burris, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Indiana University. Burris’ photos focus on food activism, colonial legacies, and globalization in both Costa Rica and the United States. Congratulations, Mecca! We are grateful for the submissions from all of those who participated this year and hope that everyone found the photographs inspiring. If you did not win this year (o ..read more

Yesterday we announced the winner of the annual SAFN Anthropology Day Photography contest and posted the photographs they submitted. You can see them here. We are now happy to announce the 2nd Place winner of this year’s competition. Morgan Jenatton, a graduate student at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Marseille, France, and at  El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, in Chiapas, Mexico, submitted an impressive series of pictures exploring food in Mexico and France. The series looks at the supply chain that supports food production in both contexts, with photographs that show ..read more

David Beriss We are ready to reveal the winners of this year’s SAFN Anthropology Day photo contest! The weighty decision was reached by a panel made up of SAFN officers, including Amanda Green, Jennifer Jo Thompson, Shannon Caplan, Noha Fikry, and me. I want to thank the committee for their work and their patience. Our criteria this year were the same as last year. Photos were judged for the ethnographic nature of the pictures, overall. the contribution of the photo as insight into foodways. the extent to which the photos help us see the work and lives of people in food. the overall ..read more

Weber, Karl, ed. (2023) Food, Inc.2. Inside the Quest for a Better Future for Food. NY: Hachette Book Group-Public Affairs. ISBN: 9781541703575. 336 pages. Ellen Messer Cover design is clever and informative: It features what looks like a Holstein dairy cow, with a bar code on its flank, looking out at the reader from a plowed grassland with out of focus industrial landscape in the background. The book is a “back for seconds” entry into the publisher’s Public Affairs series, “A Participant Guide” promoted as “an inspiring companion to the acclaimed film.” The authors are many of the talking h ..read more

Ariana Gunderson Indiana University I recently had the opportunity to share the importance and joys of our discipline of Food Anthropology with sixteen middle schoolers who visited Indiana University’s campus. In developing a food anthropology workshop on the subject of bread for these tweens, I benefitted greatly from the collective wisdom of SAFN members, who shared their own experiences of teaching food anthro to kiddos in a recent blog post. Here, I’ll share the lesson plan and script from my workshop, where we spent one hour together analyzing bread’s context, using our senses, and good n ..read more

Photo Neni Panourgiá. Necromancer (The Oracle of the Dead) by the river Acheron, Greece. Jugs that held cereal and other seed offerings to the shrine. 14th-13th century BCE. After the offerings were used the jugs were shattered in situ.   Neni Panourgiá (Justice-in-Education Initiative, Heyman Center for the Humanities Columbia University) David Sutton (Southern Illinois University) Note: This is a follow up discussion to the post by Neni Panourgiá “On Bread Alone.” Neni Panourgiá and I have been friends and colleagues since the late 1980s, when we were graduate students. We crossed paths ..read more

Neni Panourgiá Justice-in-Education Initiative, Heyman Center for the Humanities Columbia University The Beginning My father would cut the bread against his chest. Winter or summer, dressed for dinner or half-naked in his bathing suit, sitting at the table in the dining room or under the fig tree at the summer house, he cut the bread using a knife that he sharpened himself at his lab. He sharpened all the knives of the house. He didn’t use a “sawing motion” as David Sutton has described in his Secrets from a Greek Kitchen (2014:50). Rather, in a sweeping draw he would slide the immensely sharp ..read more

Overthought, but tasty. Photo: David Beriss Amanda Green and Jennifer Jo Thompson Student, professional, or retired. Academic or practicing. New member or lapsed. You have a place at the SAFN table! Check out what the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition has been up to and (re-)join* us — for a discount? (*You must be an AAA member to join SAFN.) Student rate: $0 Professional/Retired: $35 — now 30% off: only $24.50 Sustaining: $60 Login to AAA Community Hub and click on “Join a Section or IG” on the bottom left side of the page to proceed. Your SAFN membership will be p ..read more

Jane preparing a cake with her son at home, Scotland (photo: Imogen Bevan) Bittersweet: Living with sugar and kin in contemporary Scotland. Imogen Bevan. PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. 2022. Francesca Vaghi (University of Glasgow) Sugar – and the pleasures and anxieties it evokes, often simultaneously – is ubiquitous. This is a well-known story, yet one that is told in a novel and captivating way in Imogen Bevan’s thesis on sugar and kinship, set in the Edinburgh neighbourhood of Leith. By weaving together the stories of children, parents, grandparents, school staff, and ..read more

Andrew Mitchel PhD Candidate The Ohio State University What does it mean to be an expert on food? This piece will argue that my scholarly work and the knowledge and labor of Oaxacan chefs should both be acknowledged as forms of expertise. I am a PhD student studying the success, adaptation, and identity of Oaxacan chefs in Columbus, Ohio, Los Angeles, California, and Oaxaca City, Mexico. I ask whether doing and possessing expertise as a scholar or chef are the same; describe experts’ specialized knowledge; examine the lasting and ephemeral products of experts; and conclude by considering every ..read more