Food Values Beyond Nutrition - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 556

of a hungry person evokes knowledge that spans caloric and moral values. Narayan's
Swamiji would insist that this plight demands recognition and action from other souls.
Notes
1. Many thanks to Jane Fajans, Ron Herring and Gloria Raheja for thoughtful readings and
helpful suggestions.
2. See, of course, Lévi-Strauss's four-volume structuralist compendium, Mythologiques —
especially the first volume (1983)—that finds food metaphors to encode the most primary
understandings of human existence.
3. To sample works representative of these and related equations see Bender 2003; Caldwell
2009; Counihan 2004; Donner 2008; Flammang 2009; Hardiman 1996; Holtzman 2006;
Janeja 2010; Khare, ed. 1992; Mankekar 2005; Nazarea 1998; Pellow 2007; Sutton 2001;
Toomey 1994. Farquhar 2006 provides a most helpful survey.
4. Not all the anthropology of food points toward macro social-justice issues. Another recent
reader (Watson and Caldwell 2005) takes a cultural studies approach, looking at local
manifestations of global markets in foodstuffs and food brands: KFC in Beijing; Coca Cola
in Trinidad; McDonalds in Moscow. It is about flow, image, and profit rather than need.
Somewhat shockingly, it lumps together willful fasting and hapless starvation under the
ethically neutral heading “absence of food.”
5. See Stoller and Olkes 1986 for their influential, personal reflection on these matters,
delightfully titled, “Bad Sauce, Good Ethnography.”
6. Both the Bhagavad Gita (Miller 1986) and the Law of Manu (Doniger and Smith 1991) have
a great deal to say on the ways that the “qualities of life” ( gunas ) are inherent in different
kinds of foods that are appropriately consumed by different kinds of persons.
7. Variations on “have you eaten?” as a way of saying hello are not unique to Rajasthan, but,
rather, are common in many parts of the world.
8. See especially Marriott 1976; Mayer 1970, Hanchett 1988 and Khare 1976 focus more
broadly on ritual and domestic uses of food.
9. There is an abundance of fictional writings centered on food and its myriad meanings and
uses in South Asia; see for example, Sharma 1997, 2009; Thieme and Raja 2009.
10. This section draws extensively on materials included in Gold 2009 and Gold 2012b, par-
tially reworking them and without further reference to earlier renditions.
11. Much of this literature is centrally concerned with politics and economics, and I do not
attempt to survey it. On Polyani's “great transformation” in a South Asian context see Herring
2001 as well as his introduction to this volume. For anthropological discussions of the ways
cultural variables affect “moral confusion” resulting from impinging capitalist markets see
Parry and Bloch, ed. 1989; Sahlins 2000. Scott 1977 based on research in Southeast Asia is the
classic study of rural moral economy and its distributional requirements.
12. See Herring 2011 for many recent sources on this conflict and for a thorough and penetrat-
ing analysis of brinjal politics.
13. Reaction against just such tastelessness in affluent cultures would be movements like local food
and terroir; see for example Trubek 2008; Weiss 2011; and several chapters in this volume.
14. See also Ghassem-Fachandi 2009 for the hardening of religious identities around food in
tension-ridden Gujarat.