From "supersizing it" to hoarding, we are living in an age of excess. Whether it is cars or housing, American culture is being driven by the old adage that "bigger is better". Yet, although we often overlook it, nowhere is this rhetoric of excess more on display than within our food discourses. While many would argue that the gourmand vanished from society at the end of the 19th century, this book contends that both the gourmand and its counterpart, the glutton, have moved beyond their historic roots to become cultural personae found throughout contemporary media and popular culture. Utilizing texts ranging from the Slow Food Movement to "food porn" as a cornucopia of visual fantasies, this book maintains that today the gourmand and the glutton have come to epitomize a rhetoric of excess far beyond the realm of food.

Foodscapes explores the nexus of food, drink, space, and place, both locally and globally. Multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary in scope, scholars consider the manifold experiences that we have when engaging with food, drink, space, and place. They offer a wide array of theories, methods, and perspectives, which can be used as lenses for analyzing these interconnections, throughout each chapter. Scholars interrogate our practices and behaviors with food within spaces and places, analyze the meanings that we create about these entities, and demonstrate their wider cultural, political, social, economic, and material implications.

Foodscapes explores the nexus of food, drink, space, and place, both locally and globally. Multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary in scope, scholars consider the manifold experiences that we have when engaging with food, drink, space, and place. They offer a wide array of theories, methods, and perspectives, which can be used as lenses for analyzing these interconnections, throughout each chapter. Scholars interrogate our practices and behaviors with food within spaces and places, analyze the meanings that we create about these entities, and demonstrate their wider cultural, political, social, economic, and material implications.

From high-tech kitchen gadgets and magazines to the Food Network, the last few decades have seen a huge rise in food-focused consumption, media, and culture. The discourses surrounding food range from media coverage of school lunchrooms and hunger issues, to news stories about urban gardening or buying organic products at the local farmers market. Food is no longer viewed merely as a means of survival. International and comprehensive in approach, this volume is the first book-length study of food from a communication perspective. Scholars examine and explore this emerging field to provide definitive and foundational examples of how food operates as a system of communication, and how communication theory and practices can be understood by considering food in this way. In doing so, the book serves to inspire future dialogues on the subject due to its vast array of ideas about food and its relationship to our communication practices.