In this article I present the social life of camarones, a Peruvian river crustacean used in some of the region’s favorite dishes, and the liminal space they occupy in the geography, minds, and ecosystem of Peru and its people. I situate the relationship between these crawfish and the folks who capture them, known as camaroneros, within insights of environmental anthropologists and food scholars who also explore the connections between cultural and biological diversity and the entangled socio-ecological histories that inform the manner in which nature is mediated and understood by local societies. In this article, however, I expand this understanding to reveal unexpected spaces of engagement, especially those that emerge while eating, which tend to be overlooked by bounded notions of culture and nature and limit the ways we can imagine human-nature relationships. Via the story of camarones and camaroneros of one river valley of Peru, I argue that eating is a socio-ecological act that is imbued with profound cultural meanings involving a wide range of participants—not just farmers or producers—each with their own ecological identities yet still implicitly linked to one another through the process of producing, preparing, and consuming food.

Between 1947 and 1958, B.C. Sugar—western Canada’s largest sugar manufacturer—ran six major advertising campaigns that depicted Black people as laborers on sugarcane plantations. One of these campaigns, moreover, played upon offensive stereotypes of Black men as happy-go-lucky, childlike, and suited for manual labor. Analyzing the reach, content, and significances of these campaigns, this article suggests that despite increased civil and human rights advocacy in the 1940s and 1950s, at least one major Canadian corporation persisted in distributing anti-Black racist advertising. Such persistence reveals that white supremacist sentiment was entrenched in western Canada during this time. It also suggests that the western Canadian sugar industry particularly, and the North American food industry more generally, have been prone to anti-Black racism within advertising.

This article aims to describe and theorize the role of food television in cultivating popular understandings of the relationship between food and race. Although there is burgeoning research on representations of food and identity, scholars have devoted much less attention to representations of race in food-related television programming. This article highlights the necessity of doing so through a comparative examination of shows that aim to expose viewers to racial and ethnic communities through their foodways. We ask to what extent these shows deliver contact across racial difference in hierarchical and egalitarian ways. We found that these shows convey manifestations of “eating with the Other” by providing viewers with a warm and respectful entrée into the everyday realities of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities. Simultaneously, the shows embody bell hooks’s notion of “eating the Other,” as they commodify the experiences of marginalized communities for the vicarious pleasures of their viewers, and gloss over larger social, political, and economic inequalities. This article offers insights into the ways in which contemporary food television is dealing with issues of ethno-racial differences and inequalities, and discusses the potential of this medium to act as a form of critical intervention.

Some scholars contend that the Global South is experiencing a consumer-driven nutrition transition characterized by a sharp increase in meat consumption. This article engages critically with this hypothesis by exploring the production, distribution, and consumption of chicken in Tamil Nadu (South India). Using the analytical lens of political ecology, it argues that food circuits are shaped in the interaction among political-economic processes, biophysical processes, and embodied encounters with food. In India, intensified farming and agrifood industrial capitalism affect the materialities of, and the meanings attributed to, chicken meat, making it more available, more accessible, and more desirable. The industry strives to control and conceal the animality and organicity of chicken as animal and as food. Yet new materialities and meanings are resisted by the biophysical processes that pervade the circuits of meat provision and by eaters’ visceral and cognitive engagement with chicken meat. The very people who produce, sell, buy, cook, and ingest food, even though they are partly dispossessed by capitalist and state control over knowledge and economic processes, also play a role in shaping, negotiating, and resisting the material, political, and emotional dimensions of taste, and of eating practices at large.