Eating acquired a new political importance during the Enlightenment, as writers began to link individual diets to the strength and wealth of nations. This article examines the eighteenth-century career of a foodstuff that became emblematic of these developments: the potato. Politicians, statesmen, and philosophers across Europe enthusiastically promoted the potato as a means of strengthening the body politic. They framed this promotion within a language of choice and the individual pursuit of happiness. In so doing they laid the foundations for today's debates about how to balance personal dietary autonomy with the demands of public health. The roots of the current neoliberal insistence that healthy eating is fundamentally a matter of individual choice thus lie in the Enlightenment.

This paper focuses on how discourses of food have shaped understandings of what is at stake in the Greek crisis. Drawing from Karl Polanyi's concept of “embeddedness,” I argue that food is central to Greek interpretations of neoliberal policies and processes because of its centrality to Greek culture and identity. Food has also been a site of contested practices of “solidarity” and “charity” by which new social experiments are emerging in the wake of the breakdown of the welfare state. In arguing for food's centrality in the reshaping of Greek sociability, I will suggest that food be thought of not simply as a “topic” for anthropological investigation, but as a master-concept on the level of “kinship,” “ritual,” or “exchange” in any anthropological analysis of contemporary life.

As popular interest in food and agriculture has grown, so have an array of social movements intent on improving the ways we grow, raise, process, sell, and consume our sustenance. While scholars tend to agree with activists’ critical assessments of the failures of the industrial, corporate, chemically intensive food system, they often wonder whether the sustainable, local alternatives that activists recommend are sufficient for broad social transformation. Two scholarly critiques of US alternative food systems revolve around issues of food justice, meaning the ways that race, class, and gender affect who can produce and consume what kinds of foods, and neoliberalism, which refers to activists’ privileging of voluntary, market-centric strategies over those that appeal to the regulatory power of the state. This paper lays out three strategies through which the work of US food justice activists can address both critiques. These include cooperative ownership, organizing labor, and pushing to outlaw risky technologies. However, rather than being at odds with the alternative foods market, each strategy makes use of it as a venue from which to draw targeted support.