The globalization of food consumption has often been equated with the loss of culinary traditions and the homogenization of cuisines. By contrast, the anthropologists, historians and sociologists contributing to this collection reveal both rapid changes and also profound and sometimes surprising continuities in local food consumption practices in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and use these to shed light on shifting social boundaries and cultural identities. The volume combines ethnographic, historical and comparative analyses, situating local practices of eating, cooking and sharing food within transnational processes and contexts. In so doing, the volume celebrates and furthers approaches developed in Jack Goody's seminal 1982 book, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. With studies of China, India, West Africa, South America and Europe, the book provides a truly global perspective on the social dynamics of food consumption in the modern world.

Jakob A. Klein is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK and Deputy Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre. His publications include Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World, co-edited with Y. Jung and M.L. Caldwell, and Consuming China, co-edited with K. Latham and S. Thompson. Anne Murcott is Honorary Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, UK. Her most recent publications are Waste Matters: New Perspectives of Food and Society co-edited with D. Evans and H. Campbell, and The Handbook of Food Research, co-edited with W. Belasco and P. Jackson.