Seafood draws on controversial themes in the interdisciplinary field of food studies, with case studies from different eras and geographic regions. Using familiar commodities, this accessible book will help students understand cutting-edge issues in sustainability and ask readers to think about the future of an industry that has lain waste to its own resources. Examining the practical aspects of fisheries and seafood leads the reader through discussions of the core elements of anthropological method and theory, and the book concludes with discussions of sustainable seafood and current efforts to save what is left of marine ecosystems. Students will be encouraged to think about their own seafood consumption through project assignments that challenge them to trace the commodity chains of the seafood on their own plates.Seafood is an ideal book for courses on food and culture, economic anthropology, and the environment.

Three authors who have different backgrounds and are at different phases of academic careers will bring in unique and complementary ’tastes’ to this proposed book. Richard Wilk is Provost’s Professor of anthropology and co-Director of the Food Studies program at Indiana University, and former president of the Society for Economic Anthropology. His initial research focuses on the cultural ecology of farming and family organization, and much of his recent work has revolved around the global history of food and sustainable consumption, including the construction of the taste and distaste of eels. His publications include more than 140 papers and book chapters, and monographs including Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Bucanners to Ecotourists, which is the winner of the Society for Economic Anthropology Annual Book Prize 2008. He has collaborated with both domestic and international scholars for several edited volumes, such as Fast Food/Slow Food: the Cultural Economy of the Global Food System, and Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places (co-edited with Livia Barbosa). He is also co-editing with Josiah Heyman "Globalization and the Environment" book series from Altamira Press, and he publishes and co-edits several textbook and readers, including The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living (co-edited with Nora Haenn), and The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (co-edited with Kelly Askey), and Economies and Cultures, which he and Lisa Cliggett are currently revising for the third edition. Shingo Hamada is currently a research fellow at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, and he will start lectureship in an inaugural food studies program at the Faculty of Liberal Arts in Osaka Shoin Women’s University, Osaka, Japan in April 2015. His research centers on the ethnographic fieldwork in fishing communities, including fisherfolk, buyers, consumers and fisheries scientists. His dissertation synthesizes the environmental history and science-technology studies of herring fisheries, products, and stock enhancement programs in Japan. His current research focuses on waste of potential food resources (by-catch) and folk culinary knowledge of seafood among coastal peoples of Japan, especially traditional fermented seafood. He also has started working in collaborations with Japanese and Pilipino fisheries scholars in small-scale fishing communities, where export-driven shrimp and milkfish aquaculture develops, top-down marine protected areas have been established, and Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) hit in 2013. He also designed and taught an undergraduate course titled "Fish and Ships: Anthropology of Seafood." Lillian Brown is an advanced Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology in the food concentration at Indiana University. She was a graduate assistant for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar in Food Choice, Politics and Freedom at Indiana University in 2012-2013. Her research focuses on cultural values, class difference and taste in seafood markets with a particular interest in consumer groups in Haiti and Hawaii. She is currently teaching a course called Bizarre Foods, and will be assistant instructor for a Human Biology course on environmental toxicology in Spring 2015.