Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture

”Anderson’s book is a solid introduction to the anthropology of food for students and general readers. It is clear, well-written, spiced with interesting examples, and illustrated with many evocative photographs taken by the author and by Barbara Anderson.”
—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Anderson's view of the relationship between the biological and the cultural is nicely provocative, and his rich personal fieldwork experiences greatly enliven the pages of Everyone Eats."
—Sidney W. Mintz, author of Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past

”Plenty of cultural insights and background history lend to a survey particularly recommended for college-level students of anthropology and social science.”
—The Bookwatch, The Midwest Book Review

"Everyone Eats is anthropology at its best, an exceptional blend of biological and cultural explanation that reveals our relationship with food and eating. Anderson's personal ethnographic experience as a nutritional anthropologist among cultures from around the world will leave the reader with a sense of wonderment about the fundamental human act of eating. Throughout the book Anderson develops a deep social conscience about the problems of over–and under-nutrition–that face the world today."
—Barrett P. Brenton, Associate Editor of The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture

"Although intended for the general public and not as a textbook, this book is recommended for higher education, especially advanced courses."
—CHOICE,highly recommended

”Anderson does an excellent job of tracing foodways as dynamic processes, defining cuisines in the Mediterranean world, and discussing how foods reveal world systems and signal ethnicities.”
—Gastronomica

Everyone eats, but rarely do we ask why or investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do we love spices, sweets, coffee? How did rice become such a staple food throughout so much of eastern Asia? Everyone Eats examines the social and cultural reasons for our food choices and provides an explanation of the nutritional reasons for why humans eat, resulting in a unique cultural and biological approach to the topic. E. N. Anderson explains the economics of food in the globalization era, food's relationship to religion, medicine, and ethnicity as well as offers suggestions on how to end hunger, starvation, and malnutrition.

Everyone Eats feeds our need to understand human ecology by explaining the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment.