Food preparation, consumption, and exchange are eminently social practices, and experiencing another cuisine often provides our first encounter with a different culture. This volume presents fascinating essays relating to food by anthropologists working in many parts of the world, exploring their experiences of hunger, pleasure, and disgust, and what they learned by eating with others. From the rich metaphors for social life drawn from eating and drinking in Latin America, to the experience of refugees subsisting on food aid, this book covers a wide range of contemporary issues in anthropology, with a special focus on the experience and challenge of ethnographic fieldwork. Essays address linguistic and social acculturation through eating, the experience of scarcity, industrial food production and the threat of contamination, and ecology, identity, and social differentiation. "Food: Ethnographic Encounters" offers readers a broad view of the vibrancy of local and global food cultures, and provides an accessible introduction to both food studies and contemporary ethnography.

Introduction / Leo Coleman -- Food and Morality in Yemen / Anne Meneley -- It All Started with the Bhajias / Nina Berman -- The Enchantments of Food in the Lower Amazon, Brazil / Mark Harris -- Live Poultry Markets and Avian Flu in Hong Kong / Frédéric Keck -- Revisiting Lao Food: Pain and Commensality / Penny Van Esterik -- In Search of the Elusive Heirloom Tomato: Farms and Farmers' Markets, Fields and Fieldwork / Jennifer A. Jordan -- Keeping out of the Kitchen: Cooking and Power in a Moroccan Household / Claire Nicholas -- "Do You Know How to Eat . . .?" Edible Expertise in Ho Chi Minh City / Nina Hien -- Learning to Exchange Words and Food in the Marquesas / Kathleen C. Riley -- Eating Vegetarian in Vietnam / Christophe Robert -- The Food of Sorrow: Humanitarian Aid to Displaced People / Elizabeth Dunn -- Guide to further reading / Leo Coleman.