North Americans love eating meat. Despite the increased awareness of the meat industry's harms–violence against animals, health problems, and associations with environmental degradation–the rate of meat eating hasn't changed significantly in recent years. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable paradox: a need to square one's values with the behaviors that contradict those values.Using a large-scale, multidimensional, and original dataset, Happy Meat explores the tho...

The challenges of teaching a successful introductory sociology course today demand materials very different from the norm. It is a question of making the practice of sociological thinking meaningful, rigorous, and relevant to today’s world of undergraduates.This comparatively concise, highly visual, and engaging book offers a refreshingly new way forward to reach students, using one of the most powerful tools in a sociologist’s teaching arsenal – the familiar stuf...

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent ‘hole in the wall’ ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline ...

The intersections of aging, media, and culture are under-explored given trends in population aging, rapid increases in the mediation of everyday life, and the growing cultural significance of media consumption at the global level. This book brings together an international collection of critical scholars, both well-established and up-and-coming, from the various academic disciplines that share a common interest in the future study of aging and media. This anthology of original articles int...

In recent years everyone from politicians to celebrity chefs has been proselytizing about how we should grow, buy, prepare, present, cook, taste, eat and dispose of food. In light of this, contributors to this book argue that food has become the target of intensified pedagogical activity across a range of domains, including schools, supermarkets, families, advertising and TV media. Illustrated with a range of empirical studies, this edited and interdisciplinary volume - the first book on f...

The Globalization of Nothing is back in a revised and completely updated edition, with an even greater emphasis on the processes of globalization and how they relate to McDonaldization. As before, this book is structured around four sets of concepts addressing the issues of: "places/non-places," "things/non-things," "people/non-people," and "services/non-services." By drawing upon salient examples from everyday life, George Ritzer invites the reader to examine the nuances ...

Few things are as important as the food we eat. Conversations in Food Studies demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary research through the cross-pollination of disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Widely diverse essays, ranging from the meaning of milk, to the bring-your-own-wine movement, to urban household waste, are the product of collaborating teams of interdisciplinary authors. Readers are invited to engage and reflect on the theories and practi...

From the creator of Your Fat Friend and co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast, an explosive indictment of the systemic and cultural bias facing plus-size people.Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people’s exp...

One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outré food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch andother forms of conspicuous consumption have blind...

Learn to identify—and combat—Systemic Shame, the feeling of self-hatred and disempowerment that comes from living in a society that blames individuals for systemic problems, with this invaluable resource from the social psychologist and author of Unmasking Autism.“Stop doomscrolling and read this book. You’ll feel better, I promise.”—Celeste Headlee, journalist and bestselling authorSystemic Shame is the socially engineered self-lo...

**We can bury the girlboss, but what comes next? The former executive editor of Teen Vogue tells the story of her personal workplace reckoning and argues for collective responsibility to reimagine work as we know it.“One of the smartest voices we have on gender, power, capitalist exploitation, and the entrenched inequities of the workplace.”—Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad**“As I sat in the front row that day, I was 80 percent faking it with a...

How the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us allIn today’s world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shi...