{"product_id":"food-gender-and-poverty-in-the-ecuadorian-andes-9781577660293","title":"Food  Gender  and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes","description":"\u003cp\u003eWe are what we eat: our food defines us as individual women and men  as families and communities  and as members of our race  our class  and our nation. In this book  Mary Weismantel uses four different facets of the social life of food--diet  cuisine  discourse  and practice--to draw a richly detailed and compelling portrait of one South American community during the 1980s. The foods eaten in Zumbagua  an indigenous parish of highland Ecuador  are key to understanding what holds this distinctive people together in the face of tremendous economic and cultural challenges  as well as what divides them. The detailed discussion of diet is surprisingly revealing. Ancient histories emerge from the origins of staple crops like barley and potatoes  while recent trends  such as the substitution of purchased candies and colas for too-expensive fruits and vegetables  expose an ongoing ecological and economic crisis. In her discussion of cuisine--the cultural rules by which foods become meals--Weismantel shows how the everyday work of women preparing food transforms a mundane physical necessity  into a deeply meaningful symbolic act. Differences between local and national cultures  everyday and special occasions  men and women  adults and children  family and friends are only some of the cultural messages transmitted through snacks and means. Further  this culinary language is a highly expressive political idiom. By analyzing conversations and arguments about food  this book shows how an apparently apolitical community engaged in agonized debates about survival in the face of endemic racism and accelerating poverty. Cooking oil and wild mustard  bread and gruel  white rice and brown barley all appear as highly charged symbols of assimilation or resistance. Lastly  the book moves into the kitchen itself  where kinship  generation and gender shape--and are shaped by--the practical work of feeding the family. Social changes  such as the feminization of agriculture  continually alter labor demands within and outside of the kitchen  creating new tensions and conflicts within the family. By retaining close attention to the food itself as it is prepared and consumed  this book explores these intimate family issues without ever losing sight of the larger forces involved. The kitchen stove is a final nexus between production  exchange  and consumption. In the end  the delicate balance between the labor and products that go out of the house  and the goods that come back in  determines economic survival. And it is by choosing what to allow in and what to exclude  and how to shape the finished product for their own consumption  that the people of Zumbagua exert a precarious cultural autonomy in the face of daunting difficulties. This book is both a richly specific document of their lives  and a significant theoretical statement about the anthropology of food.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45652879769653,"sku":"ByrdShop_1577660293","price":208.85,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781577660293.jpg?v=1781853095","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/food-gender-and-poverty-in-the-ecuadorian-andes-9781577660293","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}