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In The Americans, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are undercover operatives for the Soviet Union. In that capacity, they are responsible for crimes including murder and espionage. Yet they also pose as a law-abiding family, running a small business, raising children, and making friends with their neighbours. By ‘practicing’ American life, Philip becomes more American, forging an identity more receptive to American values and attitudes. This chapter draws on concepts from the literature on legal consciousness to examine the relationship between identity and hegemony. Studies of legal consciousness emphasise that consciousness is not simply legal attitudes or even ideology; rather legal consciousness is reflected in the way that people enact their legal beliefs and values. Those enactments help individuals form identities, but those identities are constrained by the hegemonic ideologies that are prevalent in the culture. Law and legal consciousness are important to both processes.

For migrant urban ethnographers who study their city of settlement, ethnography may have a double meaning, serving not only as an approach to understanding a city academically but also a pathway to connecting with a community more broadly and personally, a type of personal place making. This chapter uses the experiences of the author – an American working and living in Shanghai and Tokyo for over 20 years – to show how his evolving practice of the ethnography of the city relates to a slow process of coming to live purposefully in it. The chapter also details a migrant’s perspective on the ethnography of sexuality, nightlife and foodways in urban Asia. The insider-outsider relationship that the migrant ethnographer brings to the city may be viewed as both burden and asset. As transnational migrants, migrant ethnographers can perform as institutional mediaries who connect researchers across borders and as educational facilitators who help migrant students discover means of associating with an unfamiliar environment. In short, ethnography may be a way of living as well as learning.

This longitudinal case study affords opportunistic infra-cross-cultural and gendered comparisons of foodways within the fourth-world Saami societies across four north-European nation-states and through two generations. The study centers on 44 years of ethnographic research in arctic Norway, among both nomadic reindeer-herding and sedentary Saami together with their nearest neighbors within and without northernmost Norway.

General ethnographic immersion, from five years in duration down to single months or weeks, since early 1972, provides qualitative and quantitative data relevant to gender and food, collected in the two local languages, and supplemented by archeological and historical records as well as literatures from contiguous areas.

Two generations ago, most families, nomadic, or settled, could remember being self-sufficient with respect to food, and to lesser extents to clothing and shelter. Women’s roles in food acquisition and preparation have expanded in recent times. Some families, given choices largely made by wives and mothers, may today have a diet comparable with that in other parts of the West.

This holistic ethnographic research continues indefinitely. Any ethnography is both enabled and limited by its investigator and by local social relations, in this case synergistic and positive.

By the close of the 20th century, Saami researchers joined others in social science, often focusing on their indigenous culture and language. These provide usually corroborating and always fascinating data for outsiders, and many anecdotal narratives illustrating these data.

This chapter explores the development of the Professional Cook – Indigenous content program in the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada. Chef Andrew George, Wet'suwet'en professionally trained cook, shares his knowledge and experiences in participating in the planning, program development, and delivery of the culinary training program. The Indigenization of the Professional Cook program was made possible through leadership and collaboration between government; training institutions; Indigenous elders, traditional knowledge keepers and communities; industry and businesses. The chapter interweaves reports from the schools, training institutions, and government; highlights from the programs; Indigenous foodways and recipes; and highlights on how such culinary education and training programs can help provide ways toward food sovereignty.

The Melungeons, a person-of-color ethnic group dwelling in southern Appalachia, have recently discovered their multi-racial, non-Christian ancestry. We describe the process of ethnogenesis via consumption undertaken by Melungeons to connect their identities to this newfound ancestry. We also examine the social evolution of the Melungeon ethnic label to become a valued personal possession and the public identification of certain physical features as markers of Melungeon ethnicity. It is proposed that these may serve as exemplars for consumer behaviors among other mestizo ethnic groups.

This chapter looks at how Latin American immigrants go about shopping for groceries in Nashville, Tennessee, and relates this simple act to a wider political economy. The chapter examines the act of shopping for groceries and the immigrants' preferences through elements largely ignored by the prevailing economic paradigm. To some extent, the immigrants are aware that their mode of shopping is not entirely “rational” and that their choices are often informed by nothing more than “feelings” toward a place or product. The ethnography examines how the immigrants deal with their now dislocated practice of shopping in their everyday life in the new city. In examining this process, the ethnography considers the public spaces in which the practice of shopping takes place, and includes both those stores catering directly to immigrants and those serving a wider market.

This chapter examines the increase in global demand for quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) and considers the impact of such demand on the Peruvian and Bolivian farmers who produce it. Specifically, it analyzes the social media marketing of U.S. based I Heart Keenwah (IHK) and considers the role of “storied food” with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in a Web 2.0 context. This chapter reports the results of textual, rhetorical, and cultural analyses of the digital marketing materials IHK deploys, and considers IHK’s use of Web 2.0 tools to mobilize discourses of socially responsible marketing, and implications of industrial quinoa production on Andean biodiversity and indigenous culture. This chapter principally concludes that the social media and digital marketing materials that IHK deploys obfuscate the social, economic, and ecological complexities surrounding the quinoa industries in Peru and Bolivia. This chapter provides evidence of new tendencies in capitalist commodification, and demonstrates how the traditional and indigenous protectors of the quinoa plant species are being denied their agricultural and cultural heritages. Further more, it demonstrates how the language of corporate social responsibility is abused in the service of less sustainable, branded, and extractive imaginaries and corporate profit. Given the significant rise in international quinoa demand, IHK’s explosive economic success, and IHK’s reliance on Andean quinoa, this case study provides unique insights into global food capitalism in the age of social media.

This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

The chapters present original qualitative and quantitative research illustrating the complex relationship between gender and food. The need to understand the relationship intersectionally and in historical context is apparent and provisioning as caring emerges as a major theme.

Food is a human right yet it is not always and everywhere available and when it is not always humanly produced and healthful. The fact that food production and consumption is gendered cannot be ignored in the quest for feeding our planet.

The chapter and the volume are intended to illustrate some of the many ways that food and gender are related and to encourage gender scholars to continue to pay attention to food research.