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这篇文章的编者旨在写一本有关于食物的辩论书，并提供了一种在生物学和文化的边界跨学科，跨文化的集合，每个人都需要吃，食物具有一定的特殊意义。在本书中，编者提醒食品的普遍意义：吃的过程每天都需要几次，食品是每一个经济的基础，是各国和家庭政治战略的核心棋子。编辑认为，食物是生命，因而寿命可以通过食物进行研究。食物的喜好，厌恶，和饮食失调，不能充分评估与物理解释，而忽略了文化和象征意义。食品标志着社会差异，食物分享创造团结，食品短缺损害人的社区。身体条件和表象，如胖还是瘦，是深深植根于性别角色和文化范畴，以及象征着人们如何通过食物和食欲的不同来定义自己。本文作者强调食物的意义，因为既然大家都需要吃，因此关注它的含义比其他的问题的人更多。

In putting together this reader, the editors aimed at writing a book 'with legs', a book that contributes to the debates around food, and that will offer an collection of what has been written so far interdisciplinary, cross-culturally, and historically about it. At the border of biology and culture, everyone needs to eat and associates food with certain values. In their introduction, the editors remind of the universal importance of food: the process of eating is reproduced everyday several times, food is the foundation of every economy and a central pawn in political strategies of states and households. The editors believe that food is life, and thus life can be studied through food. In this reader, the cultural aspect of food is stressed: food preferences, dislikes, and eating disorders cannot be fully assessed with physical explanations while neglecting the cultural and symbolic dimension. Food marks social differences, food sharing creates solidarity, and food-scarcity damages human communities. Bodily conditions and images, such as being fat or thin, are deeply embedded in gender roles and cultural categories, and symbolize how people define themselves differently through food and appetite. Because of this focus on the cultural dimension of food consumption, anthropology dominates the book despite its interdisciplinary approach. The authors stress the significance of food, because since everybody eats, its meanings concern more people than that of other issues. It has to offer a great variety of meanings since it is interwoven in the practices of everyday life all around the world, and through its diversity in material and preparation. Rather than uniformity, there is a broad range of manners, tastes, and cuisines connected to it.

The emphasis on gender throughout the book shows that food across and history and cultures has often been a key source of power for women. Women are often associated for the preparation of food, which turns it into a tool of subordination, but also a source of direct influence over those who eat the food.

The book is broken into four sections: The first one 'Food, meaning, and voice' covers some classical papers from authors such as Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Marvin Harris. It thus presents theories as diverse as cultural structuralism, symbolism, cultural materialism, and semiotics. The papers of Mary Douglas, Jean Soler, and Marvin Harris for example represent three different approaches to Jewish dietary choices.

The second section 'Commensality and fasting' focuses on the meanings of practices such as giving, receiving, and refusing food. As Caroline Walker Bynum shows for women, Christian piety, saintliness, and the refusal of food were strongly intertwined in late-medieval Europe. Eating 'disorder', which today would be medicalized or psychologized, was theologized in medieval Europe. Walker Bynum differentiates between cultural function, and cultural meaning. The main function was that women were able to control their social environment through food refusal and the manipulation of th