The rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries

The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one’s persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living.
 
The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike—in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it.
 
Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production.
 
The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.
 

Standing as the world’s two largest economies, marshaling the most imposing armies on earth, holding enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons, consuming a majority share of the planet’s natural resources, and serving as the media generators and health care providers for billions of consumers around the globe, the United States and China are positioned to influence notions of democracy, nationalism, citizenship, human rights, environmental priorities, and public health for the foreseeable future. These broad issues are addressed   as questions about communication—about how our two nations envision each other and how our interlinked imaginaries create both opportunities and obstacles for greater understanding and strengthened relations. Accordingly, this book provides in-depth communication-based analyses of how U.S. and Chinese officials, scholars, and activists configure each other, portray the relations between the two nations, and depict their shared and competing interests. As a first step toward building a new understanding between one another, Imagining China tackles the complicated question of how Americans, Chinese, and their respective allies imagine themselves enmeshed in nations, old rivalries, and emerging partnerships, while simultaneously meditating on the powers and limits of nationalism in our age of globalization.