Consuming the Inedible

Everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners. This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices, and vice versa. Ranging across diversity of disciplines Consuming the Inedible surveys scientific and local views about the consequences - biological, mineral, social or spiritual - of these food practices, and probes to what extent we can generalize about them.

Jeremy M. MacClancy is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Anthropology Department, Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Consuming Culture, and prize-winning investigator of Basque cuisine.

Jeya Henry is Professor of Human Nutrition at the School of Life Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, and Visting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was a board member of the UK Food Standards agency between 2000-2003 and has published extensively on energy regulation and obesity.

Helen Macbeth is Chair of ICAF (UK) and Honorary Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, Oxford Brookes University.

"...contains fascinating material on the social, political, nutritional, and evolutionary aspects of human food choice. Scholars and students in food studies will find Consuming the Inedible useful for its variety of approaches to 'unusual' eating practices, and several of the chapters should also find their way onto reading lists for courses in the anthropology of food."  ·  JRAI