American Culture New Student Orientation 2025

You should touch base with Julie McLoone.  Julie is the  curator in the the Special Collections Research Center, she provides collection and research support for print materials published after 1700 and several of our archival collections. Some of her areas of emphasis include the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, the Hubbard Collection of Imaginary Voyages, artist’s books, and literary and theatre archival collections. 

Critical Food Studies

About the Book Series (24 books)

The study of food has seldom been more pressing or prescient. From the intensifying globalization of food, a world-wide food crisis and the continuing inequalities of its production and consumption, to food's exploding media presence, and its growing re-connections to places and people through 'alternative food movements', this series promotes critical explorations of contemporary food cultures and politics. Building on previous but disparate scholarship, its overall aims are to develop innovative and theoretical lenses and empirical material in order to contribute to - but also begin to more fully delineate - the confines and confluences of an agenda of critical food research and writing. Of particular concern are original theoretical and empirical treatments of the materialisations of food politics, meanings and representations, the shifting political economies and ecologies of food production and consumption and the growing transgressions between alternative and corporatist food networks.

DATABASES

SAGE Encyclopedia of Food Issues

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Food Issues explores the topic of food across multiple disciplines within the social sciences and related areas including business, consumerism, marketing, and environmentalism. In contrast to the existing reference works on the topic of food that tend to fall into the categories of cultural perspectives, this carefully balanced academic encyclopedia focuses on social and policy aspects of food production, safety, regulation, labeling, marketing, distribution, and consumption. A sampling of general topic areas covered includes Agriculture, Labor, Food Processing, Marketing and Advertising, Trade and Distribution, Retail and Shopping, Consumption, Food Ideologies, Food in Popular Media, Food Safety, Environment, Health, Government Policy, and Hunger and Poverty. This encyclopedia introduces students to the fascinating, and at times contentious, and ever-so-vital field involving food issues.

Because Food Studies is heavily interdisciplinary, materials can be hard to find using traditional subject divisions. Research materials may be distributed across numerous disciplines and subject areas. Searches using multiple terms are most likely to be successful. For instance, using both a place name and another term, such as “cooking”, “food habits” or “Social life and customs” is a good way to get resources on food in a country or geographic region.

In databases, searching for the following terms in titles, or the title and abstract, can be very useful:

• Cooking
• Cuisine
• Eating
• Dining
• Drinking
• Foodways
• Gastronomy
• Hunger
• Nutrition
   

This is a partial list of Library of Congress subject headings that may be useful in searching the library catalog for food studies topics. Note that search terms with multiple words must be enclosed by quotation marks. You can also combine multiple terms in order to narrow your search results.

Subsequent boxes suggest additional subject headings and search terms relevant to narrower topics: Agriculture, Alcohol, Food Consumption, Diet, Domestic Service, Food Consumption, Gardening, Home Economics and Housekeeping, Vegetarianism.

General Library of Congress Subject Headings

• Beverages
• Cookery
• Cooking
• "Diet in Literature"
• "Dinners and dining"
• "Eating philosophy"
• "Food consumption"
• "Food habits"
• "Food history"
• "Food in art"
• "Food in literature"
• "Food industry and trade"
• "Food preferences"
• "Food service"
• "Food supply"
• "Food writers"
• "Food writing"
• Gastronomy
• Hunger
• Nutrition
• Nutritional
   

Additional Library of Congress Subject Headings (combine with food-related terms)

• Biotechnology
• "Economic aspects"
• Folklore
• "Health aspects"
• "Moral and ethical aspects"
• "Political aspects"
• "Religious aspects"
• Research
• "Social aspects"
• "Symbolic aspects"

This is a partial list of search terms that may be useful in searching the library catalog. Note that search terms with multiple words must be enclosed by quotation marks. You can also combine multiple terms in order to narrow your search results. Food justice is a topic that can be particularly hard to encapsulate within particular search terms, but the following are possible entry points, particularly when combined with some of the terms suggested in other areas. For example, one might search for "hunger" and "social justice."

• "African American"
• "Community-based social services"
• "Consumer advocacy"
• Hunger
• "Food cooperatives"
• "Food consumption"
• "Food security"
• "Food supply"
• Minorities
• "Moral and ethical aspects"
• Nutrition
• Racism
• "Social justice"