An Introduction to the Anthropology of Food.

Hello and welcome to my long overdue food blog!

Anthropology is all about culture. Looking at our own culture, looking at other people's cultures, looking at how culture is passed on and changed, looking at how culture is preserved, and so on.
The one thing every human has to do is eat. Therefore eating, and food in general, is a big part of all cultures. As an ex-Anthropology student and all round (vegan) food lover, studying culture through food habits and consumption seems second nature to me.

Let me introduce myself and what I hope to achieve from this blog. 

My name is Emily and I'm 24 years old. I turned vegan when I was 19 after a long and thoughtful process. (I will go more into how and why I became a vegan in a later post).

I have recently graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) with a degree in Social Anthropology (I say recently, I graduated in July 2010, but I'm clinging onto “recently” for as long as possible!). I learned so much in my three years at SOAS and met some wonderful people. Some of my favourite and most memorable modules were “Ethnography of a selected region: Japan” and “Anthropology of gender”. However one of the main reasons I chose SOAS was for their “Anthropology of Food” option. I was gutted I had to wait until my third and final year before I could take the course, but also so pleased I had too once I got there. I feel like I've learned the most from anthropology of food and for a long time I wondered what I would do with my knowledge and how I would be able to expand on it without doing a masters (that won't be able to happen any time soon. Sigh)

This blog is a way for me to keep my learning process going, and also something you will enjoy reading and find useful for whatever reason.

The idea for this blog was a bit of a mistake. My friend Billie moved to Berlin recently and during the last phone conversation we had before she moved we discussed her keeping a blog. She said she would probably keep a food blog to which I replied “that's an amazing idea, I've always wanted to do one!” That made me think “hang on, why I haven't I started a food blog before?” 

Now there are many vegan food blogs, and I enjoy reading most of them, but this blog isn't here as a typical vegan food blog. I won't post often of “hey look at the new vegan food I have found!” Even though I like to read those posts I can't really be bothered doing that. (I might upload these kinds of posts occasionally, but they won't be often).

A lot of the time I feel like maybe people are just posting so they can be the first to reveal what new food is on the block before anyone else does for some uber-cool-points or something. I'm not about that.

This blog is (hopefully) going to be more about the anthropology of food from a vegan perspective. I have never come across a blog like that. If you have then great, link me in the comments, but what I have planned is (hopefully) going to be something different. I'm not doing this blog to be “unique” or “cool” I'm just doing it to actually use the mountains of food knowledge I have and stop it being a useless waste.

I will hopefully feature topics such as: food waste, health, food 'restrictions', fair trade, organic, industrialization, agriculture, body issues, cleanliness, food as a form of culture, food as a form of language, food as a form of memory and many more.

I will also be adding some “typical” vegan food blog features, such as recipes and the occasional reviews. I am also currently involved in a vegan food swap with John from the Laziest Vegans so I will post about that.

I hope you enjoy my blog. Feel free to comment if you agree/disagree with what is being featured, or tell me if you like/dislike my posts, I will try to offer more of what you enjoy, but there will hopefully be a bit of everything.