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Warde, Alan. The Practice of Eating. Malden (MA): Polity Press, 2016. 203 pp., $24.95 paper (9780745691718)
In recent decades, Alan Warde has become an influential figure in both food studies and the sociology of consumption; his work in each of these distinct yet overlapping fields consistently helps to reciprocally inform and refine one another. In The Practice of Eating, Warde avails himself of the sociology of consumption's recent "practice turn" to develop a rigorous account of eating as a multifaceted and variable social activity. In his view, practice theory provides the means to create a sociological account of eating that knits together many of the best qualities of previous socio-cultural studies of food and dining, while also addressing their characteristic limits and oversights. In turn, he believes, an extended examination of eating can expand the reach of practice theory itself, enhancing especially its ability to comprehend "highly complex but weakly regulated activities" (7). Although Warde's book does not contain original empirical research and is rather scant on concrete examples, it consolidates a large and diverse body of scholarship into a coherent theoretical framework for analyzing eating as a social practice.
Until recently, Warde argues, properly sociological analyzes of eating have been surprisingly scarce within the burgeoning body of popular and academic writing on food. To the extent that eating has often been conceptualized as a purely physiological process under the purview of nutritional science, the specifically social dynamics of food consumption have remained underappreciated. Social-scientific studies of eating within psychology, marketing and economics have frequently been quite truncated, orienting themselves around various practical public health concerns and the objective of "getting individuals to behave in their own best interests in accordance with scientifically determined dietary guidelines" (12).
While sociology holds promise as a means of deepening such work, Warde suggests that it too has fallen short of developing a nuanced understanding of eating ....