Despite the predictable alliterative title ["feast and famine"], this collection of essays if far from lacking originality in its approach to its main topic: the different cultural approaches to very real circumstances connected to lack of food, such as hunger, scarcity, and the social turmoil they generate. . . . One of the core tenets of this book, which also constitutes a widely shared principle in the burgeoning field of food studies, is that eating and nutrition cannot be reduced to their biological components, and that the attention paid to quantitative data about malnourishment and hunger need to be qualitatively compiled and interpreted by an analysis of the rules and the significations that define foodways as cultural systems.