Although early anthropological accounts often dealt with cooking and eating as part of ritual or daily life, food was rarely regarded as the central point of academic focus.
This changed in the later half of the 20th century, when foundational work by Mary Douglas, Marvin Harris, Arjun Appadurai, Jack Goody, and Sidney Mintz cemented the study of food as a key insight into modern social life.
[1] Mintz is known as the "Father of food anthropology"[2] for his 1985 work Sweetness and Power,[3] which linked British demand for sugar with the creation of empire and exploitative industrial labor conditions.
Several related and interdisciplinary academic programs exist in the US and UK[6] (listed under Food studies institutions).
It publishes a majority of papers in social anthropology, but is also open to contributions from historians, geographers, philosophers, economists.