He is a directeur de recherche of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and heads the Institut Interdisciplinaire d'Anthropologie du Contemporain (Interdisciplinary Institute for Contemporary Anthropology), a research unit of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris.

Claude Fischler's main area of research has been a comparative, interdisciplinary social science perspective on food and nutrition.

His work covers the structure and function of cuisines, tastes and preferences and their evolution and change over time and space, as well as body image.

Subsequently, he came to focus on perception of risk, scares and crises, on comparative approaches of attitudes toward food and health across cultures (in relation to, among other things, prevalence of obesity), on the reception and perception of sensitive technologies (including novel foods) and more recently on assessment and measurement of well-being and quality of life in a comparative perspective.

The anthropology of commensality ties into the general issue of sharing food, at the local and global levels.