[3] The term ′foodways′ appears to have been coined in 1942 by three University of Chicago graduate students, John W. Bennett, Harvey L. Smith and Herbert Passin.
Those with information to share about different food habits were encouraged to contact the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead at the National Research Council.
It was in these circumstances that John W. Bennett and his companions went to study Anglo-Americans, German-Americans and African-Americans in the fertile but frequently flooded bottomlands of southern Illinois along the banks of the Mississippi River.
This had gained currency in the United States following its adoption by Yale professor and pioneering social scientist William Graham Sumner.
Similarly, Bennett et al. concluded, foodways were not likely to change simply because bureaucrats suggested that new ways had economic or nutritional benefits.
As folklorist Jay Anderson argued in a pioneering 1971 essay, foodways encompasses "the whole interrelated system of food conceptualization and evaluation, procurement, preservation, preparation, consumption and nutrition shared by all the members of a particular society.
According to Harris, Lyon and McLaughlin: "…everything about eating including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it and who's at the table – is a form of communication rich with meaning.
In an article in the journal Consumption Markets & Culture, from Taylor & Francis publications, Douglas Brownlie, Paul Hewer, and Suzanne Horne explore culinary consumptionscapes through a study of contemporary cookbooks, with chic recipes often turning intensely into a kind of "gastroporn", creating a "simulacrum of desire" as well as a "simulacrum of satisfaction.
Springer Publishing has released the book, Pre-Columbian Foodways, by John Staller and Michael Carrasco, which studies and examines "the symbolic complexity of food and its preparation, as well as the social importance of feasting in contemporary and historical societies.