With the holidays upon us, food is a topic at the front of our minds. The centerpiece of our tables, cultures, and familial traditions, food is nourishment for both body and mind. What we eat, however, is also at the center of a growing discipline that marries science and the humanities.

In light of the persisting trend toward 'eating organic,' the omnipresence of people who label themselves 'foodie,' or the heightened awareness of ethnic food options in an increasingly global society, chances are you've recently heard the term "Food Studies." Food Studies: it has a nice ring to it. Personally, I would study a piece of chocolate fudge cake any day of the week. But there's a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Food Studies is a wide-reaching interdisciplinary movement that's all about thinking critically about how we eat, what we eat, and why we eat it. Food Studies enlists formal academic disciplines such as economics, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and art, to seek greater understanding of the central role that food plays in cultures across the globe. It seeks the answers to big questions like: What are the ethics of eating? How do our eating habits affect the environment? And, how does food factor in to the formation and/or understanding of individual, national, racial, and class identities?

These emerging questions are worth paying attention to—journalists at publications like National Geographic and The New York Times have treated the topic, and academic institutions like The New School and NYU have recently begun offering graduate and undergraduate degrees in the emerging discipline. If you're interested in learning more about Food Studies, and exploring your own relationship to what you eat, these NYPL resources are a good place to start:

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health by Marion Nestle
The abundance of food in the United States—enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over—has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more—more food, more often, and in larger portions—no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott
Much like oil today, sugar was once the most powerful commodity on earth. It shaped world affairs, influencing the economic policies of nations, driving international trade and wreaking environmental havoc. The Western world's addiction to sugar came at a terrible human cost: the near extinction of the New World indigenous peoples gave rise to a new form of slavery, as millions of captured Africans were crammed into ships to make the dangerous voyage to Caribbean cane plantations. What began as the extraordinarily expensive luxury of nobles and the very wealthy has become a staple in the modern world. Indeed, it played its own role in creating that world, fuelling the workers of the Industrial Revolution, and giving rise to the craze for fast food. Sugar: A Bittersweet History tells the extraordinary, dramatic and thought-provoking story of this most commonplace of products from its very origins to the present day. Elizabeth Abbott examines how and in what quantities we still consume sugar; its role in the crisis of obesity and diabetes; how its cultivation continues to affect the environment; and how coerced labor continues in so many sugar-producing nations.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
What should we have for dinner? That is the simple question that lies at the center of Pollan’s book on American eating habits. Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on.

The Modern Art Cookbook by Mary Ann Caws
Matisse, Picasso, Hockney—they may not have been from the same period, but they all painted still lifes of food. And they are not alone. Andy Warhol painted soup cans, Claes Oldenburg sculpted an ice cream cone on the top of a building in Cologne, Jack Kerouac’s Sal ate apple pie across the country, and Truman Capote served chicken hash at the Black and White Ball. Food has always played a role in art, but how well and what did the artists themselves eat? Exploring a panoply of artworks of food, cooking, and eating from Europe and the Americas, The Modern Art Cookbook opens a window into the lives of artists, writers, and poets in the kitchen and the studio throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

The 'What's on the Menu Collection' at NYPL
Ever wonder what the hottest menu item was in the year 1910? Or how much a burger cost in 1945? Or what wines were in vogue at the Four Seasons in the 1970s? With approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Access the database from anywhere at menus.nypl.org.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood—facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf—his casual questioning took on an urgency. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting of the harm we cause with our eating habits.

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
A book that insists it is more about the act of eating, rather than the food itself, Tompkins' Racial Indigestion draws from 19th century poetry, art, advertisements, theater, literature, cookbooks, and other media to show the myriad ways in which depictions of the act of eating in media are historically, quite politically charged. Informed by recent contributions to race, gender, and queer studies, Tompkins argues, among other things, that the prevalent depictions of black Americans being 'eaten up' in 19th century media points and laughs at their powerlessness in American society, in which they are literally and figuratively chewed up and broken down to provide energy to sustain the dominance of the white-male's economic and social structures. Full text available online.