Introduction Contemporary food practices. Spaces of food production and consumption

Abstract

and distinction, reflect the identity, lifestyle, status, class, gender, age and capital of each human being. This IRSR special number dedicated to contemporary food practices includes five interesting articles, three of them focused mainly on the space of food production and consumption. The last two articles will present the daily food constrains and their implication in the food choices and social identity for people with different heath issues. The opening article of this issue, Mobile Eating: A Cultural Perspective, tackles the contemporary theme of mobility, seldom used in the food studies. The author highlights the high percentage of North Americans who eat and drink in their car and connects their practices with the mobile food infrastructure, with important roots in the American traveling history. Eating in the car may be explained by the need to be mobile, the pressure of time but also through habits related to fast-food eating or by the American car culture. Though eating in the car is perceived as a bad habit, especially in contrast with home eating, it provides a convenience that promised to extend time through multi-tasking. The author includes the practice of eating in the car as part of the fast-food system and highlights the risks associated with it, such as distracted driving, obesity and excessive environmental waste The second article, Shifting Food Consciousness: Homesteading Blogs and the Inner Work of Food Justice, brings us to another contemporary issue, the food activism or the social justice work. The author uses an ecowomanist theoretical framework and analyzes blog posts written by four homesteading bloggers. Home produced food is considered an alternative for industrialized food and it is part of the local production of food. The author presents four case studies of women who have chosen the domestic work as a lifestyle, in the search of living a more ‘authentic’ life but also as a form of self-care and healing process. The third article, Cultural Hybridity in the USA exemplified by Tex-Mex cuisine Race, Femininity and Food, explores the one of the world’s great culinary regions, the U.S.-Mexican border area. The author uses the concepts of acculturation, hybridization and transculturation in DOI 10.1515/irsr-2017-0008