Mary S. Willis

Good Taste Mary S. Willis

Good Taste: A Reader on Dietary Factors Affecting Global Cuisines provides students with engaging articles that explore the relationship between food, nutrition, and culture. Readers are challenged to consider a variety of issues about food systems worldwide, including how food culture influences health and well-being, how food production affects the environment and our health, how human biology determines the foods we're able to process, and how the indigenous food past affects contemporary dietary patterns.

The collection begins by defining culture, exploring the relationship between biology and nutrition, and highlighting the roles food plays in religion. In subsequent sections, students read a variety of articles on topics connected to nutrition in different areas of world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the United States, and Central and South America. Each topic and article serves to strengthen the reader's understanding of food and the nutrition therein, as well as the ways in which culture shapes all that we do when it comes to food.

Good Taste helps students understand why populations around the world eat the way that they do, both in the past and the present. It is an ideal resource for introductory undergraduate courses in anthropology and nutrition.

Mary S. Willis is a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She earned an M. A. and Ph. D. in anthropology from Washington University. Dr. Willis has traveled and worked in Asia, Africa, and South America for more than 40 years. She has studied transitions of refugee populations from South Sudan to the U. S. since 2000, and has led a study abroad program to Ethiopia and Zambia, training students in food security, health, and nutrition, and collecting data on the impact of under-nutrition on growth-related sequelae within rural farming populations, since 2014.