Food is vital for human life, promotes pleasure and prevents disease. Though biological scientists have studied food and nutrition in depth, few sociologists have focused on them as social problems.

Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems (published by Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, N.Y.), co-edited by Jeffery Sobal, a nutritional sociologist and associate professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University, and Donna Maurer, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, fills this gap. Composed of 14 chapters with detailed references by sociologists and nutrition scientists from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Norway, the book addresses: -- hunger in America and world hunger

• the medicalization and demedicalization of obesity -- stigma and anorexia nervosa
• anxieties and ambivalence related to food and eating -- meat and vegetarianism
• food information wars: consumer rights vs. industry interests
• food biotechnology as a social issue
• inequalities and health in industrial countries -- different views on food stamps and hunger -- politics and nutrition policy: the case of Norway -- politics, controversy and dietary standards in Great Britain
• food safety: media pressure and the public "Rather than study these problems as objective 'facts,' this book views them as socially constructed processes," says Sobal, who contributed the chapter on obesity and teaches courses in social science perspectives in food and nutrition. "By studying food and nutrition issues as social rather than biological problems, we can look at how these issues become recognized as problems, how they develop, and how the process of constructing issues into social problems is associated with other structural and cultural conditions." The 344-page original paperback is intended for scholars or as a text in courses on food, cultural aspects of nutrition, or part of a social problems course.