To Feast on Us as Their Prey wins 2020 ASFS Book Award

To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, edited by Rachel B. Herrmann, has won the 2020 book award for an edited volume from the Association for the Study of Food and Society.

The ASFS Book Award recognizes an outstanding book about food that employs exemplary research methods, offers novel theoretical insights and constitutes a significant contribution to the study of food from a scholarly perspective.

Studies of cannibalism, Herrmann writes in the introduction, “have the potential to refine and develop our understandings of food his-tory, histories of eating, and studies of hunger during the early modern period. . . . This book’s authors, in pinning down the specifics of cannibalism in each of their case studies, offer scholars the opportunity to sharpen definitions of hunger, of food deprivation, and of food’s myriad meanings in the early modern Atlantic world. By considering cannibalism and topics including the British, African, and Native American Atlantics; the early modern period; imperialism; cooperation; food history; diplomatic networks; and theatre, new answers emerge in response to the question of why and how cannibalism mattered.”

To Feast on Us as Their Prey is part of the Food and Foodways Series at the University of Arkansas Press. In their series editors’ preface, Jennifer Jensen Wallach and Michael Wise write that Herrmann “argues that although much scholarship on the subject has focused on ascertaining whether or not cannibalism took place, answering this question is a far less revealing exercise than endeavoring to understand what stories about the consumption of human flesh reveal about the people who first circulated and interpreted them. Together the contributors examine how various Native American, European, and African peoples defined themselves or were defined by others in relation to this enduring taboo. Throughout the text the idea of hunger is used both as a metaphor and to describe a physical sensation. Hunger to dominate, to explore, to understand, to explain, and to eat under-girded the cross- cultural encounters discussed in this volume, a fact that makes this important collection a vital contribution to the food studies canon.”

The Food and Foodways Series explores historical and contemporary topics in global food studies and is committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research.

Other University of Arkansas Press books to win ASFS awards are Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe, edited by Montserrat Piera (2019); Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives, edited by Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland, and Gabriel R. Valle (2018); and Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama, edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach (2017).