Food, Morals and Meaning.

The article presents an introduction to the book "Food, Morals and Meaning." The book will examine people's need to discipline their desires, their appetites and their pleasures at the table. It first explores the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of natural appetite which had to be curbed. The chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. "Food, Morals and Meaning" will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.