Everyone eats, but rarely do we investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do we love spices, sweets, coffee? How did rice become such a staple food throughout so much of eastern Asia? Everyone Eats examines the social and cultural reasons for our food choices and provides an explanation of the nutritional reasons for why humans eat what they do, resulting in a unique cultural and biological approach to the topic. E. N. Anderson explains the economics of food in the globalization era, food's relationship to religion, medicine, and ethnicity, and offers suggestions on how to end hunger, starvation, and malnutrition. Anderson also brings insight into the historical and scientific underpinnings of our food customs.

This thoroughly updated third edition incorporates the latest food scholarship, including breakthrough findings that have been made in archaeology and nutrition, the new science of food production, and the effects of climate change and pandemics on food supply chains. A perennial classic in the anthropology of food, Everyone Eats feeds our need to understand human ecology by explaining the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment.