Caribeños at the Table

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196 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 1 fig., 1 table

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6457-6
Published: October 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6456-9
Published: October 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6458-3
Published: September 2021

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Melissa Fuster thinks expansively about the multiple meanings of comida, food, from something as simple as a meal to something as complex as one’s identity. She listens intently to the voices of New York City residents with Cuban, Dominican, or Puerto Rican backgrounds, as well as to those of the nutritionists and health professionals who serve them. She argues with sensitivity that the migrants’ health depends not only on food culture but also on important structural factors that underlie their access to food, employment, and high-quality healthcare.

People in Hispanic Caribbean communities in the United States present high rates of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases, conditions painfully highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both eaters and dietitians may blame these diseases on the shedding of traditional diets in favor of highly processed foods. Or, conversely, they may blame these on the traditional diets of fatty meat, starchy root vegetables, and rice. Applying a much needed intersectional approach, Fuster shows that nutritionists and eaters often misrepresent, and even racialize or pathologize, a cuisine’s healthfulness or unhealthfulness if they overlook the kinds of economic and racial inequities that exist within the global migration experience.

About the Author

Melissa Fuster is associate professor of public health nutrition at Tulane University.

For more information about Melissa Fuster, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Combining perspectives from her training in biology, social sciences, food policy, and nutrition, Fuster challenges conventional wisdom that privileges cultural and socioeconomic factors to explain health inequalities . . . [A] remarkably researched book describing alimentary practices for some of the city’s largest Latinx populations."—Gastronomica

"Fuster has interesting things to say about how dietitians view the traditional diets of the Caribbean—as unhealthy and unsophisticated. . . . And she urges us to think about migrant eating patterns in the broader context of everyone’s eating patterns."—Marion Nestle, Food Politics

"Expands the field of food studies by bringing forward an interdisciplinary approach that combines public health, food policy, anthropology, and sociology focused on the understudied communities of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans in NYC."—Intervenxions

"This book offers a new lens through which practioners can become culturally competent. It would be of great use to anyone studying and working with diet-related health outcomes in migrant communities, particularly undergraduate students studying nutrition, public health, political science, social sciences, and immigration."—NACLA Report

"Fuster expands the field of food studies by bringing forward an interdisciplinary approach that combines public health, food policy, anthropology, and sociology focused on the understudied communities of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans in NYC. . . . A necessary book in Latinx Studies and Caribbean Cultural Studies."Latinex Project

“In this rich and engaging book, Melissa Fuster draws on nutrition science, social science, and food studies to make a significant intervention into the racialization and pathologization of Caribbean–New York foodways, showing how rich and complex they are, as well as how maligned. I am excited to teach Caribeños at the Table, which will appeal to a broad readership in Latinx studies, food studies, nutrition, public health, Caribbean studies, and the social sciences.”—Alyshia Galvez, Lehman College, City University of New York