WRIT 128: Writing About Food and Culture

This guide offers some useful starting places for your research on food and culture. Please feel free to contact me for help navigating these resources or finding sources for your individual research topics. I'm happy to work with you on any aspect of the research process.

– Karen Storz, Research & Instruction Librarian

SuperSearch is a great place to start for journal articles, books and almost everything else the library has, in one easy to use interface.

For searching with more focus and precision, try one of the databases recommended on this guide.

SuperSearch can be a great place to get a panoramic view of a topic from a wide variety of sources. Some tips:

• Start with a broad keyword search and scan the results to discover different themes, approaches, and interpretations, e.g., 
  • food justice
• Scan the Subjects that come up in your results list for useful terms to try in new searches.

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• Use the filters to focus your search. For example, limit to books and e-books or scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals, or use the publication date filter to find articles or books published in the last 5 or 10 years.

Specialized encyclopedias, handbooks, companions, and other reference sources can be great places to explore a topic. They can summarize knowledge around a topic, synthesize scholarly discussions, and define key concepts. They often include bibliographies as well, making them a good resource for identifying key books and articles on a topic. Try searching for a topic in one of the following databases to search multiple reference sources at once. 

You can also search or browse individual encyclopedias. Here are some selected titles related to food studies.

Watch this 3-minute video about how choosing and adjusting your topic is an integral part of the research process! (from North Carolina State University Libraries)