Revealing food consumption through both material and symbolic aspects, and the role that marketplace institutions, discourses and places play in shaping, perpetuating or transforming them, this holistic book reveals how consumer practices of 'the meal', and the attendant meaning making processes which surround them, are shaped.

Preface 1. Introduction: The practice of the meal Part I: Acquisition 2. Authentic Food and the Double Nature of Branding 3. The Supermarket Revisited: Families shopping food 4. Working Your Way Down: Re-balancing Bourdieu's capitals in times of need 5. The Multi-Cultural Food Market: Grocery stores approaching foreign-born consumers in Sweden Part II: Appropriation 6. Appropriation 7. Appropriating Bimby on the Internet: Perspectives on technology mediated meals by a virtual brand community 8. The Digital Virtual Dimension of the Meal 9. Fraught Contexts and Mediated Culinary Practices: Ontological practices and politics Part III: Appreciation 10. Consuming the Family and the Meal: Representations of the family meal in women's magazines over 60 years 11. From Harmony to Disruption and Inability: On the embodiment of mothering and its consumption 12. The Intersection of Family Dinners and High School Schedules in Urban China 13. Meal Deviations: Children's food socialisation and the practice of snacking Part IV: Disposal 14. The Milk in the Sink: Waste, date labeling and food disposal 15. The Quest for the Empty Fridge: Examining consumers' mindful food disposition 16. "Don't Waste the Waste": Dumpster dinners among garbage gourmands 17. Shit Happens: Excrement as fear of waste, and waste of fear 18. Concluding Remarks

Benedetta Cappellini is a lecturer in Marketing at the Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are in food consumption, material culture and family consumption. She has published in Journal of Business Research, The Sociological Review, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Consumer Behaviour and Advances in Consumer Research. Her teaching interests are in consumer behaviour and marketing communication.

David Marshall is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at the University of Edinburgh Business School. His primary research interests include research on food access and availability; consumer food choice and eating rituals; and children's discretionary consumption in relation to food advertising and marketing. He edited Understanding Children as Consumers (2010) and Food Choice and the Consumer (1995) and has published in a number of academic journals including The Sociological Review, Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, International Journal of Advertising and Marketing to Children (Young Consumers), Appetite, Food Quality and Preference, International Journal of Epidemiology, Journal of Human Nutrition.

Elizabeth Parsons is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include: consumer culture, critical marketing, and gender, identity and subjectivity at work. Recent co-edited texts include: Branded Lives: The Production and Consumption of Meaning at Work (Edward Elgar) and Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies (Sage). She is also co-editor of the journal Marketing Theory.