This volume of essays examines the relationship between eating and crisis. The United States’ long-lasting economic and cultural hegemony raises a number of questions: Has America been – literally and metaphorically – eating, appropriating, exploiting, and molding the world in its own image, or has it been eaten, appropriated, and exploited as a (frequently criticized or disdained) source of ideas, ideology, and knowledge? What is the relation between the current ecological crisis and America’s consumerist economy, with its practices of food production and consumption, and its use of natural resources? What is America’s role in the ongoing crisis of modernity? And, if the crisis continues, where are the sources of sustenance?

Justyna Kociatkiewicz, Laura Suchostawska and Dominika Ferens are associate professors at the University of Wroc?aw (Poland). Their fields of interest include contemporary American novel, conspiracy theory and narrative theories; cognitive linguistics and poetics as well as eco-linguistics; and American minority literatures, theories of race, gender and sexuality respectively.