This volume of essays examines the relationship between eating and crisis, both literal and metaphorical, in American literature, film, television series, the visual arts, various manifestations of popular culture, lifestyles, history and ecology. Among the issues discussed are the ethics and aesthetics of food, and sustenance in times of crisis.

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.

Contents: Tomasz Basiuk: , or, Delicacies Morally Good for You – Ma?gorzata Poks: Voluntary Simplicity and Voluntary Poverty: Alternatives to Consumer Culture – Aneta Dybska: The Battle over Squash and Beans: Food Justice Activism in a Polarized City – Justyna Wierzchowska: Consuming the Artist, Consuming the Image: Marina Abramovi? 2001 MOCA Gala Controversy – Zofia Kolbuszewska: An Abject Guide to America: CSI Lab Autopsy and Stomach Contents as an (Ironic) Index of Interiorizing the Global and the Local – Agata Zarzycka: Unhappy Meals: Fast Food and the Crisis of the Underground in American Goth-themed Fiction and Graphic Novels – Oskar Zasada: Devouring Heroism: An Archetype Crisis in American Pop Culture – Elisabeth A. Frost: Performing Witness: The New Documentary Poetics – Jacek Partyka: Writing of Crisis and Crisis of Writing: Charles Reznikoff’s (1934) – Joseph Kuhn: The Pale Horseman: Crisis in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter – Marta Kova: Indigestible America and the Crisis of Multiculturalism in Aleksandar Hemon’s Fiction – Anna Gilarek: Humanity in Crisis: Man-made Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s and – Dominika Bugno-Narecka: Food (and) War in – Agnieszka Kaczmarek: Eating Itself to Death: The USA as Seen by McCarthy and Twain – Paulina Ambro?y: «Resistance Is the Opposite of Escape»: Still Life as Sustenance in the Poems of Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein – Veronika Hofstätter: «Twas very hard to get down their filthy trash»: Investigating Food and Crisis in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative (1682) – Ma?gorzata Martynuska: Consuming Latinidad: Mexican Foodways in Maria Ripoll’s (2001) – Jerzy Kamionowski: Steam-driven cannibals … claim us flesh eaters,– wish we were»: Black Sustainability through the Voice in African American Poetry on the Middle Passage – Laura Suchostawska: Thoreau and the Indians, or a Crisis of the American Ideals of the Wild and Wilderness – Francesca de Lucia: Marching through Wilderness: Relating to the Environment in an Italian American Perspective – Dominika Ferens: Between Taste and Interest: Reading Asian American Literature in the Age of Food Literacy.