Comprehensive, anthropological monographs on food systems are lamentably rare.
Audrey Richards's (1939) Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia still remains
the model for the field; she and an interdisciplinary team examined food
production, preparation, exchange, preferences, symbolism, consumption, and nutritional
consequences. Moore & Vaughan have restudied food systems in the region
where Richards worked (1994), combining history with ethnography in an
analysis that is both broad and richly detailed—a worthy successor to Richards's
work. Taken as a pair, Ikpe's history of food systems in Nigeria (1994) and Anigbo 's
ethnography of commensality among the Igbo (1987) provide similar breadth.