This book encapsulates the socio-cultural meanings of sweets - ritual, pride of craftsmanship, heritage and cultural identity. It also shows how sweets continue to be a part of 'Bengali' diet with a past of acute hunger, starvation, food movements and social welfare programmes for food security.

Portrait

Ishita Dey is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, South Asian University, Delhi. Her research interests are food, labour, and senses. She has co-anchored an art research project on Smells of the city with a focus on Delhi supported by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi and collaborated on an art installation Dawakhana as part of Seema Kohli's solo show Khula Aasman.
She is an editorial board member of the journal Society and Culture in South Asia (Sage), Gastronomica (University of California Press) and has published her work on food in edited volumes, Oxford Compendium to Sugar and Sweets and journals such as Contributions to Indian Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Sense and Society and Gastronomica. She has coedited a book Sustainability of Rights After Globalisation (Sage, 2011) and co-authored a book Beyond Kolkata : The Dystopia of Urban Imagination (Routledge, 2013).