Sarah Elton

Biographic Data

ID76870
NAMESarah Elton
GIVEN NAMESSarah
FAMILY NAMEElton
SIGNATUREELTON S
AFFILIATIONSToronto Metropolitan University
ORCID0000-0003-4784-7092
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS47
TOTAL CITATIONS179
AUTHOR COUNT47
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1998
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX7

  • Making Microbes Explicit

    Mae Hey, Maya Hey et al.ARTICLEGastronomica The Journal of Food…2026

    People in food studies, along with others who like to eat, have long been aware that microbes make our foods tasty—for what is koji, kombucha, wine, dosa or a slice of brie without microorganisms? People also have known that these microscopic organisms spoil our food, but it’s also a process that microbes might consider their bacchanalia. Microorganisms are taste-making and rotting agents and so much more; they are as diverse as they are ubiquito…

  • Finding the Microbes in Food Studies

    Sarah Elton, Mae Hey et al.ARTICLEGastronomica The Journal of Food…2026

    Microbes change the way you understand the world. As scholars of food and food systems, we’ve been centering microbial questions in our research. We’ve argued for making visible the microscopic life that is, for the most part, invisible to the human eye. These are lifeforms that, until recently, have been largely sidelined in academia outside of fields like microbiology and infectious disease.As we explored in the introduction to the first editio…

  • Plants as Part of Our Social Worlds

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLEContexts2025

    Plants produce oxygen, shade, food, medicine, fuel, and so much more. They are intimately bound up in our day-to-day lives. Because plants are so central to building the worlds we liv e in, understanding our relationships with them will help us better understand our multispecies society

  • Palaeoanthropology and the study of pre-adult fossil remains

    Open AccessDebra R Bolter, Noël Cameron et al.ARTICLEAnnals of Human Biology2025Cited by: 2References: 8

    The workshop advanced efforts to understand human evolution, particularly the selective pressures shaping patterns of growth and maturity across a broad range of hominin species

  • Doing More-Than-Human Research: Developing Qualitative Research Methods for a Multispecies World

    Open AccessSarah Elton, Noha Fikry et al.ARTICLEQualitative Inquiry2025References: 50

    Increasingly, qualitative researchers are considering the more-than-humans that Euro-Western social science largely has ignored. But if social science research methods were made for humans, how does one include everything else? In this article, five scholars describe the methodological steps they each have developed. We explore the role of onto-epistemology as an analytical tool to understand relationships between people and food-producing plants…

  • Agencies of intimacy: Fleshing Out Vegetal Politics by Exploring Plant Agency in Gardens and Produce Supply Chains

    Sarah EltonARTICLESocial & Cultural Geography2025Cited by: 1References: 46

  • Canadian beach cohort study: Protocol of a prospective study to assess the burden of recreational water illness

    Open AccessIan Young, Binyam Negussie Desta et al.ARTICLEBMC Public Health2024

    Initial implementation of the study at two Toronto, Ontario, beaches in 2023 confirmed that recruitment is feasible and that a high completion rate (80%) can be achieved for the follow-up survey. While recall bias could be a concern for the self-reported RWI outcomes, we will examine the impact of this bias in a negative control analysis. Study findings will inform future recreational water quality guidelines, policies, and risk communication str…

  • Biomechanics in anthropology

    Open AccessMichael A Berthaume, Sarah EltonARTICLEEvolutionary Anthropology Issues…2024References: 88

    Biomechanics is the set of tools that explain organismal movement and mechanical behavior and links the organism to the physicality of the world. As such, biomechanics can relate behaviors and culture to the physicality of the organism. Scale is critical to biomechanical analyses, as the constitutive equations that matter differ depending on the scale of the question. Within anthropology, biomechanics has had a wide range of applications, from un…

  • Food system resilience tested: The impact of Covid-19 on a major node in North America’s produce supply chains

    Open AccessSarah Elton, Evan Fraser et al.ARTICLECanadian Food Studies / La Revue…2023

    At the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, many warned that the resilience of the global, industrial food system would be tested. We conducted regular interviews in 2020 with key actors at the Ontario Food Terminal, North America’s third largest produce wholesale market, to better understand urban food system resilience in the first year of the Pandemic. How major wholesale marketplaces, such as the Ontario Food Terminal, fare during emergencies …

  • Eating for Two Trillion

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLEContexts2023

    Thinking of the gut microbiome as part of the foodscape reorients us to a food justice perspective on equality and access to human health and flourishing

  • The relational agency of plants in produce supply chains during Covid-19: “Mother nature takes her course”

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLEJournal of Rural Studies2023Cited by: 3References: 31

  • O pós-humanismo convidado ao jantar: Explorando O Potencial De Uma Perspectiva Mais-Que-Humana Em Food Studies

    Open AccessSarah Elton, Janice Alves TrajanoARTICLEAntropolítica - Revista…2023References: 9

    O presente texto visa apresentar uma tradução para o artigo Posthumanism invited to dinner: exploring the potential of a more-than-human perspective in food studies, escrito por Sarah Elton, e publicado originalmente em língua inglesa. A autora tem como propósito, neste ensaio, incentivar pesquisadoras e pesquisadores da área dos estudos da alimentação a incorporar debates pós-humanistas em seus trabalhos, descentrando os humanos e contemplando o…

  • Addressing the growing fossil record of subadult hominins by reaching across disciplines

    Open AccessDebra R Bolter, Noël Cameron et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Anthropology Issues…2023Cited by: 5

    The field of paleoanthropology lacks a coherent methodology to study ontogeny in extinct hominins. During the past two decades in this field, several factors have served as an impetus to better define this subfield of study within human evolution. First is the increased recovery of immature hominin remains that span multiple genera-Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo

  • Is a vegetable garden essential? Toronto gardens as culinary infrastructure

    Sarah Elton, Donald C ColeARTICLEFood Culture & Society2022References: 19

    A recurring debate in cities and in the literature is whether gardening food to eat is essential or recreational. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, some political jurisdictions closed gardens, deeming them non-essential to life – including the province of Ontario where fieldwork for this study was conducted. This paper analyzes mixed methods data generated pre-pandemic to understand the role of urban agriculture in the lives of gardeners in Toron…

  • JHE 50th anniversary: Generosity

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLEJournal of Human Evolution2022References: 7

  • Is the ‘obesity crisis’ really the health crisis of the food system: The ecological determinants of health for food system change

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLECanadian Food Studies / La Revue…2021

    Multilateral organizations and research institutions are increasingly calling for transformation of the industrial food system due to its negative health impacts, its contribution to climate change and the fact that the system fails to provide adequate food to more than 800 million people. A foremost rationale given for food system change is the so-called obesity crisis. This commentary draws from critical weight studies and ecological public hea…

  • Growing Methods

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLEEnvironmental Humanities2021

    A methodology for plant qualitative research is at an early stage of development. While conducting a multispecies ethnography of gardeners and the plants they grow for food in a neighborhood in transition from social housing to a mixed-income community in Toronto, the author wondered, How to account for plants and their agency? What is evidence of vegetal politics? What is a multispecies ethnographer doing when decentering the human in relation t…

  • Intimate ecosystems: The microbiome and the ecological determinants of health

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLECanadian Journal of Public Health2021References: 17

  • Ontogenetic and morphological variation in primate long bones reflects signals of size and behavior

    Open AccessJason A Nadell, Sarah Elton et al.ARTICLEAmerican Journal of Physical…2021Cited by: 5References: 141

    OBJECTIVES: Many primates change their locomotor behavior as they mature from infancy to adulthood. Here we investigate how long bone cross-sectional geometry in Pan, Gorilla, Pongo, Hylobatidae, and Macaca varies in shape and form over ontogeny, including whether specific diaphyseal cross sections exhibit signals of periosteal adaptation or canalization. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Diaphyseal cross sections were analyzed in an ontogenetic series acro…

  • Relational health: Theorizing plants as health-supporting actors

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLESocial Science & Medicine2021Cited by: 8References: 66

  • My New Year's resolution for 2020 is to try harder at sharing data

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLEAmerican Journal of Physical…2020

    Could 2020 be the year when biological anthropologists start to share their data routinely? Turner and Mulligan's (2019) article is an excellent blueprint for how, what, where, and why to share data. Their case, developed in conjunction with a much wider group of scientists, is logical and straightforward to follow. We need to use it as a framework for aligning our discipline—study by study, article by article—with the movement for more open and …

  • Baboon biogeography, divergence, and evolution: Morphological and paleoecological perspectives

    Open AccessSarah Elton, Jason DunnARTICLEJournal of Human Evolution2020Cited by: 6References: 119

  • Reconsidering the retail foodscape from a posthumanist and ecological determinants of health perspective: Wading out of the food swamp

    Open AccessSarah EltonARTICLECritical Public Health2018

    A growing body of literature explores the connection between the retail environment and diet in North America. Scholars have coined the term ‘food swamp’ to describe neighbourhoods that are dominated by retail food outlets selling processed foods. As a metaphor, food swamp evokes the unhealthiness of the food found there, speaking to notions of disease that have been associated with the swamp for centuries. However, considering the discourse of t…

  • Participation, representation, and shared experiences of women scholars in biological anthropology

    Open AccessT R Turner, Robin M Bernstein et al.ARTICLEAmerican Journal of Physical…2018Cited by: 10References: 68

    American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) membership surveys from 1996 and 1998 revealed significant gender disparities in academic status. A 2014 follow‐up survey showed that gender equality had improved, particularly with respect to the number of women in tenure‐stream positions. However, although women comprised 70% of AAPA membership at that time, the percentage of women full professors remained low. Here, we continue to conside…

  • Phylogeny, phylogenetic inference, and cranial evolution in pitheciids and Aotus

    Open AccessAlexander Bjarnason, Christophe Soligo et al.ARTICLEAmerican Journal of Primatology2017

    Pitheciids, one of the major radiations of New World monkeys endemic to South and Central America, are distributed in the Amazon and Orinoco basins, and include Callicebus, Cacajao, Chiropotes, and Pithecia. Molecular phylogenetics strongly support pitheciid monophyly, whereas morphological analyses infer a range of phylogenies including a sister relationship between Aotus and Callicebus. We collected geometric morphometric cranial data from pith…