I'm a little phobic about scholarly reading and writing. I generally find it dense, dull and detached. I've resisted writing academic type articles myself because I'm daunted and also because I just don't get what good they can do/what they're for.
However, when I was researching a paper I'm presenting at the SHARP Conference in Minneapolis next week on how the punk rock and anarchist ideals of zines differentiate them from other self-published works, and I was looking for articles that defined punk, I found one called The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine from Ethnology , research for which, "stems from my participant-observation in the Black Cat Café in Seattle from 1993 to 1998. The café was owned and operated by people called 'punk' in their culture for their anarchist philosophy." (That's from footnote #2 in the article.)
Anyway, maybe because the author was a "participant-observer," rather than just the latter. this article was written in a way that really appealed to me. It's really an interesting piece. Here's the full citation in some semblance of Chicago style:
Dylan Clark, "The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine," Ethnology 43, no. 1: 19-31.
If you don't have access, write to me, and I'll send you a pdf.
It gets into really interesting issues about punk and raw, unprocessed food, getting food out of dumpsters, veganism, feminism, and cleanliness.