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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This popular text, now in a third edition, offers readers a vivid perspective on the cultural and social complexities of food practices and the current food system. Synthesizing insights from the multidisciplinary field of food studies, this book engages readers’ curiosity by highlighting the seeming paradoxes of food: how food is both individual and social, reveals both distinction and conformity, and, in the contemporary era, seems to come from everywhere but nowhere in particular.
Each chapter begins with an intriguing case study and ends with suggested resources and activities. Chapter topics include identity, restaurants and food media, health, marketing, industrialization, global food, surplus and scarcity, and social change. Updates and enhancements in this edition reflect new scholarly insights into how food is involved in social media, social movements, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout, the book blends concepts and empirical accounts to address the central issues of culture, structure, and social inequality.
Written in a lively, accessible style, this book provides students with an unrivalled and multifaceted introduction to this fascinating aspect of social life.
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Seitenzahl: 535
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Principles and Paradoxes in the Study of Food
Introduction: invitation to the feast
Foodways
The food system
Three principles
Paradoxes: the individual and society
Plan of the book
2 Food and Identity: Fitting In and Standing Out
Introduction: food and identity
Food and national and regional identity
Food and racial-ethnic identity
Food and social class identity
Food and gender identity
Culinary tourism
Conclusion: the complex relationship between foodways and identity
3 Food as Spectacle: The Hard Work of Leisure
Introduction
Fine dining and invisible labor
Food entertainment media
Food porn
Conclusion: spectacle or reality?
4 Nutrition and Health: Good to Eat, Hard to Stomach
Introduction: nutrition and health
Constructing nutrition advice
Marketing health, manufacturing taste
Obesity: epidemic or epic delusion?
Medical definitions of overweight and obesity
Obesity: health risk or hype?
Impacts of the medical model of obesity
Alternatives to the medical model of obesity
Conclusion
5 Branding and Marketing: Governing the Sovereign Consumer
Introduction: the myth of consumer sovereignty
The system of mass consumption
Consumer culture
Brands and branding
Coca-Cola as a food icon
Children and youth
Revolutions in food retailing
Conclusion: manipulated or empowered?
6 Industrialization: The High Costs of Cheap Food
Introduction: the industrial food system
The industrialization of milk
Social costs
Reinforcing social inequality
Environmental costs
Conclusion: why is cheap food so costly?
7 Global Food: From Everywhere and Nowhere
Introduction: international versus global
The colonial division of labor
Decolonization and development
Case study: cocoa in Ghana
The globalization project
Food for global elites
Conclusion: food from everywhere or somewhere?
8 Food Access: Surplus and Scarcity
Introduction: poverty and social exclusion
Defining food insecurity as a social problem
The scarcity fallacy
Anti-hunger efforts in the United States and Canada
Food aid and the Green Revolution
Case study: irrigated rice in the Gambia
An inflection point?
Conclusion: why deprivation amid excess?
9 Food and Social Change: The Incremental Revolution
Introduction: changing food to change society
Community food networks
Alternative food networks at a distance
Alternative identities
Food, justice, and self-determination
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
USDA’s 1992 Food Guide Pyramid was more acceptable to the meat and dairy industr…
Figure 4.2
USDA’s MyPyramid icon, released in 2005, replaced the Food Guide Pyramid
Figure 4.3
USDA’s MyPlate replaced MyPyramid in 2011 and remains the most current graphical …
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Dole was among the first companies to heavily promote a brand for relatively unp…
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
As this graphic from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exp…
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
This map shows deals in which land, in units of 200 hectares or more, has been o…
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
The survey questions used to assess household food security in the United States
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Food & Society
Principles and Paradoxes
3rd Edition
Amy E. Guptill, Denise A. Copelton, and Betsy Lucal
polity
Copyright © Amy E. Guptill, Denise A. Copelton, & Betsy Lucal 2023
The right of Amy E. Guptill, Denise A. Copelton and Betsy Lucal to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2013 by Polity PressSecond edition first published in 2017 by Polity PressThis third edition first published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4225-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934996
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
We heartily thank the people at Polity that we have had the good fortune to work with – Jonathan Skerrett, Emma Longstaff, Karina Jákupsdóttir, Evie Deavall, and Gail Ferguson – as well as several anonymous reviewers. They have all been generous with vital guidance and kind enthusiasm. We are also indebted to many friends, colleagues, mentors, and students who have provided invaluable resources, feedback, and encouragement. They include Joyce Altobelli, Amy Bonn, Amanda Earl, Brian Fletcher, Amy Fuhr, Thomas Happell, Jennifer Haytock, Jennifer LiPira, Paul Loomis, Alison Moss, Jaymeson Moss, Xavier Moss, James Rose, Joan Spade, Marybeth Stalp, Jason R. Titus, Beth Tracton-Bishop, and Rick Welsh. Our thanks to them all.
Amy GuptillThe College at Brockport, State University of New York(SUNY Brockport)
Denise CopeltonThe College at Brockport, State University of New York(SUNY Brockport)
Betsy LucalIndiana University South Bend
1Principles and Paradoxes in the Study of Food
EACH year, all over the United States and around the world, competitors and spectators gather to witness and celebrate the ability of some to quickly consume enormous quantities of a single food. The most famous of these competitions is the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest that typically takes place in Coney Island, New York each July 4 (US Independence Day). In 2009, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut set event, US, and world hot-dog consumption records by eating 68 hot dogs in the allotted time of 10 minutes. He went on to break his own record multiple times, most recently in 2021 when he consumed 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes, earning his fourteenth win at the Nathan’s event. Separate men’s and women’s events have been held since 2011 when Sonya “the Black Widow” Thomas wolfed down 40 hot dogs to nab the women’s title. Thomas held that title until 2014 when Miko Sudo won the event. Sudo would become seven-time champ, boasting a record of 48½ hot dogs in the 2020 event (she did not compete in the 2021 contest). The 2021 women’s champ was Michelle Lesco who consumed 30¾ hot dogs with buns (Pianovich 2021).
Welcome to the world of “competitive eating,” the latest version of the classic pie-eating contest from county fairs. Eating contests have a long history in the United States, dating to at least the 1700s (Vardi 2010). They have a growing fan base in the United States and Japan (Halloran 2004). You can view these events not just on the Food Network, but also on ESPN. You can root for Matt Stonie, who first entered the competitive eating scene at the age of 19; Geoffrey Esper, the 2017 and 2019 Hooters wing-eating champion; and Eric “Badlands” Booker, whose large stature better represents the stereotype of “big” eaters, as they eat as many jalapeño peppers, pancakes, baked beans, or tamales as possible in the allotted time (Major League Eating n.d.).
The International Federation of Competitive Eating (www.majorleagueeating.com) supervises and regulates these events, stressing, above all, that competitions must be safe. Interestingly, the website section on safety does not address the possible risks of this sport for its participants who, among other aspects of their training, imbibe huge quantities of liquids in the days before a competition to stretch their stomachs. As in other sports, these competitors take these risks and provide viewers with an engaging spectacle of a well-developed skill.
Contrast today’s competitive eating with the “racial eating contests” staged by whites for white audiences at the turn of the twentieth century (Vardi 2010: 371). Such events pitted African Americans against one another, requiring them to consume, in most cases, “watermelon, pies, crackers or rice” (Vardi 2010: 376). These contests were presented as “light entertainment” at “club meetings, civil organization forums, and professional conferences” (Vardi 2010: 376). While eating contests were a popular form of entertainment and amusement for audiences across races, these racial eating contests were different, as we can see from white media coverage. According to Itai Vardi, accounts in the white press characterized the consumption by Black contestants as animal-like and/or “likened [them] to mighty gustatory machines” (Vardi 2010: 381). Given that this time period was one of nutritional scarcity for many African Americans (Harris 2011; Warnes 2004; Witt 1999), participation in such contests may have been tempting, despite the potential to reinforce horrible racist stereotypes about Black persons as less than fully human.
While these racial eating contests and today’s competitive eating are similar in form, their social and cultural contexts make them sharply distinct, which raises fundamental questions about how to understand and explain food practices. As Warren Belasco (2002: 13) explains, “what we think about food may have little to do with the actual material properties of the food itself.” Patterns of food production, preparation, and consumption are not universal, natural, or inevitable (Germov and Williams 2004). These patterns are created and continually recreated by individuals’ actions and interactions. At the same time, individuals navigate among existing patterns in the decisions they make, and some have more freedom and influence than others. When we study food, as with any dimension of society, we confront fundamental questions: Where do these patterns come from? How can we discern their meaning? And how do individuals conform to and/or subvert these patterns?
Introduction: invitation to the feast
Welcome to the study of food! You are joining a growing community of students, scholars, and activists who are exploring perennial questions about the human experience through what Winson (1993) calls “the intimate commodity.” Unlike other things we buy, food is taken into our bodies multiple times a day. It is a meaningful and sustained arena of action and interaction, one that connects us to others on deeply significant terms. While scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences have been finding important insights through the study of food for at least a century, food studies as an interconnected field emerged more recently. These connections are still forming, as people with backgrounds as varied as urban planning, literature, sociology, bioethics, cultural studies, feminist history, and global geography discover and create points of connection in food. Food also connects thinkers and writers from colleges and universities to those in other arenas. Food writers often function as public scholars, bridging academic ideas and diverse popular engagements with food. The field is hugely diverse and, obviously, no single text can satisfyingly capture it all.
This text is entitled Food and Society, rather than, say, Food and Culture, which is to say that this book puts insights from disciplines like anthropology, sociology, geography, political economy, and, to a lesser extent, history in the foreground. Anthropologists, with their focus on the role of food in the construction and maintenance of social systems (Ferguson and Zukin 1995), have long been at the forefront of scholarly discussions of food. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1983), for example, demonstrated that social convention, rather than biology, determined what was edible by members of a given society. He also examined how certain foods were designated as suitable either for men or for women, or should only be consumed on holidays or never by children. In introducing the field, we weave together insights like these with more structural ones, ones that focus, for example, on the institutional context of food entertainment (chapter 3) or the persistence of hunger amid food surpluses (chapter 8).
This introductory chapter first discusses foodways and the food system as two key concepts for understanding this field of study. We then discuss three principles that help explain the patterns we present in subsequent chapters. Following that, we outline the notion of paradox: how apparent contradictions in food-related patterns raise key questions about their underlying dynamics. As you will see, these paradoxes stem from the fundamental questions raised in this chapter’s opening case study. The introduction ends with a synopsis of each chapter’s animating paradox and key insights.
Foodways
Foodways* are the patterns that establish “what we eat, as well as how and why and under what circumstances we eat” (Edge 2007: 8). The concept of foodways focuses our attention on food preparation and consumption, as well as on the cultural dimensions of food and eating.
A key element of foodways is what we eat. There is an enormous range of substances that are edible by humans or that can be made edible through techniques of preparation to make them safe and tasty. As Harris (1985: 13) wryly notes, “We can eat and digest everything from rancid mammary gland secretions to fungi to rocks (or cheese, mushrooms, and salt if you prefer euphemisms).” Yet any one of us consumes only a tiny portion of that range. Part of this fact has to do with personal taste; but even individual taste is not a simple matter of determining whether a substance produces a positive or negative sensation in the mouth and on the tongue. Rather, taste is acquired via social learning and depends on both cultural perceptions and individual idiosyncrasies. For example, the taste of coffee may be unpleasant on first drinking it, but many people learn to love coffee as a result of cultural conventions. Humans will also go to great lengths to turn inedible items into palatable ones. For example, the wild cassava eaten in tropical regions of the world is poisonous until it is pounded and soaked for days. Similarly, most olives are inedibly bitter until they undergo a lengthy curing process.
Realizing that even the most basic understandings of food are socially defined raises interesting questions about why we eat the foods we do and how we view them. Consider, for example, the centrality of meat in many US foodways. Many cultures have a “special esteem for animal flesh” and commonly use “meat to reinforce the social ties that bind campmates and kinfolk together” (Harris 1985: 27). More prosaically, restaurants in the southeastern United States often offer meals known as “meat and threes.” Eaters pick a meat – such as fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, or meatloaf – and three vegetable sides – such as coleslaw, greens, pickled beets, mashed potatoes with gravy, cheese grits, applesauce, or macaroni and cheese. Only in this context is macaroni and cheese a “vegetable.” Many of these restaurants accommodate vegetarians by offering a “farmer’s plate” composed of chosen “vegetable” sides. It is not a coincidence that the restaurants call these meals “meat and threes” rather than “vegetables and ones.” For many Americans, eating meat and a couple of “starches” (usually some kind of potato, less commonly rice or pasta) and vegetables is what makes a “meal,” or, more specifically, a “balanced meal.” In many other cultures, cuisines are composed around a staple starch – such as potatoes, rice, or maize – and flavored with meats, vegetables, herbs, and spices, a category that anthropologists summarize as “relish” (Mintz 1985). While the relish is nutritionally crucial, it is the starchy food that makes the meal. The focus on meat may seem natural to people who participate in American and similar foodways, but it reflects a particular cultural history shaped, in part, by the abundant natural resources made available through the European colonization of North America (Cronon 1992).
While the concept of foodways helps draw our attention to the social and cultural context of food-related practices, it is so broad that defining a pattern as part of a foodway does not go very far in explaining why that pattern has emerged and persisted. Different academic traditions emphasize different factors in explaining foodways, and the burgeoning field is constantly producing new insights. Thus, while “foodways” is a useful touchstone concept, it is not the only way to frame our understanding of food. We must also consider the food system, which focuses our attention on other aspects of humans’ relationships with food.
The food system
While the concept of foodways focuses on what we eat and why, we also use another lens to examine the relationships among food, individuals, and society. The concept of a food system − the set of vast, interlinked institutions and processes that transform sunlight, water, and soil into meaning-laden foods − highlights the production, processing, and distribution of food and necessarily turns our attention to the materiality of the food we eat. A system is made up of interdependent parts that create a unified whole. For a system to operate properly, all of its parts must be in place and working (Hesterman 2011). The arrangement of parts influences how the system works; and changes to one part of the system create changes (sometimes unpredictable ones) in other parts of it.
The major purpose of a food system is “to provide nutrition to keep us all alive” (Hesterman 2011: 4). How well it does so depends on each of the parts of the system and their relationship to one another. Stress or strain in one part of the system will be felt in other parts of the system. A breakdown in some aspect of the system will influence the ability of the system as a whole to operate. Of course, we need to keep in mind that, while humans are fundamental to all parts of the system, some things − like weather − are beyond human control.
Historically, food systems were quite small and localized. For a long time, humans produced and processed much of their own food, depending only on their family or clan for what they needed. As technologies advanced and populations grew, food systems became more complex and humans became more interdependent. Some people produced food or items that could be processed into food; other people processed it; still others distributed it. Eventually, most people in industrialized nations ended up far removed from these social processes and now participate in the food system largely as consumers.
Indeed, such changes have been crucial to the development of humans as a species. Hesterman (2011: 9), writing about the United States, puts it this way: “A food system that allows less than 2 percent of our population to feed the rest of us … is exactly the system you want to free the other 98 percent to develop other sectors of our economy, such as manufacturing, health care, social services, the arts and sciences, and education.”
But this arrangement also means that, for most people, the workings of much of the food system are invisible and they may not understand just how complex that system is. As we will show in chapter 6, the industrialization of the food system, which allows for the efficient feeding of vast numbers of people, also has serious costs with respect to the environment, human health, and people’s traditional ways of living. In other words, there are high costs associated with the cheap food this system is able to produce. Similarly, advances in technology have created a global food system that allows wealthy people to enjoy virtually any food any time − while also creating patterns of food scarcity that make it almost impossible for others to acquire adequate food, despite its actual abundance (see chapters 7 and 8).
To get a sense of the array of processes that must come together for a food system to work, consider the following. Let’s start with food production. Many foods are grown from plants. Seeds are planted, often with the help of machines; inputs like water and fertilizers are added; plant growth is monitored and facilitated. The success of this aspect of the process relies on a great deal of knowledge and technology, as well as some amount of luck. When the crop is ready to be harvested, people and machines come together to make that happen. But, once the crop has been picked, unless it is a fruit or vegetable that can be eaten as it is, it must be processed. And even if it can be eaten as is, it still must be distributed and sold for consumption.
Processing is the next step. While some crops are processed only minimally, others “become ingredients for a myriad of processed products” (Hesterman 2011: 5). Pollan (2006) details how the processing of No. 2 field corn results in an incredible range of corn-based food products. Each year in the United States, billions of bushels of No. 2 corn are taken to wet mills and turned into “the building blocks from which companies like General Mills, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola assemble our processed foods” (Pollan 2006: 86). The most valuable product created from the processing of corn is high-fructose corn syrup, which finds its way into hundreds of processed foods, some of which you wouldn’t expect to contain sweetener. The remaining fractions of the corn kernel are turned into non-food items, other sweeteners, corn starch, and so on. As Pollan (2006: 91) notes, today, “you would be hard-pressed to find a … processed food that isn’t made from corn or soybeans,” another versatile food crop.
Once they have been processed into something edible by humans, these food products are still a long way from the individuals who will consume them. They now must be distributed. In the United States, that means traveling an average of 1,500 miles (2,414 km) from where the food was produced to where it will be consumed (Hesterman 2011: 7). Most food is not purchased directly from producers or processers. Rather, it is distributed to grocery stores, restaurants, or other outlets where it is purchased by consumers or perhaps discarded.
And while you might assume that consumption is the end of the line for a food product, there is one more part of the food system to account for: How will we deal with the waste produced? Not just the human waste that results but, “All those parts of our meal that we do not eat − including packaging, wastewater and chemicals from processing, and food that is prepared but not eaten − end up either in a landfill or compost heap to be recycled back into soil” (Hesterman 2011: 7).
As you can see, the production, processing, and distribution of food comprises a complex and wide-ranging set of processes, not all of them under human control. Too much or too little rain can interfere with production. A strike by workers can shut down processing. A blizzard or hurricane can interrupt distribution, as can a trucking company going bankrupt. And a global pandemic can affect multiple elements within a food system, as it did in spring 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down economies worldwide. The food system is, indeed, a complicated and sometimes fragile entity. As two perspectives on the same phenomena, foodways and food systems provide a more complete picture of the relationships between food and society.
Two key examples illustrate the relationship between foodways and the food system: the increased demand for yeast during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 and the Jewish practice of keeping kosher. During the first wave of the pandemic, stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders were enacted in locales throughout the United States and across the world. Those who could work from home were forced to do so, while workers in industries that were completely shut down also found themselves homebound. In mid-April, CNN was reporting on “why everyone’s suddenly baking bread.” The article surmised that “for those locked into a monotonous daily landscape, unable to help or change the crisis outside, bread-making offers the relief of an all-consuming task” (Hu 2020: para. 6). Others reported on the “pandemic-driven renaissance” of home bread making (Mak 2020: para. 1). But this sudden and unpredictable shift in foodways created a spike in demand for yeast, a critical bread-baking ingredient.
Yeast is composed of single-celled fungi that eat the sugar and starch in bread dough and convert these into carbon dioxide gas. As the gas is released, it causes the dough to expand and the bread to rise. Demand for dry yeast, the type used by most home bakers, typically peaks in the November and December holiday-baking season and drops off in January. But the surge in pandemic baking fueled demand, resulting “in as much as a 600 percent increase” over the prior year (Mak 2020: para. 3). By April 2020, it was nearly impossible to find dry packaged yeast in grocery stores or online (Guynn and Tyko 2020; Mak 2020).
The problem was threefold. First, the sudden shift in pandemic foodways led to greater demand. Second, like agricultural products, yeast must be grown. According to an official at Fleischmann’s, one of the three major yeast producers in the United States, it takes ten days “to make the most product in the shortest amount of time. Trying to cut that time results in lower volumes per batch.” And third, the pandemic caused massive supply-chain issues, closing a plant in India that supplies the jars in which active dry yeast is packaged and slowing the delivery of paper packaging (Mak 2020). Thus we see how a sudden change in foodways combined with supply-chain issues within the food system created a worldwide dry yeast shortage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A second example also illustrates the relationship between foodways and the food system. Jewish people who keep kosher do not consider edible material to be food unless it is prepared according to a particular set of practices. Kashrut, the practice of keeping kosher, means, among other things, not mixing meat and dairy in meals; not consuming pork, shellfish, and some birds; and eating only kosher meat. Meat is kosher only if the slaughter of animals to be consumed by observant Jews is overseen and certified by a rabbi to ensure that the act is done in accordance with the rules. Utensils, pots and pans, and other tools used to prepare meats cannot be used to prepare dairy foods unless they have been kashered through prescribed processes of heating, scouring or scalding, infusing or soaking. These rules are subject to debate and interpretation, and they also differ depending on whether one is orthodox or conservative. For example, according to strict orthodox rules, non-stick pans coated with Teflon™ cannot be kashered; conservatives say they can (Stern 2004).
In order to keep kosher, Jewish people need to be part of a food system that can produce, process, and distribute food according to the relevant religious principles. In order to observe these foodways, Jews need access to food products that receive special treatment and handling as they move through the food system. Enjoying a meal out requires finding a restaurant that has adhered to these religious restrictions all the way to the point of consumption.
Having discussed foodways and the food system as complementary perspectives in the study of food, next we profile three explanatory principles that we revisit in subsequent chapters. They capture some of the essential insights of the field and help us integrate an astonishing variety of ideas and findings.
Three principles
Three basic principles underlying the interdisciplinary study of food and society help frame our understanding:
food is both symbolic and material;
food is both individual and social; and
foodways and food systems both reflect and reinforce social inequality.
First, food is both richly symbolic and undeniably material. Consider the common notion of comfort foods, dishes and products consumed specifically for an emotional boost. We tend to think comfort food choices simply reflect idiosyncratic, individual tastes. However, Locher and colleagues (2005: 274) conducted a study with college students and found that “both the social and physiological dimensions of food” help explain food choices. Socially, students’ chosen comfort foods shared three traits: (1) they invoked a feeling of familiarity and of being cared for; (2) students ate them when they needed an emotional boost; and, (3) even though these foods evoked feelings of being cared for, they tended to eat these foods when they were alone. Eating these foods made them feel connected to a group – their family – that was physically absent but made psychologically present. In explaining their choices, students also highlighted the physical attributes of their comfort foods: how soups or ice creams are soft, spooned, and filling, or how crunchy foods enable a stress-relieving physical activity (Locher et al. 2005: 287). Some respondents also emphasized that their comfort foods must be convenient, which reminds us of another important material reality: how many kinds of “junk” foods are widely available and cheap.
The case of comfort foods also highlights a second key principle of food studies: that people’s experiences with food are both individual and social. For example, differences in eating patterns help distinguish social groups from each other, becoming a form of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), the relatively rare and highly valued knowledge, skills, attitudes, and tastes that help define an elite status. As we describe in more detail in chapter 2, knowing and using upper-class table manners – knowing which fork to use for what foods, for example – marks a person as having a particular class status in society. Before the twentieth century, fine dining was largely limited to the elite (McMillan 2012); but, when eating out boomed along with the ranks of the middle class in the 1950s, many had to learn the “bodily management and emotional control” inherent in Victorian-era table manners (Kasson 1991: 182). As another example, gender shapes the choice of comfort foods: men tend to prefer hot meals, while women prefer snack foods (Locher et al. 2005). Researchers explain that men more often eat meals prepared by others, and associate these hot dishes with being cared for. Women, conversely, often do the work of preparing meals, and find ready-to-eat foods a mark of indulgence. As these two examples illustrate, the practices we participate in (or avoid) reveal much about our social location and multiple identities.
The third principle that organizes our approach to understanding food has to do with inequality. Because they stand at the intersection of social forces, foodways and food systems both reflect and shape social inequality, persistent patterns in which some people enjoy more material and cultural privileges than others. As we explain in all of the following chapters, foodways are used both to maintain and to contest inequalities of power and privilege with respect to gender, social class, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and age. As we note in several chapters, even something as prosaic as school lunches reveals profound underlying dimensions of inequality. One vivid example is obento, the Japanese practice of constructing elaborate, visually appealing boxed lunches that young children eat at school. Mothers are expected to prepare them with meticulous care, and students are expected to eat them quickly and in their entirety. In a classic analysis, anthropologist Anne Allison (1991: 195) explains that this almost compulsory practice “situates the producer as a woman and mother, and the consumer, as a child of a mother and a student of a school … Both mother and child are being watched, judged, and constructed.” Power is at work in the obento practice, maintaining women’s unequal burden in child-rearing and families’ subordination to the state. While school lunches in the United States are not as elaborate or scrutinized, chapter 2 explains that US food practices are still highly gendered, and chapters 4, 6, 7, and 8 explore the dynamics of inequality in the food system that help explain what ends up on cafeteria trays or in lunch boxes.
These three principles compose a conceptual framework that organizes our exploration of this wide-ranging and dynamic field. There is no unitary or dominant “theory of food”; but there are some integrating concepts and ideas that help connect different perspectives. The different traditions we draw on in this text emphasize some underlying features over others, but these three principles help us make clear connections among these disparate insights. The chapters parse out topics within food studies that sometimes cohere with and sometimes cross disciplinary traditions. We could have grouped findings from the field in many different ways; we chose these particular topics because they each center on a key compelling question revealed by a paradox, that is, an apparent contradiction. The following section elaborates the notion of paradox in relation to the fundamental questions raised by the opening comparative case study of competitive eating. These questions underlie the specific paradoxes that animate each chapter.
Paradoxes: the individual and society
A paradox is something that is seemingly contradictory but simultaneously true. Throughout this text, we show how the study of food reveals interesting paradoxes. For example, chapter 7 shows that global food comes from everywhere but seemingly nowhere in particular. The social sciences are replete with such paradoxes, revealing often the complex relationships between individuals and society and between agency and structure. Oft quoted is Karl Marx’s famous aphorism from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (2001 [1852]: 7): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Looking beyond the sexist writing conventions of the time, we see that Marx puts his finger on one of the central questions that impels all of social inquiry: to what extent are individuals free to create the conditions of their own lives amid the myriad social and cultural forces they must navigate? Ascertaining the relative influence of the individual and society – of the personal/psychological and the social – has long posed a challenge for sociologists and other students of social life. As we explained above in our discussion of the three basic principles organizing our book, this relationship is important to the study of food and society as well.
In earlier decades, social science was dominated by a structuralist perspective, that is, one that focuses on enduring social patterns and how they shape human behavior. This perspective highlights how food production, processing, preparation, and consumption are organized through institutions, organizations, and groups. For example, sociologists of agriculture employ structural insights to track and explain the “disappearing middle” in the agricultural sectors of the United States and other wealthy countries (Lyson, Stevenson, and Welsh 2008). The largest industrialized farms are growing in number, as are the smaller “boutique” farms in peri-urban regions, while mid-size or “family-scale” farms are shrinking. This trend can be explained structurally in terms of how the largest farms often benefit the most both from agricultural subsidies and relationships with large food manufacturers, and small farms from the growing demand for alternative, nonindustrial foods among relatively well-off urban consumers. In other words, this is an issue that focuses our attention on the food system and how it operates.
In more recent decades, a social constructionist perspective arose, in part out of frustration with structuralism’s tendency to make existing structures seem inevitable and immutable and, consequently, to frame individuals as passive. Social constructionism emphasizes individual agency, reminding us that, as people make choices and behave in particular ways, they help to shape the social world in which they live. When patterns persist, it is because they are continually reproduced by human action. In emphasizing individual agency, the constructionist perspective on food tends to focus on the meanings we attach to our engagement with foodways and how they relate to practices and relationships. As the opening case study vividly illustrates, even practices that seem to have the same form can have vastly different underlying meanings. Similarly, the analysis of comfort foods (Locher et al. 2005) shows that individuals actively construct these practices according to their treasured social relationships. Agency does not mean freedom from social influence; rather, it means navigating and shaping social and cultural landscapes both individually and collectively.
While there have been many scholarly and activist debates that have fallen along structuralist-constructionist lines, most food scholars appreciate how the dialogue between these two perspectives reveals more than each could reveal on its own. We present them here, not as opposed alternatives but as complementary lenses. Empirical research shows that foodways are neither frozen nor fluid, and together food scholars have produced more insight by employing different emphases. For example, consider the differing approaches to the question of why we eat what we do. Connors and colleagues (2001) focus on individuals and find that people have “personal food value systems,” a set of processes they use to make choices about foods they eat. Taste, health, cost, time, and social relationships were the five main values around which these systems revolved, but safety, quality, waste, ethics, symbolism, and variety also played a role. Other scholars emphasize the broader forces that shape, for example, our taste in bread (grainy or white?) and which foods we are most likely to find on the supermarket shelf (see chapter 5).
Clearly, delving into any particular pattern quickly shows both the individual and society as important. For example, consider analyses of vegetarianism in the United States. As more individuals have adopted vegetarian diets, more restaurants have begun to offer vegetarian-friendly options on their menus, which in turn shapes the choices patrons can make about what to eat (Maurer 2002). Researchers also note that some vegetarians participate in vegetarian organizations or otherwise identify themselves as activists within a social movement, while others see avoiding meat as simply a personal choice (Maurer 2002). Mainstream food writing often promotes regular meatless meals as boons to health for meat eaters (see chapter 4), and so vegetarianism is not as much of a departure from North American or European dietary conventions as it once was. This mainstreaming of vegetarianism may be seen as a boon or a detriment to the movement. Clearly, then, vegetarians make vegetarian foodways, but not out of whole cloth. And vegetarian foodways are influenced by the food system itself, which affects the variety of vegetarian foods that is available at a given time and in a given place.
The chapters that follow explore insights about foodways and food systems, with each chapter title suggesting a paradox that such insights reveal. Each chapter opens with a case study that illustrates its animating paradox, and each of these paradoxes relates, in some way, to the fundamental question about how individual agency works within these shifting social structural realities. Thus the paradoxes should not be seen as problems to be solved but rather as points of ongoing, productive dialogue. Celebrating a paradox as a point of departure is wholly in keeping with the adventurous spirit of food studies, a field that bridges the material and the symbolic, the intimate and the global, the sacred and the profane, the eternal and the ephemeral.
Plan of the book
In the rest of this book, we examine many dimensions of foodways and food systems, using the key explanatory principles to maintain some common orienting threads. Each chapter also offers suggestions for further reading and exploration.
In chapter 2, “Food and Identity: Fitting In and Standing Out,” we examine how food is central to both individual and group identity. Foodways mark membership in some groups and signal outsider status in others. They unite the people who consume the same foods in similar ways, while serving as a means for others to show that they are “different” and, depending on the context, better. We show how food is implicated in the social construction of identity, including national and regional, racial-ethnic, class, and gender identities. These patterns, which change over time, reproduce cultural beliefs about appropriate behavior for people based on group affiliation.
Chapter 3, “Food as Spectacle: The Hard Work of Leisure,” shows these patterns in another context, the production of food-based leisure experiences that require an enormous amount of work – most of it invisible to those who consume it, literally or figuratively. The paradox examined in this chapter is the hard work done by some people to provide spectacular leisure experiences for others. The amount of work by restaurant employees that goes into the production of a fine-dining experience for customers is remarkable. We also explore how the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted restaurant work and altered the dining-out experience. Finally, we examine food entertainment media as another realm in which food functions as spectacle. We consider the case of “food porn,” a kind of media that allows viewers to experience the pleasures associated with food in a vicarious manner. Viewers can watch or read about others doing the work needed to prepare a complex recipe and enjoy the results on the screen (television or computer) or page.
Chapter 4 explores “Nutrition and Health: Good to Eat, Hard to Stomach,” taking up the paradox that pairs US government nutrition guidelines and food marketing with the food choices made by consumers. Despite fairly widespread agreement over the past few decades among academic nutrition professionals about what constitutes a “healthy diet,” consumers often report confusion about what is and is not healthy and experience difficulty following a “healthy diet.” This is because information about “healthy” eating is both abundant and contradictory. We explore how lobbying and marketing by the food industry and the dual and conflicting mandate of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to protect US agriculture and simultaneously offer nutritional advice to the American public produces confusing nutrition messages. We end by discussing another health issue linked with diet – the so-called “obesity epidemic.” We consider the consequences of the dominant medicalized view that links overweight and obesity with poor health, and explore alternative framings of weight as a form of bodily diversity.
Chapter 5, entitled “Branding and Marketing: Governing the Sovereign Consumer,” examines these interactive processes by going beyond the “enchanting myth of consumer sovereignty” (Korczynski and Ott 2004: 575) to explore the complex interplay of corporate influence and consumer choice when foodways are embedded in a broader consumer culture. We explain that brands are symbols; they are the legal property of corporations, but also part of the broader cultural lexicon where consumers imbue them with other meanings. The significance of branding is especially vivid when we examine the impact of consumer culture on children, so the chapter considers those questions as well. Later, we describe major institutions and shifts in food retailing, starting with the rise of the self-service supermarket as a social institution that embodies the paradox of consumer sovereignty within a rigorously monitored and controlled environment. The recent proliferation of discount retailers raises new questions about marketing and consumer choice.
The vast production system that supplies supermarkets and other mass outlets is the subject of chapter 6, “Industrialization: The High Costs of Cheap Food.” It begins with the urgent issue of antibiotic resistance and how it reflects the “systemness” of food. It then describes the cultural and material process of industrialization with reference to the case of fluid milk. In the latter part of the chapter, we explain why critics of industrial food characterize its “cheap” food as distressingly costly. The chapter explains how industrialization intersected with long-standing social inequalities, describing how racism fueled the dispossession of Black farmers and other farmers of color. At the same time, the mechanical, chemical, and biotechnology revolutions in agriculture produced new environmental risks as they increased inequality in the food system.
Chapter 7, “Global Food: From Everywhere and Nowhere,” builds on the industrialization narrative to explain global food connections while highlighting the role of corporations in managing transnational supply chains. Privileged eaters in the current global food system consume foods from around the world whose origins are surprisingly murky. The chapter explains this paradox by examining the food connections between the global North and the global South through three broad eras: the modern colonial period, the development decades, and globalization. In the current era, specialty vegetables, sushi, and quinoa illustrate the stark global inequalities that shape the global food system. Throughout, we ask how the costs and benefits of the system are distributed and why.
Chapter 8, “Food Access: Surplus and Scarcity,” examines inequality of food access through a critical lens. It begins with a look at the UN World Food Programme, a program that won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize but nevertheless reflects the failure of the international system to prevent food crises. The chapter then explains the paradoxical connections between food surplus and food scarcity in national and global food systems. How food scarcity problems are defined is also important, as the notable semantic differences between “hunger” and “food insecurity” reveal a contested terrain. What can we define as food deprivation and how might we address it? Last, we review the vast array of creative, passionate anti-hunger efforts and how they were strained by the COVID-19 crisis.
The final chapter, “Food and Social Change: The Incremental Revolution,” describes the burgeoning food movements and the diverse ways in which individuals and organizations are promoting greater self-determination through food, both face to face and across geographic and social differences. It examines how activists have looked to food provisioning and trade to survive systems of oppression, gain power over their day-to-day lives, and promote mutually supportive ties. While each individual project can seem modest in scope and impact, we encourage readers to consider their significance to individual and collective identity, social ties, and democratization. We close this volume with the concepts of food justice and food democracy because, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1969 [1845]: para. 11) famously put it, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
We hope that reading this book is just one moment in a lifelong engagement with the rich insights from food studies. In studying food, you are joining this vibrant intellectual community, bringing your own unique experiences and insights like a bottle of wine to a dinner party. None of the research presented here is the final word on its topic; you will have something to add. As a reader, you are not a member of an audience but rather a guest at a table. Bon appétit!
Further reading
Le Billon, Karen. 2012. French Kids Eat Everything. New York: HarperCollins/Morrow. Writing as a parent and academic, Le Billon argues that differences between US and French foodways can help explain the significant difference between obesity rates in the two countries.
Lorr, Michael. 2020. The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket. New York: Avery. Lorr provides a fascinating and disturbing portrait of the American supermarket, uncovering details about the workers spread throughout the supply chain whose labor makes the modern supermarket and the products that fill its shelves possible.
McMillan, Tracie. 2012. The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. New York: Scribner. McMillan, a journalist, provides insights into the relationship between foodways and the food system in the United States. Her focus is on the difficulties of eating well in that context.
Pollan, Michael. 2009. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin. While encouraging individuals to exercise agency in their choices about what to eat, Pollan’s follow-up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma also examines a number of structural constraints on those choices, such as how they are shaped by food science and the industrialization of eating.
Twitty, Michael W. 2017. The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South. New York: Amistad. This award-winning book, both memoir and history, confronts the racial politics of southern foodways and both the pain and joy tied to the African-American experience. In doing so Twitty conveys deeply how food both reflects and shapes our most personal experiences and social locations.
Further exploration
IN CLASS: Describe the best meal you have ever eaten. What made it the best meal ever? What did you eat? With whom did you eat it? Was it a special occasion? Are the foods you ate likely to be foods with which your classmates are familiar? Why or why not?
FOR DISCUSSION: Watch a film that features a ritual meal of some kind (e.g.,
When Do We Eat?
,
Soul Food
,
What’s Cooking?
,
Babette’s Feast
,
The Wedding Banquet
). Discuss what is eaten, how and when it is eaten, who shares the meal, and where it is eaten. Based on what you see, how strict are the rules for what foods are to be consumed, how they are to be prepared, who participates in the meal, and how the meal is structured?
ONLINE: Visit the International Federation of Competitive Eating website (
www.majorleagueeating.com
) and look at the eater profiles and list of records posted there. What patterns do you see in the profiles? What records are most surprising?
*
Items in bold appear in the glossary.
2Food and Identity: Fitting In and Standing Out
ON August 19, 2021, Gene Weingarten, humor columnist with the Washington Post, published an essay entitled, “You Can’t Make Me Eat These Foods.” In his tongue-in-cheek commentary he declared himself a “food snob” and someone with “an unusually sophisticated palate, broadly eclectic tastes supplemented by the lack of an ‘ewww’ factor, and a huge appreciation for culinary inventiveness,” which he claimed “sets [him] apart from, and above, lesser persons”(Weingarten 2021: para. 1). In the article, which Weingarten claimed he wrote as a comedic rejoinder to criticisms from his editor that Weingarten had an immature palate (demonstrated by his whining “like a toddler” about certain foods), he listed the following foods that he will not eat: Old Bay Seasoning, balsamic vinegar, hazelnut, Indian food, anchovies, blue cheese, pizza or hot dogs with more than two toppings, cooled green peppers on anything, garbage sushi, and sweet pickles. Although readers can find much to criticize in Weingarten’s list, it was the inclusion of Indian food that sparked a media controversy. Weingarten (2021: para. 6) wrote that Indian was “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based entirely on one spice. If you like Indian curries, yay, you like Indian food! If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle.”
Indian and Indian-American readers were especially incensed, and a Twitter firestorm erupted. Padma Lakshmi, Indian-American author and host of food-themed television shows Top Chef and Taste the Nation, tweeted, “What in the white nonsense is this?” and “Is this really the type of colonizer ‘hot take’ the @washingtonpost wants to publish in 2021 – sardonically characterizing curry as ‘one spice’ and that all of India’s cuisine is based on it?” (@PadmaLakshmi, August 23, 2001). Indian food enthusiasts, food writers, and academics joined the growing chorus of criticisms and schooled Weingarten on the colonialist history of curry and the geographic and cultural diversity of India and Indian cuisine. As one writer explained in the Indian Times, “There is no such thing as ‘curry’ in India. The blanket term was coined by British colonizers, possibly as an Anglicization of the Tamil word ‘kari,’ which translates directly as ‘a cooked vegetable or meat’” (Subramaniam 2021: para. 1).
Weingarten’s own tweets in response to the media backlash didn’t help matters. In one tweet that has since been deleted, he wrote: “Took a lot of blowback for my dislike of Indian food in today’s column so tonight I went to Rasika, DC’s best Indian restaurant. Food was beautifully prepared yet still swimming with the herbs & spices I most despise. I take nothing back” (Fieldstadt 2021: para. 14).
Within days, the Washington Post removed one sentence from the online version of Weingarten’s piece and posted a correction: “A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Indian cuisine is based on one spice, curry, and that Indian food is made up only of curries, types of stew. In fact, India’s vastly diverse cuisines use many spice blends and include many other types of dishes” (Weingarten 2021: correction).
Lakshmi penned a full response to Weingarten’s article, also published in the Washington Post, where she outlined the bigotry and racism inherent in Weingarten’s statements:
For generations, people have slung racist insults about the “stinky” foods of immigrants: Italians with garlic, Irish with cabbage, Koreans with kimchi and, yes, South Asians with curry. It was never funny. On the heels of a pandemic that particularly devastated India and a cultural reckoning with racist structures in the United States, mischaracterizing and denigrating the food of 1.3 billion Indians is not a good look. (Lakshmi 2021: paras 7–8)
Weingarten’s disparaging remarks and the media backlash that followed illustrate how closely food is linked to both individual and national identity. Foodways mark membership in particular nations, geographic regions, racial-ethnic groups, social classes, and genders.
Culinary distinctions sustain group identity and foster a sense of personal belonging, while simultaneously marking as outsiders individuals and groups whose foodways differ. On one hand, Weingarten’s sampling of Indian cuisine demonstrates an adventurous spirit and willingness to cross cultural thresholds by sampling food associated with a cultural “other.” But, as Weingarten’s repeated negative characterization of Indian cuisine demonstrates, the incorporation of foodways often occurs on the culinary terms set by the cultural novice. Weingarten’s sweeping negative generalizations about the vast cuisine of all of India reinforces both cultural difference and European culinary standards as the ethnocentric benchmark against which other cuisines are judged.
Introduction: food and identity
Individuals creatively define who they are and craft a social identity, both in terms of idiosyncratic and personal characteristics and relative to the various social groups to which they belong (Howard 2000). What foods we eat, how and when we prepare, serve, and consume them, are all types of identity work – activity through which we define for ourselves and others who we are socially and culturally (Caplan 1997; Howard 2000; Lupton 1996). Consumption choices, such as clothing, transportation, and housing, powerfully indicate the type of person we are and how we want others to see us. Whether we wear designer or second-hand clothing, drive a Mercedes or ride a bicycle, or live in a luxury townhome or public housing complex, each of these class-based status symbols offers clues to the various social statuses or positions we occupy in society. A symbol is something that stands for something else. As such, symbols carry shared meanings within particular cultures. Status symbols, then, are objects that signify one’s position (or social status) in society. While we have some choice in what clothes we wear, modes of transport we use, and places we live in, these “choices” are also clearly structured by the larger opportunity structure in which we are located. Poor persons will be hard-pressed to realize the “choice” to drive a Mercedes, for example, just as their “choice” to eat fresh fruits and vegetables out of season may be constrained (see chapter 8). The relationship between food and identity is thus a good example of the complex interplay of individual and society noted in chapter 1.
