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Anthropology Readings:

1. Camp, Charles. 1989. “The Food Event” in American Foodways:


What, When, Why and How We Eat in America.
Main Idea:
• Food events may have food as the main attraction or just a
supplemental attraction
• Food events can tell you about the culture by analyzing
• Instead of just looking at the food and who is eating it is also
important to consider the preparation, who did it, and the food
stuffs or ingredients that went into it, distribution of food
• Keeping track of meals shows importance of the event (eg 23rd
spaghetti dinner)
• Food is intertwined in human business and a social way of
bringing people together etc
• MODEL:
o Meal Organization
 Physical
• Food
• Site
• Cooking process
 Social
• Cooks
• Eaters
o Event Organization
 Responsibility
 Interaction
 Strategy
 Structure
 Occasion
 Relationships
• Potluck Story:
o Community gathers
o Prepared by women, and the food retains the identity of its
preparers
• Box Social:
o Food loses identity of preparer: women
• Armistice Day:
o Food loses identity of preparer, men
o Separation of cooks and eaters
• Conservation Dinner:
o Cooked by men
o Separation of cooks and eaters
2. Weismantel, Mary 1999. “Tasty Meals and Bitter Gifts: Consumption
and Production in the Ecuadorian Andes.” In Changing Food Habits:
Case Studies From Africa, South America and Europe.”
Main Idea:
• Zumbagua land is changing, the average person is poorer and
typically women work on the farm and men go to the city to
make money
• Men bring back wanlla or gifts as they are so called in order to
keep the dignity of the country, as if saying they don’t really
need the gifts even though they do need them to survive
• Poverty leads to changing foods because they can no longer
import the old ones, they rely more heavily on sugars and barley
gruel. The old people act as if they are disappointed on a daily
basis because they don’t like eating the gruel, but the younger
people are used to it, with the poverty they were born in it is now
the norm to eat gruel they know nothing else
• Even though the young men now go to the city and make money,
they are still not considered the wealthy ones because the
wealthy ones are the old ones who own land and work the land
and harvest the land and have a steady home
• The market is a symbol of luxury, when It cannot be afforded
they bring gruel to eat there
• Wanlla can be nice or not nice, usually fathers bring home cheap
stuff but if actually giving a gift family to family it is usually nice
wanlla like bread, which imposes financial harships often times---
adds prestige
• Jayaj means stong bitter and hot—associated with male, mishqui
means sweet and tasty—associated with female

3. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1997. “The Culinary Triangle.” In Food and


Culture: A Reader.
Main Idea:
Cooking raw and rotting
Cooking:
- one of the two modes of the elaborated

- roasting is natural--- raw--unelaborated


- boiling is a sign of culture must use tools etc--rotten--elaborated
-hierarchy of boiled vs roasted: boiled is for family it shows plebeian by
the
conservation of the juices and such during cooking--endo cuisine and
roasting is
for guests or banquets it shows aristocracy by the cooking bring
destruction and
loss to the mear-- exo cuisine
- so the way the meat is cooked shows democratic vs aristocracy,
feminine vs
masculine, culture insights, life vs death
- smoking represents the cooked
- cooking does not only represent culture it represents the necessary
articulation between nature and culture

4. Musharbash, Yasmine. 2004. “Red Bucket for Red Cordial, Green


bucket for the Green Cordial: On the Logic and Logistics of Warlpiri
Birthday Parties.” In Australian Journal of Anthropology
Main Idea:
-birthday parties represent a change from everyday events because
the food is
opposite of what is found on a daily basis
-the b day party food and such is a showing of worth and wealth and
what you can
do to the community who is invited etc
-the birthday individual is not recognized and people do not eat
together so
this food event is not necessarily an excuse to bring community
together
-a symbol of motherhood and youth because the old women make
damper which is an
everyday food while the young women throw birthday parties for their
children
with bright colorful magnificent food
-bush foods are the oldest, damper is next, store bought foods are the
most contemporary
-food is prepared and arrayed with care
-people load up on food and mix it on their plate before redistributing
their portion to their relatives

5. Taking the biscuit: the structure of British Meals by Mary Douglas


and Michael Nicod
Main Idea:
• The British are conservative with their food habits, while
everything changes food systems are stable
• Housewives are held responsible for preparing staple meals of
a known kind where the frame is steady
• In the highly structured parts of their diet, people would be
receptive to improved quality in the traditional foods but in
the less structured parts there would be scope for introducing
completely new kinds of food
• A “food event” is an occasion when food is eaten, without
prejudice as to whether it constitutes a meal or not.
o Some elements can be duplicated but none omitted
• A “structured event” is a social occasion, which is organized
according to rules prescribing time, place, and sequence
actions. Food in a structured event constitutes a meal, while
food in an unstructured even constitutes a snack
• Three kinds of meals:
o A major hot meal at 6pm on week days and early
afternoon on weekends—centralized around potatoes
o A minor meal at 9pm on weekdays and 5 pm on
weekends—centralized around cereals
o An even more minor meal usually biscuits and tea when
men get home from work etc.—centralized around
cereals
• Breakfast is not a meal
• Ceremony is expressed by plate changes and extra utensils
• The sequence of meals is a matter of convenience on a
weekday but on a Sunday there is a match to be seen
between the time and sequence and the rank order
• The difference between a special meal and a common meal is
that the number of trimmings are increased for the special
meal
• One staple, one centerpiece, one liquid dressing, one
trimming in all cases
• First Course:
o Served straight from the cooking vessels on to the plate
o No pattern making
• Second Course:
o More scope for fantasy in the composition
o Served at the table
o Liquid dressing is thicker than that served at the first
course
• Third Course:
o First course in which hot drinks are drunk
o Total segregation of the liquids from solids
• Themes:
o Distinction between hot and cold
o Fresh fruit had no place in the system unless smothered
in cream
• Biscuit:
o A summary form of all courses, capable of standing for
all the sequences
o The nearest thing to a stop signal saying that eating
must come to an end

6. The Abominable Pig by Marvin Harris


Main Idea
• Pig is a large taboo in Israel
• Looking for reasons to make it forbidden:
o Trichinosis and undercooked pork were connected
o It contained more moisture than necessary and too much
superfluous matter
• Mary Douglas said it has a split hood and is non cud chewing
therefore it is out of place and things that are out of place are
dirty
• Harris says there is more to the ban on pork than the pig’s
inability to thrive on grass
o Not well adapted to the climate and ecology of the Middle
East
o A lot costlier to raise
o Pigs have less to offer by way of benefits than ruminants
o This historical experience led to a traditional aversion to
pig meat
• Coon attributed the fall of the Middle Eastern pig to deforestation
and human population increase
• Food laws in Leviticus were mostly codifications of preexisting
traditional food prejudices and avoidances
• Camels were forbidden to be eaten as well
o Camels were the most important possession of the Middle
Eastern desert nomads
• The application of the expanded formula to hare and shaphan did
not result in any dietary restrictions that adversely affected the
balance of nutritional or ecological costs and benefits
• The list is no disservice and appears to be based on a taxonomic
principle that has been somewhat overextended
• The pig aversions in several different Middle East cultures
strongly supports the view that the Israelite ban was a response
to recurrent practical conditions rather than to a set of beliefs
peculiar to one’s religion’s notions about clean and unclean
animals
• Harris thinks pig taboo reflected a basic conflict between the
dense human population crowded into the treeless Nile Valley
and the demands made by the pig for the plant foods that
humans could consume
Children’s Food and Islamic Dietary Restrictions in Xi’an by Maris Boyd
Gillette
Main Idea:
• Food creates a division between the Han (majority of culture) and Hui
(Muslim culture) in Xi’an, China
• The Hui eat qingzhen which has to with a cleanly preparation of the
food, few machines and more made by hand
• Anything that has been made in the vicinity of pork is unacceptable
and filthy, and since this could be anywhere for the Hui they cannot
eat in a Han’s home when they are visitors because the Han’s food is
“polluted”, they also cannot eat at many restaurants
• Products made in a company must have 45% Hui workers and the
Cook must be Hui
• Western civilization represents power, intelligence, success,
modernization, and so now the Hui are starting to purchase Western
made foods, however they do not eat them often, they feed the foods
to their children so that their children might possess these qualities
and they also give the food as a gift
• So while the qingzhen wrapped or unpackaged food represents
everyday food and is eaten by adults, the western packaged food
represents prestige and is eaten by children
• The Western culture food is also a way to connect the Hui and Han
because now they can share a bottle of soda or something along those
lines
• Qingzhen was basically being redefined as that which was not Han,
rather than that which was Muslim

Synesthesia, Memory, and the Taste of Home by David E. Sutton


Main Idea:
• Food is memorable as a sensory
• Synesthesia is defined as “the union of the senses” which seem
to feed off of each other
• Xenitia is described as a condition of estrangement, absence,
death, or of loss of social relatedness, loss of the ethic of care
seen to characterize relations at home
• Food serves as a physical object as a tangible site for memory
which can facilitate a “return to the whole”
• Return to the whole
o Attempted when there is a lack of fit or coherence
between different domains of experience
o Need to somehow recreate things by an argument of
images of some kind in which primary preceptors are
evoked
• Food provided a shock of recognition captured in the metaphor
of the “whole world”, but specifically triggered by memory of
taste and smell
• Food is often experienced in terms of a “burning desire” that is
satiated through a sensory experience evoking a local
knowledge, and evoking a wholeness
• Smells evoke what surrounds them in memory, what has been
metonymically associated with the smell in questions
• Involuntary sensory memory is evoked by food-metaphor
provides images
• Attempted taxonomies of smell seem forced and vague
• Smells can be recognized over a distance of many years and
once recognized one can access or invoke prior information, it is
possible to recognize them, but much more difficult to recall
them
• Smell of decay associated with sin and death

Overture by Marcel Proust


Main Idea:
• Certain foods evoke memories and essences that are not in the
person but become the person, the food transcended the flavors
and becomes a visual memory
• Eating the food made the memory come alive

Race, Place, and Taste by Emily Walmsley


Main Idea:
• Food as a sensory experience can be a means to bind people
together of highlight their differences
• Taste and its interrelated senses can give us significant insights
into the production of cultural identities
• People are more likely to respond to tastes and smells that
identify them with the cultural environment in which he or she
was raised
• Sensory experiences are powerful markers of difference and
belonging and are not fixed as one or the other, their meanings
are shifting, contingent, multiple and diverse
• Disgust is never far from the pleasures of food and eating
• Cuisine in Ecuador is a marker of black people, race remains a
defining feature of social relations
• The food defines who they are, buses stop for street vendors
• Emplacement: sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-
environment
• Food and locations are associated, so are race region and power
• always fresh ingredients
• sazon means flavour or seasoning. A measure of sazon directly
reflects the culinary skill and sensibilities of the person who
cooked it
• people think that the black people are better at preparing the
traditional foods because they are natives: they do not call upon
this knowledge consciously when they cook because it comes
out from deep inside
• thus there is importance of teaching the children how to prepare
the food so they have natural ability
• in one context, the taste and knowledge of Esmeraldan cuisine
is highly symbolic of blackness; in another it serves to
incorporate incomers and their descendants into the
increasingly mixed race local identity of esmeraldanidad
• multiple sensory models co-exist in the city and sensory
knowledge is always capable of adapting and expanding

Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European
Identity by Alison Leitch
• an international consumer movement dedicated to the
protection of “endangered foods”
• lardo (pork fat) nominated as a key example of an “endangered
food”
• In America fat is regarded as poison but in Europe it was a
delicacy
• Slow food has a snail as its logo, and it outlines its dedication to
the politics and pleasures of slowness and its opposition to the
fast life
• Food has a potency as a political symbol particularly in periods
of great economic and social change
• Collective action around food are often motivated by ideas of
social justice within moral economics, rather than more
pragmatic concerns such as hunger or scarcity
• Food and other items of consumption have been central as
cultural symbols in colonial and post-colonial nationalist
struggles
• Deepening concerns in Europe over food and policy are linked to
questions of European identity, indeed with moral economies
and with the imagination of Europe’s future as well as its past
• Slow food is a response
• Lardo was an essential daily source of calorific energy in the
quarry worker’s diet
• Lardo was though to quell thirst as well as hunger and was
appreciated for its coolness on hot summer days
• Lardo was adopted for a cure for any number of health ailments
• Lardo can be seen as the perfect culinary analog of a block of
marble- both materials convey parallel ideas of metamorphosis
• Marble allows the pork fat to breathe while at the same time
containing the curing brine
• the calcium carbonate in the marble is a purificatory medium
which extracts harmful substances from pork fat, including
cholesterol
• lardo takes 6-9 months to make
• slow food started to imagine itself as an international
organization concerned with the global protection of food tastes
• a threat to lardo was copying of it by lardo wholesalers
• lardo is no longer an element in local diets but now a luxury food
element privately patented by a group of people who may be
entitled to sell the recipe
• haute cuisine has become a new metaphorical reference point
for the reappraisal of indicidual, local and national identities
• slowness becomes a metaphor for a politics of place: a
philosophy complexly concerned with the defence of local
cultural heritage etc
• food is no longer a private pleasure

Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The lunch box as ideological state


apparatus
• obentos are boxed lunches of highly crafted elaborations of food
that mothers make for their nursery school children that contain
cultural order and meaning
• obentos should be palatable and pleasant for the child and
appealing and pleasurable for the mother
• the children must consume their entire meal according to school
rituals
• both mother and child are watched, judged, and constructed
• obento as a routine, task, and art form of nursery school culture
are endowed with ideological and gendered meanings that the
state indirectly maniiputlates
• In japan much attention is focused on the obento, investing it
with a significance
• The key element of the obento is appearance, presentation is
critical
• Nothing large is allowed, so the eye is pulled not toward one
totalizing center but away to multiplicity of de-centered parts
• The foods are meant to oppose one another
• Food is fresh or raw or minimally cooked, so natural foods, and
rice is always included
• By producing something from the home, a mother both girds
and goads her child to face what is inevitable in the world that
lies beyond by giving of herself and the home in the form of
labor,
• the obento is a test for the child and if the child succeeds, a
mother is complimented, if the child fails, a mother is blamed
• making the obento is a full time job
• messages:
o the world is constructed very precisely and that the role
of any single Japanese in that world must be carried out
with the same degree of precision
o it is women, not men, who are not only sustaining a child
through food but carrying the ideological support of the
culture that this food embeds

Feeding Lesbigay Families by Christopher Carrington


• the work of preparing and sharing meals creates family
• two distinctions: cooking/cleaning and cooking/shopping
• feeding work can create gender, ethnic, class, and sexual
identities
• planning meals presumes knowledge about food and household
and thinking ahead and preparation techniques and nutrition
• there are hidden forms of work involved in feeding
• little trips to the store constitute the essential core of feeding
• deciding where to shop, monitoring supplies
• price
• the cleanup of the meal is much more routine than the
preparation
• gender is something that one does and it requires continual
effort to reproduce in everyday life
• to violate the gendered expectations of others often leads to
stigma and to challenges to the gender identity
• feeding work in the household constitutes women’s work, even
when men engage in the work
• more affluent families spend less time in preparing meals for
everyday consumption than do the less affluent
In Praise of the Simple Meal: African and European Food Culture
Compared by Gerd Spittler
• in Africa a simple meal that does not vary from day to day is
regarded as perfect
• most Europeans saw little to attract them in these dishes, which
they found insipid and monotonous like an underdeveloped
cuisine—a sign of property
• the quality of the ingredients is a prerequisite for the perfect
dish, but its preparation is just as important
• the perfection of a dish is greater if no costly ingredients are
required
• the dish demonstrates its perfection through its monotonous
daily consumption
• the ingredients of a standard/ simple meal are accessible to all
• preparation of the simple meal is lengthy and laborious
• satisfaction of hunger, healthiness, digestibility, good flavor
• the contrast between everyday and feastday dished qcquires a
different significance in a class society from that attached to it in
a classless society
• simple needs should not be equated with deficit

Food as a Cultural Construction by Anna Meigs


• in New Guinea eating is one way that vital essence is transferred
between objects and organisms
• foods that are polluting violate the boundaries of the underlying
system of categories
• food and eating are understood as means that unite apparently
separate and diverse objects and organisms, both
physiologically and mystically in a single life
• all edibles are prescribed to some category of persons
• absolute rules define a relation between the consumer and a
certain kind of food
• relative rules define a relationship between a consumer, a food,
and a source
• the law of contagion states that things which have once been in
contact retain a permanent trace of this contact
• the absolute rules describe a world in which physical properties
and traits are in flux, a world in which the boundaries between
individuals become blurred
• relative rules embody the their theory of nurture
• all foods with the exception of wild species contain the nu of
their producer, food flourish by virtue of the nu that is in them
• the positive of negative charge attributed to nu in a specific
instance is determined by the relationship of the consumer to
the producer of the nu
• only transfers in one direction are deemed appropriate: from the
senior to the junior generation
• individuals contain only finite amounts of nu
• aging occurs because the senior generation is giving its nu to
the junior
• the ground serves as a transmitter of nu
• where food is understood to be alive not only with its own
contagious properties but also with the vital essence of its
producers and preparers, it plays an important role in the
intellectual construction of the self
• formlessness is the property of thos parts of reality which have
not been neatly classified or which do not occupy a secure,
established place within the system of already established
categories
• pollution is a negative power attributed to areas of confusion,
ambiguity, and disorder within the set of forms or system of
classifications
• that which is prohibited is that which is formless
• if a hua eats food produced by a stranger he is eating a dirty
thing that could result in losses in health and strength
• pollution serves to keep categories separate that are meant to
be separate
• to give a gift is to give part of yourself away
• food in hua thinking contains the self and the feelings of its
producer
The alimentary structures of kinship: food and exchange among the
Baining of Papua New Guinea by Jane Fajans
• The Baining are a society where there is no product or object which is
produced primarily for exchange, and none which when given or
received explicitly transfers to or endows one of the parties with a
value such as prestige
• Exchange derives both its meaning and motivation from its role as an
integral part of processes of social as well as commodity production
and reproduction
• Exchange constructs the individual person in a specific social context
• Food is an apt medium for exchange because it is an agent in creating
and sustaining persons in the most concrete, nurturing sense, and
because it simultaneously produces and reflects social catagories and
symbols
• Food is not only transformed, it is transformative and it acts as an
agent to generate and transform many aspects of social life
• The value acquired by food in its production underlies its
transformative power in the reproductive realm
• The Baining are an inland mountain people, who live in the Gazelle
Peninsula of New Britain Island
• Principal crop is taro
• The population is spread across the land in hamlets which consist of a
single nuclear family of households unrelated to eachother
• There are two steps in the formation of the Baining nuclear family unit:
sexual intercourse and the birth of children
• The spousal relationship and marriage are motivated by either
intercourse or the parents desire to set their children up in and
arrangement for self sufficiency and stability
• Every adult Baining is expected to produce food for themselves
• The qualities which people value in potential spouses are the social
attributes of industriousness and compatibility, not the attributes of
personal or sexual attractiveness
• Being hungry implies not being really fully socialized or socially
incorporated in Baining terms
• An adopted child become their “true child” because they give it food
• Through the symbolism of food-giving, the Baining define a social
process of reproduction parallel to, but distinct from, the natural
process of biological reproduction
• The Baining attribute a value to food production in the socialization of
children
• Adults are food givers and children are food takers
• Principal foodstuffs are those from the garden
• Products of human labor and energy in the form of heat
• Food and work are the means of transforming individuals into social
people, and the ability y to produce such transformation is what gives
food and work
• the ties between the food giver and food taker are those between
socializer and those relatively less socialized
• someone is considered an adult when they can produce their own
livelihood
• considered a parent when they become an agent of socialization
• the class of socializers is a revolving group of those who are
simultaneously productive and reproductive. When people lose these
powers they also begin to lose their status
• giving a betel nut is an action which initiates a social encounter
• the continuity of social life is thus produced through repeated acts of
exchange even if the composition of the network changes over time;
here again, the exchange of food is an important productive activity
• when a person dies, the patterns of exchange that have grown around
him or her are ruptured, their products are destroyed; the productive
process is reversed
• after a death certain individuals may assume food taboos as an
expression of their sorrow over the death of a loved one; while keeping
these taboos they are considered less than fully social
PRELIM 2 READINGS:

The Sweetness of Fat by Elisa J. Sobo:


• In rural Jamaica, amassing wealth and keeping slim have
antisocial connotations
• Because kin share wealth, no one gets rich and because kin feed
each other, no one becomes thin
• Thin individuals who are not sick or poor are seen as mean or
stingy because they do not create and maintain relationships
through gift giving and exchange, they hoard rather than share
• Thinness also indicates a lack of nurturant characteristics
• Notions about health are notions about body ideals which have
social meaning
• The ideal body I plump with vital fluids, and maintaining the flow
of substances through the body is essential for good health
• Bodies serve primarily as vehicles for the expression of the
individual self
• Jamaicans value large size, and they build the body by eating
• Comestibles that do not so much build the body but serve to
make people feel full are called food, they are not seen as
nutritious
• Blood from meat is incorporated into human blood as strength
when eaten
• sinews, another type of blood comes from pale slimy foods
(white blood as opposed to red)
• the belly is full of bags and tubes such as the baby bag and the
urine bag
• bigness tends to ensure reproductive success and survival in
times of scarcity, and plumpness is generally considered
attractive
• plumpness also depend on household conditions, people with
worries cant fat
• fatness is associated with moistness, fertility, kindness,
happiness, vitality, and bodily health in general
• pubescent girls are soon ripe
• a washout (menstrual cycle) once a month is advised for
everyone for health
• store bought snack food is also associated with thinness
• if a woman has many lovers, whoseoever has invested the most
sperm should receive credit for paternity
• a woman who feeds a child after it is born can claim motherhood
because show grows it and a man who spends his money on food
for a child can claim fatherhood
• those who do not reproduce only serve to work
• the ultimate purpose of the individual is to recreate society;
having children expresses a readiness to fulfill obligations
• a buildup of sexual fluids can cause harm
• prostitutes and other women who perform oral sex get fat
• bad shape comes about with use and age, but also when a body
is overworked and so depleted of its stores of blood

Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom by Sidney Mintz


• the taste of freedom and the taste of food are closely linked
• to join stomach to mind is natural
• people use food and eating socially for lots of different purposes
• a building block feature of slave culture was what they got to eat
—their taste in food influenced the tastes of the masters
• those who contributed most of all to the creation of the cuising
were the slaves themselves—they created the Caribbean cuising
• cuisine means:
o what the slaves learned to eat upon their arrival
o what the slaves cooked for themselves
o what slave cooks cooked for the masters of their families
• the dish moqueca embodies qualities of those who make it and
the context in which it is made and served
• In Brazil, food and drink are increasingly prominent as one of the
sensory experiences in this reputedly sensuous place
• In Bahia, the ability to feed and nurture with scant resources is
associated with female values
• Because of the image of the acaraje vendor, people believe that
authentic Bahian food ought to be made by a Baiana. Many
Brazilians outside the region have a hard time believing anyone
else can make the food.
• Food in Bahia is a family affair, discussions around food focus on
who made it, what was served, and who was there to eat it
• New cookbook’s are very much oriented towards a tourist market
and they have full translations in English and more extended
discussions of the ingredients employes. Cookbooks symbolize
several processes of identity building.
• A cuisine which can be represented in a book is alienable
• Sao Joaquim market has different types of foods that co-exist
haphazardly with Candomble artifacts, tropical birs, and soaps
and utensils
• Foods are associated not only with African heritage in general,
but with African religion
• The meanings the foods embody may change in the transition
from place to place
• Food is Bahian because of where and by whom iti is cooked

Coffee: The Bottomless Cup by Lawrence Taylor


• Coffee is a “bottomless cup”
• Coffee is free after the first cup for a practical reason, coffee is
made in large amounts and it will get stale if not dispensed
quickly
• An invitation to dinner is more than a free meal; in addition it is
an obligation to reciprocate
• A food offering holds a particularly important place in
symbolizing the quality of a social relationship
• Coffee stands for a certain type of social relationship in America
which we call neighborship
• Neighborship therefore was a social relationship based on the
proximity of one dwelling to another
• Neighborship is important in every culture, but its form and
meaning will vary greatly
• An invitations means prepare to receive and reciprocate a whole
series of possible exchanges, of which coffee is only the first
• Color categories of coffee
• Coffee in the neighborship context is not only an adult fluid, but
its exchange is between close hut dwellers
• Coffee is the offering most suited for the exchange between
householders
• Coffee stands for the entire range of responsibilities and
exchanges involved in homemaking. The inability to make a
decent cup of coffee therefore implies total failure
• Coffee symbolized the household itself
• In other cultures, different food symbols are important, but in
America, good coffee makes good neighbors

Crafting Grand Cru Chocolates in Contemporary France by Susan J.


Terrio
• Chocolate is transformed and different into many culturally
relevant categories of food
• Chocolates are potent emblems of French culture; French
chocolatiers and tastemakers responded to repeated calls for
European uniformity in various areas by invoking the uniqueness
of their cultural products as exemplified in the specifically French
art of chocolate making
• Skill is transmitted largely through experiential training and work
is organized hierarchically, according to skill and experience,
under the authority of the craftsmand owner in the workshop and
his wife in the boutique
• Family members control daily business operations
• The human labor is embodied in the goods
• In France, chocolate candies are purchased primarily as gifts and
distributed to relatives
• According to the French, Belgian candies are too large, too
sweet, and too full of fillers
• In postindustrial societies such as France, cuisine defines a
critically important area where economic power and cultural
authority intersect
• Demand is driven for the prestige goods associated with it by
reinforcing their rarity and conferring cultural capital on those
who consume them
• The art of chocolate making requires significant cultural work on
the part of consumers to be moved symbolically from the realm
of the standardized, impersonal commodity into the realm of
personalized gift; they are imbued with and are the bearers of
the social identities of their makers and for this reason retain
certain inalienable properties
• The historicities of these goods give them special value for both
use and gift exchange making them authentic and
distinguishable from the “fake” or “inauthentic” chocolate made
from identical materials
• Distinctive regional culinary styles and local foodstuffs are
rediscovered and marketed by taste makers and retailers
• French palates had been deformed by exposure to the
questionable composition of foreign chocolates mass produced
from cheap substitute ingredients
• Knowledge about both the production and consumption of
commodities has technical, mythological and evaluative
components
• While chocolatiers celebrate the transformation from raw to
cooked they also promote chocolate as a substance that fuses
nature and culture
• Chocolate is also dangerous because of its addictive properties
• The recent conjuncture of the rise of a broader middle class
group of French consumers with the means to purchase
expensive handcrafted chocolates as gifts and for their own
consumption, on the one hand, and the appearance of foreign
franchises selling mass-produced candies in settings that
replicate French artisanal boutiques on the other is a unique one
in the history of the craft
• Authenticity is determined by culturally elaborated judgements
involving connoisseurship, taste, and correctness

Hunger, Malnutrition, and Poverty in the Contemporary United States


by Janet M. Fitchen
• Malnutrition and hunger exist in contemporary united states and
they are closely associated with poverty and are currently
growing more prevalent
• The focus of American public attention on “third world hunger”
and the enthusiasm for mass media events to raise money for
famine relief divert attention from hunger and malnutrition at
home
• Low income people are inadvertently transforming their hunger
into malnutrition and also hiding their hunger from public
awareness
• When poor people buy steak, people conclude that they must be
neither very poor nor very hungry, thus the problem of hunger
receives little serious public attention
• The poor, despite their limited economic resources, follow many
dominant American cultural ideas and practices
• There is a strong cultural belief that the poor should eat
differently from other Americans because they are different
• Hunger is unevenly distributed in the populations
o Children—likely to grow up and to repeat the cycle
o The south
o Blacks
• Eating patterns of the poor
o Hunger is culturally defined and invested with meaning
that may outweigh its metabolic or nutritional aspects
• Eating patterns are shaped by the constraints of poverty:
o The poorer household is likely to spend a greater
percentage of its income on food
o Because of the constraints of poverty, the foods purchased
by America’s poor often cost more than the same foods
purchased by more affluent people
o Both purchase and consumption peak immediately after
the paycheck
o Unreliability of income
o Food consumption is unevenly distributed within
households
o Women “sacrificing for the sake of the children”
o A less well balanced diet
o Hunger is cognitive as well as metabolic
o Food is the source or the center of considerable
interpersonal friction in many low income homes
• Eating patterns are shaped by general American culture:
o Low income people express their membership in the
society and their adherence to its dominant values through
many of the same food choices that characterize the rest
of the population
o Poor people want to exercise freedom of choice in the food
selection
o The effect of junk foods on the nutritional status of the
poor is probably worse than it is on the affluent
o Poor people cling to dominant American food preferences
because despite their poverty they are American by culture
if not by riches
o Because the poor have little money, they should eat
rationally on a cost/benefit basis, where costs are
measured only in dollars and benefits solely in terms of
nutrition
o Food is a means by which we are controlled and can
control others

Hunger by Maggie Helwig:


o Anorexia is deliberate starvation and bulimia is self-
induced vomiting
o The nightmare of consumerism acted out in women’s
bodies
o Hunger is a search for reality, for the irreducible need that
lies beyond all imaginary satisfactions
o The statement of protest, of dissatisfaction, statement of
hunger, can finally destroy people
o It was sort of an adolescent rebellion against parental
control, an attempt, particularly, to escape from an
overcontrolling mother
o It cannot be an accident that this happened almost
precisely to coincide with the growth of the consumer
society
o To be skeletally, horribly thin makes one strong statement:
it says I am hungry, I will not participate, this is not real
o It is these women who live through every implication of our
consumption and our hunger, our guilt and ambiguity and
our awful need for something real to fill us

Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval


Women by Caroline Walker Bynum:
• There is a religious significance of food
• Gluttony is a major form of lust, of fasting as the most painful
renunciation, and of eating as the most basic and literal way
of encountering God
• Eve ate the forbidden fruit, salvation comes when Christians
eat their God (communion)
• The possibility of overeating and of giving away food to the
unfortunate was a mark of privilege, of aristocratic or
patrician status
• Voluntary starvation, deliberate and extreme renunciation of
food and drink, seemed to medieval people the most basic
asceticism, requiring the kind of courage and hold foolishness
that marked the saints
• Food practices- fasting and feasting were at the heart of the
Christian tradition
• Food was a central metaphor and symbol in Christian poetry
• Food as a practice was more prominent in the piety of women
than in men; fasting characterized female saints generally
• Food becomes such a pervasive concern that it provides both
a literary and a psychological unity to the woman’s way of
seeing the world
• In medieval Europe, food was not merely a resource women
controlled; it was the resource women controlled—by means
of food, women controlled themselves and their world and
women controlled their bodies by fasting
• In controlling eating and hunger, medieval women were also
controlling sexuality
• Fasting was an excuse for both wives and daughters for
neglecting food preparation and family responsibilities
• Fasting meant suffering which meant redemption
• Woman symbolized the physical part of human nature which
the man symbolized the spiritual or rational
• The flesh of Christ is associated with woman as is humanity as
body associated with woman

The Appetite as Voice by Joan Jacobs Brumberg


• A link exists between the emergence of anorexia nervosa in the
19th century and the cultural predisposition of that era
• Society plays a role in shaping the form of psychological
disorders and that behavior and physical symptoms are related
to cultural symptoms
• Volatile adolescent girls were not reliable, enormous emotional
risks were involved in baring one’s soul to the doctor
• Wasting was in style
• Girls were slaves of their bodily appetites
• Meat avoidance was tied to cultural notions of sexuality and
decorum as well as to medical ideas about the digestive delicacy
of the female stomach
• Appetite was both a sign of sexuality and an indications of lack of
self restraint
• Eating was important because food was an analogue of the self
• Food choice was a form of self expression, made according to
cultural and social ideas as well as physiological requirements
• Food was feared because it was connected to gluttony and to
physical ugliness
• Indulgence in foods that were considered stimulating or
inflammatory served not only as an emblem of unchecked
sensuality but sometimes as a sign of social aggression, women
who ate meat could be regarded as acting out of place
• Denial became a form of moral certitude and refusal of attractive
foods a means for advancing in the moral hierarchy
• Appetite was a barometer of a woman’s moral state. Control of
eating was eminently desirable, if not necessary
• Slimness in women was also a sign of social status
• Women of means were the first to diet to constrain their appetite
and they began to do so before the sexual and fashion
revolutions of the 1920’s and the 1960’s
• A controlled appetite and ill health were twin vehicles to elevated
womanhood
• In order to set themselves apart, middle class daughters chose to
pursue a body configuration that was small, slim, and essentially
decorative

Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture by


Susan Bordo:
• Anorexia is a multidimensional disorder with familial, perceptual,
cognitive, and, possibly biological factors interacting in varying
combinations in different individuals to produce a final common
pathway
• Tyranny of slenderness
• Anorexia’s synchonicity with other contemporary cultural
practices and forms
• The dualist axis, the control axis, and the gender/power axis
• Our bodies are constituted by culture
• The dualist axis:
o The body is experienced as alien
o The body is experienced as confinement and linitation
o The body is the enemy
o The body is locus of all that threatens our attempts at
control
o The only way to win is to go beyond control, to kill of the
body’s spontaneities and to cease to experience our
hungers and desires
o Anorexic women are as obsessed with hunger as they are
with being slim
o Anorexia is not a philosophical attitude; it is a debilitating
affliction
o Thinness represents a triumph of the will over the body,
and the thing body is associated with absolute purity
• The control axis
o Losing weight is the feeling of accomplishment and control
o Fantasies of absolute control
o The dominant experience throughout the illness is of
invulnerability
• The gender/power axis:
o Ninety percent on anorectics are women
o The anorectic is terrified and repelled, not only by the
traditional female domestic role which she associates with
mental lassitude and weakness
o She permeates her experience of her own hunger for food
as insatiable and out of control, that makes her feel that if
she takes just one bite, she will not be able to stop
o Mythology/ideology of the devouring, insatiable female

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