Forbrug, livstil og medier

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Forbrug, livstil og medier

• Mad, forbrug og livstil

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Introduction - Would you eat that?
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Introduction- Would you eat that?

• This dish combines two highly controversal foods
• - sweetbread (kalvebrissel)
• - foie gras (liver of a crammed goose -
  basically it is a big and fat sick - liver)
• Other controversal food in Western civilization
• - all innards, brain, snails, froglegs, oysters
• - vegetables with pesticides
• - butter (because of cholesterol)
• - Hamburgers, fast food
• - food from other cultures (foul eggs, insects,
  apes, duria fruit
• - food that is not good for the environment

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Overview

• I Food and Culture
• - Three approaches structuralism, culturalism
  and hegemony approach
• II The raw and the cooked
• III Table manners and the civilizing process
• IV Detox etc.

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Literature

• B.Ashely/J.Hollows/S.Jones/B.Taylor, Food and
  Cultural Studies, chapter 1 Food-cultural
  studies three paradigms, Routledge London
  2004.
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, chapter
  IV, group 2 On the Eating of Meat, Use of the
  Knife at Table, On the Use of the Fork at Table,
  Blackwell Oxford 1994.

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I Food and Culture

• Food plays a central role in cultures
• Symbolic
• Material
• Social
• Economic
• behaviour
• Approaches
• Structuralism (in sociology, anthropology)
• Culturalism (social science, cultural studies)
• Hegemony as approach (neo-marxism, Antonio
  Gramsci)
• Everyday life approach (Michel de Certeau)
• Civilisation process (Norbert Elias)
• Ethnographic studies

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I Food and Culture- Structural approach

• Protagonists Mary Douglas, Claude Lévi- Strauss,
  Roland Barthes
• Food and food practices has to be understood as
  the systematic generation of difference and the
  separation of self from other. (p.3, Ashley et
  al.), often binary differences (national
  international food)
• E.g. the piggish Irish, a negative standard
  against which the more disciplined English
  working class defined itselves (see Engels)
• Prominent the system of raw, cooked and rotten
  of Lévi-Strauss

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I Food and culture- structural approach

• Roland Barthes Example of steak and chips an
  edible metaphor for the national family a
  French icon, cross classes
• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, structural system
  of distinctions in relation to social economic
  class, fields and capitals. A young executive
  who knows how to live In cooking , as in
  clothing and furnishing, they manifest the same
  refusal of pretension of excess, the same sense
  of distinction. If its whiskey, we drink
  Chivas, were rather demanding.
• Beer vs. Red wine, sushi vs. Flæskesteg etc.

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I Food and Culture- cultural approach

• Raymond Williams (teashop example)
• No difference between high culture and low
  culture, special emphasis on working class
  culture, people and their practices in the centre
• Example the pub, from feeling like a member
  (working class pub with fixed drinking habits) to
  a consumer (Campari instead of beer)

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I Food and Culture- cultural approach

• David Miller, research on soft-drink (coke) in
  Trinidad ethnic divisions and a system of
  meaning, red sweet drinks (Indians) black sweet
  drink (Afro Americans)
• Michel de Certau, The Practice of Everyday Life,
  Vol. 2 Living Cooking, 1998, microresistances
  in practices, examples are the neighborhood shop
  Robert or on Innumerable Anonymous Women.

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I Food and Culture- the hegemony approach

• Antonio Gramsci, neomarxism, hegemony of a moral
  and intellectual leadership (dominant groups
  legitimize power relations)
• Example Queen Elizabeth visits in Glasgow a
  McDonald restaurant, admits that she watches
  Eastenders (popular soap) and drinks tea with a
  local resident
• one nation, different tastes?

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I Food and Culture- the hegemony approach

• How McDonald became McDonald?
• Why do people eat the Hamburges, accept the
  standarisation, in the first place (in the 30s)
  and now worldwide?
• Burger production functions according the
  principles of rationalization and standarization.
• People are hegemonized into working in this
  scheme, eating according this scheme etc.
• The illusion of the family that eats together,
  helps.
• Ritzer McDonaldization includes standarization
  plus self-rationalization/self-governing.

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II The raw and the cooked

• Claude Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropologist
• Fieldwork in different cultures, e.g. native
  American, comparison of French and Englisch
  cooking, food or the act of cooking as an
  symbolic marker
• Starts with a binary system of
• raw cooked heaven - earth
• nature culture life - death
• endogenous- exogenous
• In the finished system also gender differences
• men roasting
• Women - boiling

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II The raw and the cooked

• Mary Douglas criticises Lévi-Strauss for not
  taking small scale social relations into account,
  context can change the structure
• example how to use the nature culture
  difference to relocate the cooked food in the
  natural
• - pumpkin soup served in the pumpkin
• - the chef decorates the dish with fresh herbs
• - the advertisments places the cheese on the
  grass

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III Table manners and the process of civilization

• Mikael Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,
  Bloomington 1984
• - the carnivalesque banquet in Middle Ages
  (excessive drinking, eating etc.) is reduced to
  few occasions (birthday, wedding), modernity and
  the disciplined body
• Norbert Elias, The civilizing process (1939),
  subtitle sociogenetic and psychogenetic
  investigations

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III Table manners and the civilizing process

• Everyday forms of behaviour in the civilizing
  process, e.g. table manners
• Elias investigated into etiquette books from the
  13th to the 19th century
• Sociological frame in Vol. II State formation
  and Civilization, from feudal society over
  court-society to bourgeois society
• Manners are related to the type of society, often
  born out of the competition between social
  classes, manners allow social distinction
• Tendency in history that manners in bourgeois
  societies tend to be less important than in
  feudal or court societies, because in modern
  societies production and the individual are more
  in the centre (manners private and less
  regulated).

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III Table manners and the civilizing process

• Table manners
• - source for all manners are the emotions and
  affects of shame and embarrassement which are
  attached to bodily functions, the refinement of
  manners and the role of emotions
• - to show hygienecally correct behaviour
• Consumption of meat/ manners of eating meat
• Social difference in consumption secular upper
  class high consumption, lower class almost no
  meat
• Presentation of meat
• - Middle Ages whole animals, carving and
  presentation of animal became a art/craft, to eat
  from the whole animal is pleasurable

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III Table manners and the civilizing process

• 17th century smaller pieces of meat (also
  smaller household units)
• 20th centure whole animals are seen as
  disgusting, no bones or joints! (Chicken
  McNuggets)
• How to use the knife
• Dangerous instrument, lots of emotions connected
  (fear e.g.)
• Middle Ages Do not clean your teeth with a
  knife (p. 104)
• - Eating with a knife normal, but it is a
  problematic situation, pointing with the knife to
  ones own face

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III Table manners and the civilizing process

• 16th century to lift the knife to the mouth is
  forbidden, the knife should be passed in a way
  that it doesnt point to the other person (no
  threat).
• Modern times fish knife, lots of restrictions
  using a knife everything that can be cut
  without a knife, should be cut with a fork
  alone. (p. 106)
• Example China!

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III Table manners and the civilizing process

• Why use the fork?
• Why is it more civilized to eat with a fork?
  (p. 107)
• civilized vs. uncivilized, feeling of distaste
  when people use their hands, lick the fingers,
  touch other food with the unwashed hand etc.
• a change in the economy of dirces and motions
  (p. 107)
• Cas Wouters (Dutch sociologist) in his research
  on etiquette books/cook books he finds a
  dialectic of informalization (back to nature) and
  formalization (sophisticated manners)

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IV Detox etc.

• Detox diets are dietary plans regarded as having
  detoxifying effects. Scientists, dietitians, and
  doctors, while generally judging 'detox diets'
  harmless (unless nutritional deficiency results),
  often dispute the value and need of 'detox diets'
  due to lack of supporting factual evidence.11
• "Detox" diets usually suggest that water,12 or
  fruits and vegetables compose a majority of one's
  food intake. Limiting this to unprocessed (and
  sometimes also non-GM) foods is often advocated.
  Limiting or eliminating alcohol is also a major
  factor, and drinking more water is similarly
  recommended.
• Methods to modify the diet for the purpose of
  detoxification include
• - Eliminating foods such as caffeine, alcohol,
  processed food (including any bread), pre-made or
  canned food, salt, sugar, wheat, red meat, pork,
  fried and deep fried food, yellow cheese, cream,
  butter and margarine, shortening, etc., while
  focusing on pure foods such as raw fruits and
  vegetables, whole grains, legumes, raw nuts and
  seeds, fish, vegetable oils, herbs and herbal
  teas, water, etc.

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IV Detox etc

• - Raw foodism
• - Fasting, including water fasting and juice
  fasting
• - Increased consumption of fish
• - Food combining
• - Calorie restriction
• - Herbal detox
• - Master Cleanse, also known as the lemonade
  diet, terms that refer to the fasting diet
  advocated by Stanley Burroughs13
• Special teas used in combination with another
  detox method. Most detox teas contain ginger,
  milk thistle, licorice, rooibos, black pepper and
  dandelion, ingredients known in folk medicine as
  digestive aids. Other ingredients help to protect
  the liver, alleviate urinary problems and help
  treats stomach ulcers.
• - Some proponents of detox diets emphasize it as
  a lifestyle rather than a diet, 1415. Others
  have touted spiritual and psychological benefits
  of regular detox dieting.16

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IV Detox etc

• Socio-economic differences, who uses Detox?
  Social distinctions
• Gender differences?
• Nature culture is nature here good while
  culture (refined food) is bad?
• Ideas about purity (food, bowel system, mind)
• Other life styles vegetarianism, veganism
• Disorders Anorexia, body images and food