SO4025 Lecture 5: Food and Feeding

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SO4025 Lecture 5Food and Feeding

• 25 October, 2005

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Lecture Outline

• The triviality of food?
• Food in anthropology
• Levi-Strauss
• Douglas
• Food in relation to
• Social change
• Group identity
• Dining and manners
• Difference

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Food and Feeding

• Saturated by social meanings
• Mark social boundaries
• Structure everyday life
• Central to subjectivity
• Fundamental to embodiment

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Food as Language

• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Food is a system that reflects the broader
  social/cultural organisation
• Food dichotomies (e.g., raw vs. cooked) are
  linked to cultural dichotomies (e.g., nature vs.
  culture)
• Mary Douglas
• Food categories mark out social boundaries/
  classifications
• Foods which defy classificatory schemes are
  considered polluting
• Food encodes social events
• Food and eating symbolise the social order

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Contemporary Eating Practices

• Shifts in food consumption
• Sugar, salt, fat, fibre (Keane 1997 Davidson et
  al. 1992)
• Unstructured,de-socialised eating
• Demise of the family meal (Mintz 1984, 1985)
• Gastro-anomie (Fischler 1980)
• Implications
• Food has little symbolic meaning?
• Food is irrelevant for social relations?

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The Reality of Eating

• Food carries a variety of symbolic meanings
• Resistance to adult norms (James 1982)
• Pleasure, fun, friendship (Chapman and Maclean
  1993)
• The idealised family meal of the past may be
  more myth than reality
• The notion of a shared daily meal is important in
  many households today

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Dining Out

• Increasingly democratised
• Historically significant
• Suggests mutual tolerance/civility
• Criticised as a rich source of incivility
  (Finkelstein 1989)
• Restaurants are organised to relieve diners of
  the responsibility for active involvement
• Genuine civility requires self-conscious
  engagement
• Experienced as pleasurable even if imperfect
  (Martens and Warde 1997)

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Food and Difference

• Food differentiates us and them e.g.,
  national identity
• Also individual identity e.g., gender
• Women do most of the everyday cooking
• Men prepare special meals
• Entitlements
• Particular foods, especially meat (Bourdieu
  1986 Fiddes 1991)
• Alcohol (Chapman 1990 Gofton 1983)
• Quantities (Ross 1994)
• Dieting/eating disorders

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Lecture Summary

• The social significance of food
• Food in anthropology cultural system/ language
• Contemporary eating practices
• Food and
• identity
• civility
• difference