Food in Society

Economy, Culture, Geography

Peter Atkins, Ian Bowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317835998
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Who can deny the significance of food? It has a central role in our health and pleasure as well as in our economy, politics and culture. Food in Society provides a social science perspective on food systems and demonstrates the rich variety of disciplinary and theoretical contexts of food studies.



While hunger and malnutrition remain a reality in many countries, for some food has become an experience rather than a sustenance. This book addresses the different worldwide understandings of food through thematic chapters and a wide range of material including: description of the political economy of the food chain, from production to the point of sale; analysis of global issues of supply and demand; critical debate of environmental and health aspects of food, including GM food, the role of habits, taboos, age and gender in food consumption.



Each chapter contains a guide to further reading and to websites of relevance to food. Extensively illustrated, this book is essential reading for students of food studies in the social sciences and humanities.

PART I

HORS D’OEUVRE

1

A background to food studies

Cooking is a moral process, transferring raw matter from ‘nature’ to the state of ‘culture’, and thereby taming and domesticating it … Food is therefore ‘civilised’ by cooking, not simply at the level of practice, but at the level of the imagination (Lupton 1996, 2).

Introduction

From the points of view of epistemology (theories of knowledge and method) and general zeitgeist (spirit of a particular time), there have been many influences over the years on the study of food. The following list is merely a sample of recent trends:

• The French Annales school of history, especially in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Fernand Braudel, who was interested in all aspects of ‘material life’ (Forster and Ranum 1979).

• The political economy of food systems and the associated concepts of food filières, food régimes, food networks, and systems of provision. Marxist structuralist writers in particular focused on this in the 1980s and 1990s.

• The ‘cultural turn’ in social science in the 1990s, which unleashed a new series of writings on food, some using the qualitative methodologies of ethnography, and many having a ‘post-modern’ flavour.

• The surge of interest in food amongst the general public in the last 20 years. This has been driven to some extent by the recent increase in exotic foodstuffs available in supermarkets and the number of cooking programmes on the television and cookery books in the shops.

• Recent worries about food safety, which have created a climate of fear and distrust surrounding the activities of commercial food companies and government food regulation. This has been balanced to some extent by the discovery of a number of ‘functional foods’ that are attributed with a health-giving property.

• The connexions between food and the body touch on more than just health. A number of eating problems, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, are associated with the role of food in crises of bodily identity.

• Awareness of hunger and malnutrition in poor countries, and the explanation of famine given by Nobel Prize-winning author Amartya Sen.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate the rich variety of disciplinary and theoretical contexts in which food studies have flourished as a result of these and other intellectual currents.

Historical approaches

Although some historical studies of food are either antiquarian or are intended to illuminate a time-specific setting, many scholars have used food as an evolutionary marker of change over long periods, with the aim of making generalizations about socio-economic behaviour. Burnett (1979) in particular has shown the central role of food in the study of social history, for instance as a major contributor to the changing cost of living. Glennie (1995) prefers to investigate the changing nature of consumption by identifying the various stages in the evolution of the mass market. This must include material considerations of wealth and the technology of production, but studies of the culture of consumption are also important, as are supply-side factors such as the emergence of new retail forms (Lancaster 1995).

Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo (1992) identify a ‘developmentalist’ food literature. In their view this includes some of the writings of Marvin Harris (1986), Stephen Mennell himself, and others such as Sidney Mintz and Jack Goody. The orientation here is towards the explanation of socially and geographically varied patterns of food consumption in terms of their historical evolution in particular contexts of economy and the exercise of power. Thus food avoidances and preferences are not random and beyond rational explanation, but can be elicited from a series of historical events that have left their trace in present-day diets. Mennell’s influential book (1985) is discussed critically by Warde (1997), who sees it as an extension of Norbert Elias’s work on the civilizing process. Mennell’s implicit underpinning is the supply-side commodification of food within a structure of manufacturing and service-sector capitalism. Mintz (1985), on the other hand, works within the framework of World Systems theory, a materialist approach to the study of change initiated by Immanuel Wallerstein. Grew (1999) has edited a collection of papers with a similar, global outlook.

Other historians have looked at the changing role of particular commodities over long periods of time. Salaman’s (1949) study of the potato is justly famous (see also McNeill 1999), along with Mintz (1985, 1999) on sugar. Others have concentrated on the evolution of national diets (Drummond and Wilbraham 1957; Levenstein 1988, 1993), the longrunning Historians’ and Nutritionists’ Seminar being a particularly wideranging project in this regard (Yudkin and McKenzie 1964; Barker, McKenzie and Yudkin 1966; Barker, Oddy and Yudkin 1970; Barker and Yudkin 1971; Oddy and Miller 1976, 1985; Geissler and Oddy 1993; Burnett and Oddy 1993). A particularly encouraging recent development has been the emergence of international societies whose aim is the study of food in a comparative context. The International Commission for Research into European Food History (founded 1989) has been particularly active (Burnett and Oddy 1993; Hartog 1995; Schärer and Fenton 1998; Teuteberg 1992) and new the Association for the Study of Food and Society seeks to achieve the same on a global scale.

Popular enthusiasm for the history of cooking has encouraged extensive publication in this area, along with public events such as the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, which has been organized every year since 1981.

Cultural and sociological approaches

During the twentieth century, many sociologists and anthropologists took an interest in food, from the functionalists to the structuralists. Among the functionalists, in their first flowering, were empiricists who described food habits in terms of the kind of customary and ritualized behaviour that underpins the reproduction of a stable society (Lupton 1996). They identified certain values and norms in eating patterns that are symbolic of broader structures in society as a whole, and argued that what to outsiders may appear to be strange food customs may in fact have a function that helps to bind society together (Goody 1982).

Functionalism emphasizes the utilitarian nature of food and gives primacy to its physical qualities. This whole approach has been criticized for analysing patterns and processes within a static framework, and allowing little room for the explanation or even recognition of the importance of origins, change and conflict. It has also been attacked for the claim that we can identify the functional needs of a social system from its customs and institutional structures without entering into a circular argument (Beardsworth and Keil 1997). Much of the early food-related functionalist work was undertaken by social anthropologists, amongst whom the most prominent were writers such as Audrey Richards and Margaret Mead.

By comparison, structuralism seeks broader and deeper causes and meanings of food habits, especially how ‘taste is culturally shaped and socially controlled’ (Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo 1992). Flavour, texture, nutritional qualities and other biological properties are underplayed in favour of social context. One approach has involved scholars in applying Saussure’s linguistic analysis to an understanding of food culture. In particular, Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) analysed the universality of oppositional meanings of food such as raw, cooked and rotten (his ‘culinary triangle’). He thought that certain attitudes to food are ‘hard wired’ into the human mind and therefore generate universal structures of thought and of action. But Lévi-Strauss has been criticized for making ‘fanciful’ assumptions and generalizations from the myths of tribal peoples, and for failing satisfactorily to elucidate the foodways of advanced societies (Bearsdworth and Keil 1997).

Roland Barthes (1915–80) was one of the most entertaining and insightful of the structuralists. He brought his semiotic eye to bear in interpreting popular food preferences and food in media such as advertising. He saw foods as a system of signs (Barthes 1967, 28). Like any language, diet has rules of exclusion, signifying opposites (such as savoury/sweet), rules of association for how individual dishes and menus should be assembled, and rituals of use. Again, Saussure’s linguistic structuralism was an influence but, unlike Lévi-Strauss, Barthes discusses concepts such as capitalism and imperialism, and his analysis therefore has greater immediacy for western readers. One of Barthes’ lasting contributions was his identification and interpretation of certain ‘mythologies’ that he drew from everyday life in France itself. He analysed soap powder, the Eiffel Tower, the world of wrestling, and many others. A central theme was food and drink, with commentaries on ornamental cookery, steak and chips, and margarine. He wrote of wine as his country’s totem-drink, corresponding to milk for the Dutch or tea for the British, and therefore standing as a national symbol (Barthes 1972). For Barthes, food was central to various aspects of life touching the body and the mind, all of which are susceptible to a unified method of enquiry, a psychosociology (Barthes 1975).

Like Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, Douglas (1975, 1982, 1984, 1998) deciphers the ‘grammar’ of meals, as if they were coded texts to be dismantled into their significant components, but she prefers a ‘thick’ description based upon participant observation. She has been called a structural functionalist because she draws upon elements of both approaches. Her ‘meaning of the meal’ is derived from its role as a structured social event.

The linguistic flavour of much of the early structuralism was later leavened by the political economy project of the Marxist structuralists, who, following influential thinkers such as Louis Althusser, were especially important in the philosophical climate of the 1970s and 1980s. They tended to privilege theoretical over empirical insights and were particularly absorbed with the need to uncover the complex structures and processes of capital accumulation. As one example of this approach, Chapter 3 investigates the concept of food régimes.

Bourdieu (1984) has proved to be one of the most significant theorists of relevance to food studies. Like many other writers, he recognized the need to move away from a reliance upon the production-orientated explanations of society, which had for so long dominated materialism, towards a framework that can accommodate considerations of consumption and lifestyle. However, Bourdieu does still see class as important, and interprets taste and the nature of consumption behaviour as both expressions of class identity and as means of reproducing the class distinctions in society. For him food habits represent a naturalization of ideology (Miller 1995).

Bourdieu has one foot in structural marxism and the other in cultural studies. There are scholars who would prefer to move further, to privilege the latter at the expense of the former. They do so because they believe that individuals in many societies increasingly have freedom of choice over their own consumption decisions, in ways that are not fundamentally constrained either by the production and marketing decisions of food corporations or by loyalty to a class norm. In this view, consumption is becoming more individualized and informal, and less disciplined (Baumann 1988; but see Warde 1994).

Since the 1970s, feminism has added a dimension to food studies that previously was sorely lacking. Feminist writers have analysed the role of women within the household, and especially the fundamental part played by their food preparation tasks in the reproduction of the family (Chapter 23). But they have also addressed the relationship between food and body shape in the construction of female identity within a framework of patriarchal expectations. One wing of feminism even sees dietary items themselves as significant, arguing that killing animals and eating meat are patriarchally inspired activities (Adams 1990).

The cultural turn in social science has affected aspects of food studies in the 1990s. Bell and Valentine (1997) illustrate the various themes well in their book, concentrating mainly on the relationship between food geographies and consumption. They adopt a scale-focused approach and use sites of analysis starting with the body, then moving to the home, the community, the city, the region, the nation and, ultimately, the globe. Their subtitle is ‘we are where we eat’, a geographical modification of the German dictum ‘man ist was man ißt – you are what you eat’. For most social scientists with an interest in food, this cultural s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• PART I HORS D’OEUVRE
• PART II THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FOOD
• PART III GLOBAL AND GEOPOLITICAL FOOD ISSUES
• PART IV A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF FOOD
• PART V FOOD CONSUMPTION SPACES
• PART VI
• Index