Food and Culture

Food and Culture

In putting together this reader, the editors aimed at writing a book "with legs", a book that contributes to the debates around food, and that will offer an collection of what has been written so far interdisciplinary, cross-culturally, and historically about it. At the border of biology and culture, everyone needs to eat and associates food with certain values. In their introduction, the editors remind of the universal importance of food: the process of eating is reproduced everyday several times, food is the foundation of every economy and a central pawn in political strategies of states and households. The editors believe that food is life, and thus life can be studied through food. In this reader, the cultural aspect of food is stressed: food preferences, dislikes, and eating disorders cannot be fully assessed with physical explanations while neglecting the cultural and symbolic dimension. Food marks social differences, food sharing creates solidarity, and food-scarcity damages human communities. Bodily conditions and images, such as being fat or thin, are deeply embedded in gender roles and cultural categories, and symbolize how people define themselves differently through food and appetite. Because of this focus on the cultural dimension of food consumption, anthropology dominates the book despite its interdisciplinary approach. The authors stress the significance of food, because since everybody eats, its meanings concern more people than that of other issues. It has to offer a great variety of meanings since it is interwoven in the practices of everyday life all around the world, and through its diversity in material and preparation. Rather than uniformity, there is a broad range of manners, tastes, a...

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... remarkable collection of different approaches to food. If one might find some of them less appealing, they can be skipped by the reader since there are still enough left. Even one who is not particularly interested in food could find the book useful, since it deals in general with cultural meaning, symbolism, political economy, gender, and consumption. I liked especially the papers that dealt with the roots of thinness, since it is such a prevailing paradigm today in many parts of the world, and so heavily promoted by the media as an almost ahistorical and essential ideal. The book shows how bodily dysfunctions can be approached with cultural terms and further examines how access to food is a marker of power and how food can be used as a tool for manipulation and social control. It also provides a broad range of methodology: from fieldwork to historical approaches.