Food & Society: Principles and paradoxes

Amy E. Guptill, Denise A. Copelton & Betsy Lucal, 2013
Polity Press
350 Main street
Malden, MA 021148 USA

Foodways are the patterns that establish "what we eat, as well as how, and why and under what circumstances we eat" 

(Edge 2007) p5.

Food & Identity

• Food is central to both individual and group identity.
• Mark membership in some groups and signal outsider status in others. 
• Unite the people who consume the same foods in similar ways, while serving as a meaning for others to show that they are "different" and (depending on context), better. p.11
• We engage in identity work by learning to like and dislike particular dishes and choosing to consume certain foods but not others. p.18
• Many cultures have a "special esteem for animal flesh", and that it is common to use "meat to reinforce the social ties that bind campmates and kinfolk together." p.6
• Within a culture, particular foods or dishes are constructed as masculine or feminine.
• Men often eat meals prepared by others, and associate these hot dishes with being cared for
• Women often do the work of preparing meals and find ready to eat foods a mark of indulgence (p.4)
• Men & women have different relationships with food, with women reporting greater concern with food and weight.
• While men have increased their share of household labour, women still perform the bulk of housework, including feeding work, which entails planning and provisioning meals as well as preparing and serving them. p.31
• Men and women are rewarded for conforming to gendered foodways and sanctioned for deviation from them. People's perceptions of others' attractiveness, as well as their femininity and masculinity, are affected by what and how much one eats.
• College students rated a video of a woman eating a small salad as significantly more appealing than a video of the same woman eating a sandwich. p.31
• Men are more likely than women to to restrict their food choices to those considered gender-appropriate. p.32
• Of all domestic tasks, men are most likely to cook, and the pressures have resulted in shifting some of the work of cooking to restaurants, takeout meals and supermarket "meal solutions. Domestic outsourcing.
• Single women are significantly less likely than single men to dine at restaurants or eat takeout, while married women are the least likely to do so. p.33
• Just as men can diet in decidedly masculine ways, they can also reinforce gender boundaries through cooking. ... firefighters bring a masculine identity to the performance of traditionally feminine work. Control over the menu, delegation of duties. Peppered with sexualized banter eg. 'chicken breast' = 'chicken tits' and positioning foods to approximate body parts. Exuberant use of profanity. p.34

Food as Spectacle

• choice of restaurant is a reflection on themselves, evidence of their good taste and/or high-status position in society. p.41
• leisure class that treats food as a cultural pastime, something you can follow the way you follow sports or the movies. p.42
• on most nights, more people are watching the Food Network than are watching any single cable news channel.
• About looking more than doing.
• Gender stereotype linking women with domestic, but not professional cooking. p.49
• Contemporary shows create a gap that separates the viewer from the reality of actual cookery.
• Time spent cooking is on the decline, even though food is a growing media realm.
• The most persistent paradox of all: people love to watch cooking, but it does not mean they love to cook or that they even do it at all. p.50
• Cooking shows have eliminated cooking as labour by presenting it as easy and fun—despite the fact that cooking as a professional chef is the antithesis of easy and fun.
• Food porn: based on fantasy rather than reality.
• Generally evoke the unattainable.
• Focusses on sensual close-ups of food and aspirational eating involving fantastical creations that, like in many porn scenarios, are probably never realized in the audience's homes. p.54
• Target audience of food network has shifted from the people who like to cook to those  who like to eat, those whom "hyper exuberant, even fetishized images of cooking" appeal. p.55
• labour must remain invisible for the institution of food entertainment to succeed. p.57

Food Branding and Marketing

• Consumers do not always play a passive, receptive role. p.83
• The modern food marketplace provides consumers with an expansive and heterogenous palette of resources from which to construct individual and collective identities. p. 84

Nutrition & Health

• Information about "healthy" eating is both abundant and contradictory.

Food and Social Change

• Proponents of the food movement imagine a food system in which more growers make a decent living while wisely stewarding natural resources and promoting cultural integrity and social well being. They envision more self-reliant local economies buffered from the booms and busts of the global economy, and they frame discerning eaters as "food citizens" (rather than simply consumers) who recognize their rights to safe, healthful food.
• The idea that people can and should be actively participating in shaping the food system, rather than remaining passive spectators on the sidelines. p.176