Van Esterik - Food and Culture

Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik

Margaret Mead

This piece questions attitudes towards food and eating in a worldwhere food is overabundant and we face the ambiguity ofoverindulgence and guilt.

Roland Barthes

Barthes explains how food acts as a system of communicationand provides a body of images that mark eating situations.

Pierre Bourdieu (tr. Richard Nice)

Bourdieu addresses differences between taste of luxury and tasteof necessity through his theory of class distinction.

Claude Lvi-Strauss

This classic structuralist statement, often critiqued, shows how foodpreparation can be analyzed as a triangular semantic fi eld, much likelanguage.

Mary Douglas

Douglas applies structural analysis to the establishment of Jewishdietary rules as a means to develop self-control, distinction, and a senseof belonging based on the construction of holiness.

Marvin Harris

Materialists like Harris reject symbolic and structuralist explanations andexplain food prohibitions based on economic and ecological utility.

Jack Goody

The early industrialization of food processing was made possible byadvancements in preservation, mechanization, marketing, andtransport of food items. These advances also separated urban and ruralsocieties from food manufacturing.

Sidney W. Mintz

Colonialism made high-status sugar produced in the Caribbeaninto a working class staple.

Psyche Williams-Forson

Ethnographic, historical, and literary research reveals not onlycontrolling and damaging stereotypes about African Americans andchicken but also the ways Black women have used chicken as a form ofresistance and community survival.

T.J.M. Holden

Cooking shows featuring male chefs predominate on Japanesetelevision and propagate one-dimensional definitions of masculinitybased on power, authority, and ownership of consumer commodities.

Rebecca Swenson

The programs of The Food Network manifest gender stereotypeswhile also providing an avenue for challenging ideas of male andfemale roles regarding food.

Anne Allison

Japanese mothers, in preparing elaborate lunch-boxes for theirpreschool children, reproduce state ideologies of power.

Carole Counihan

Food-centered life histories portray the voices and perspectivesof traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Coloradowhose food stories reveal differential behaviors and consciousnesswhich promote empowerment.

Christopher Carrington

Because feeding work is complex, laborious, and highly gendered,it is problematic in lesbigay families because a full accounting of itwould destroy illusions of equality and call into question masculinityof gay men who do it and femininity of lesbians who do not.

Rachel Slocum

By applying feminist materialist theory, Slocum analyses theembodiment of race and its manifestations through food practicesand behavior displayed at the farmers market.

Dylan Clark

Punk cuisine based on scavenged, rotten, and/or stolenfood challenges the hierarchy, commodifi cation, toxicity, andenvironmental destruction of the capitalist food system.

Caroline Walker Bynum

Medieval women used food for personal religious expression,including giving food away, exuding foods from their bodies,and undertaking fasts to gain religious and cultural power.

Susan Bordo

Bordo argues that eating disorders and body image issues arecreated through social and media pressures that target allwomen regardless of race or class.