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Food Culture and Customs RSO22306 Linda van TilburgCollege 1 – Introduction to the course
Overall learning outcome: the student can compare and critically assess different cultural,
social, ethical and political perspectives on the meaning of food in relation to lifestyles.
Week 1: Individual level. Food taboo. Learning outcomes:
- The ability to analyse the different roles and meanings which food taboos can have
Fieldwork is practice
- The ability to synthesize the relation between food taboos, cultural meaning and symbols
All literature and lectures together
Week 2: Kitchen and table. Group level. Learning outcomes:
- The ability to analyse the construction of authenticity in cuisines
Fieldwork is practice
- The ability to evaluate the relation between taste, distinction and social class
All literature and lectures.
Week 3+4: Learning outcomes:
- The ability to analyse social scripts in relation to food styles
Fieldwork is practice
- The ability to evaluate the positive and negative consequences of industrial mass
consumption in comparative and historical perspective
All literature and lectures
Cultural categorisations
Often unseen and not made explicit
Help to structure our lives
We take them for granted
They work automatically
Based on norms and values
Inclusion and exclusion
Food habits = the ways in which a population group chooses, consumes and makes use of available
food in response to social, cultural, health, environmental, and economic pressures.
Cultural components might restrict our options (i.e. insects)
Shared and learned behaviour: it can be modified and unlearned: socialisation
“So many houses, so many recipes”, “You just smell it and know it is right”, “Throwing
food away which lied on the ground”
Social functions of food: Four common patterns:
Recurrent exchange
Mutual assistance and sharing in times of need
Narrowed and reluctant sharing
Non-sharing
Our society?
Expressing kinship and friendship
Expressing prestige and status
Smoothing transition phases in life through rituals
Expressing self-identity
College 2 – Food Taboos: Emotions, Senses, Meaning, Ethics
,What food taboos are and how to deal ethically with them.
About structural mechanisms (why do they do this and why not?)
Food is a moral battleground.
- Shut your mouth and eat!
- You should eat this!
- This is healthy, eat it!
- It is proven that this is healthy!
There are different morals and taboos everywhere: prohibiting, prescribing, including and excluding
(food and people). Also the notice if food is still good to eat is a kind of ethics.
Shame and Blame
Food = emotional battleground
Every disqualification of food as: unhealthy, junk food, healthy food, not possible without showing oral
and moral disgust.
In common parlance, moral transgressions “leave a bad taste in the mouth.”
Immorality elicits the same disgust as disease vectors and bad tastes.
Moral disgust: facial expression when people eat something you think is bad.
Food and emotions
Food is often ‘tabooed’ as emotional
Emotions: purely irrational?
What is rational? Rationality? - Formal and substantial rationality
Again emotions: cognitive, experience based
Examples here: disgust and pleasure
Emotions can have reasons, so not only irrational. Rational elements can be included.
Senses: science often ‘taboos’ food and taste as secondary
“Gallilei: Therefore I think that these tastes, smell, colours, etc. with regard to these objects in
which they appear to reside are nothing more than mere names. They exist only in the
sensitive body (…). I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting
tastes, smells and sounds, etc. except size, shape, quantity and motion.’
Taboo against taste of food –science
Senses
- Primary senses: distance, objective, measurable (seeing, hearing)
- Secondary sense: near, subjective, narrative (taste, touch, smell)
- Primary and secondary: approach to ‘taboo’ emotions, food
- Food, eating: in one bite: see, taste, touch, smell, hear (new: the noise in planes changes your
taste)
- Is seeing distal and touching not? Compare seeing food with looking television: what happens
- Which senses experience disgust the most?
Seeing food causes watering in the mouth, but not with other things.
Taste: 4 meanings
1. Single sense: bitter, salt, sweet, sour, umami (gustatory system, different from touch, eye, ear,
smell = olfactory system)
2. Feature of something (flavour) (mostly smell + touch + taste 1); this is tasteless
There are food element(s) which causes the taste
3. Taste of a person; taboo = they have no taste; this action is tasteless
4. More metaphoric use: taste of the soil
Meanings and values of food
Nutritional (energy, health)
Social
, Cultural/ identity
Ethical
Aethetical (taste)
Not substitutable: one meaning cannot trump the other
Taboos with all these functions
Meaning and food
- Senses, taste and body
- Can we trust our senses, body?
- Deceiving senses: caloric drinks – calories not only in food to chew on.. also in drinks!
- Meaning and time
Fuel eating: time = now, now, now (empty time)
Pleasure eating: time = past, present, future (lived time)
One bite, one gulp during a meal: past and future in the present
Pre-modern vision on human body and taboos
Body = microcosmos = mirror of macrocosmos
Galenius: four elements
1. Air (birds): primarily dry and secondary warm
2. Fire (meat): primarily warm and secondary dry
3. Earth (vegetables): primarily dry and secondary cold
4. Water (fish): primarily cold and secondary wet
- Four body fluids: blood-sanguine (air), black bile-melancholic (earth), yellow bile-choleric (fire)
and phlegm-phlegmatic (water)
Taboo: only one element.
You need a balance between the four elements
Scientific vision on body and taboos
Remnant of earlier phase: Modern science: outside = inside (calory, fat, cholesterol)
Body as machine
Mechanical or as
Computer (input output)
No trust in body, but in measure instruments
Food as fuel
Taboo: non-scientific eating
Phenomenological vision on body and taboos
Lived body (we are body, we do not only have body – denying the body is a machine)
- Emotional experiences
- Bodily, sensory experiences
- Life world
- Agency
- Taboos: inevitable, necessary orientations
- Taboo: ‘scientific eating, food’ – eat because body likes it, not because of what scientists say
Emotions, body, and food (Rozin)
Eating in dilemma, between:
Fear (avoidance) – love for new (omnivore dilemma)
Traditional/safe – boredom
Love for food – excess
Natural – cultural
Maximizing
Balance (optimizing)
Also the simple food choice includes dilemmas
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