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Week 1 – Food Taboos
Food taboo: a deliberate avoidance of food items for reasons other than simple dislike.
- Food taboos are not individual, but shared:
o If you do not eat food because of religion/culture, it is a taboo. If you become a
vegetarian on your own, it does not become a food taboo.
- Most food taboos are unconscious:
o Humans are edible, but it is just not done unconscious
- There are many theories used to make sense of it:
Evolutionary Psychology
- Starts from emotions – mostly disgust
- About developing and adhering to standard
- 3 psychosocial processes that may contribute to taboo formation
o Normative moralisation
When people share an environment, they will form patterned behaviour.
It makes clear what is right to do – sets the standard
E.g. right-handedness predominates in all populations and has
associations with purity, politeness etc.
o Egocentric empathy
= experiencing someone else’s behaviour as one’s own
Imagining a toddler eating their own poo, gives us a feeling of disgust
(even when the toddler might not feel this)
Associated with disgust and fear of getting hurt
Helps people to adhere to the taboo (you don’t want to get sick from something that
has made anyone else sick)
o Socially-mediated conditioning
Seeing experiences of others and sharing that information
If we see others eat food and it doesn’t make them sick, we can assume it’s safe
Helps people to adhere to the taboo
- So, evolutionary mechanisms that develop shared disgust, based on emotions and watching
other people can help to explain how the taboo comes about.
Symbolic Theory
- Understanding symbolic reasons for taboo
- E.g. religious, spiritual, magic, or cultural beliefs
- The meaning that tabooed food has for people
Categories
Food taboos that can be explained by symbolic explanations often concern foods that do not
conform to certain developed categories.
- Exceptions to categories grab our attention
- We find them somewhat scary
- pigs are unclean (fall outside of a category, because of split hoofs)
Limitations of the theory
- Does not explain the link between individual experience and shared belief that food item is
to be tabooed
- Hyman psychology seems to operate in a social vacuum
,So, symbolic theories try to find the symbolic reasons for the taboo, are about cultural meanings and
ideas associated with the food, but do not explain the process of becoming a taboo
Functional Theory
- Tries to understand the function of the taboo
- Explain the taboo by the utility of the food
- Identify direct or indirect benefits to health/environment
Example: meat
Meat can be dangerous to eat, for example when it is not well cooked. The function of a taboo is to
keep us healthy: a direct benefit. An indirect benefit is the promotion of sustainable or efficient use
of resources (e.g. by tabooing fish eating).
Limitations
- Hindsight – trying to find an explanation
- Does not consider the processes that gave shape to the taboo (and perpetuation of it)
So, functionalist theories try to find function of the taboo, look for rational explanations, link
resources and the environment to the taboo, and cannot explain the process of becoming a taboo.
Lecture 1.1 – Introduction
25-10-2021
In this course, food is approached as:
- A symbolic object, cultural ritual, source of identity
- A ‘lens’ on culture, ethics and society
- A tool to think with
Aim: developing the analytical skills to appreciate the cultural, social, and ethical dimensions of food.
Food
- To study food often requires us to cross disciplinary boundaries and to ask inconvenient
questions.
- Food studies require us to think about ethics, politics, history, economics, society, culture,
science all at once
Not all that is edible, is actually food:
- Cultures are selective in what they define as food – edible or inedible?
- We construct binary oppositions
o Us : them
o Same : other
o Inside : outside
o Good : bad
o Culture : nature
Social Functions of Food
- Expresses kinship and friendship
- Expresses status
- Smoothing transitional phases in life through rituals
- Expressing self-identity
- Distinguishes friends from enemies
, - Expresses social boundaries
Four common patterns around the social functions of food:
1. Recurrent exchange
2. Mutual assistance and sharing in times of need
3. Narrowed and reluctant sharing
4. Non-sharing
What is Culture?
Culture: is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
The combination of material objects as well as the ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, that are
passed from generation to generation
- Products
- Rituals and beliefs
- Attitudes
Definitions of Culture
- Rituals and beliefs that mark people as belonging to a particular community
- Products produced by and for people in a particular place and time
- Attitudes and assumptions that shape people’s everyday lives
We are Quick to Make Cultural Categories
- Often unseen, not obvious
- We take them for granted (common sense)
- They work automatically
- Based on values, beliefs and experience
- Help to structure our lives
o Inclusion and exclusion
- Cultural markers
Understanding Culture
- Shared and learned behaviour: it can be modified and unlearned
o Socialisation
- Internalised and partly unconscious
- Always changing
- Culture involves both tradition and change
o The same goes for food habits
Acculturation
- Process of cultural change: culturation (through migration or adaption in a new context)
- Groups and individuals adapt to the norms and values of another culture
- Food is often used as a way to retain some of your own culture
- Acculturation:
o Of individuals acquiring other lifestyles
o Of ethnic groups which immigrate to another society
o Of societies adopting other food habits and styles over centuries
, Food Culture
Norms, practices, attitudes and beliefs, as well as the material items surrounding the production,
distribution, consumption and disposal of food
Collections of values, ideas, practices, preparations, techniques, actors, and everything else that
allows us to make sense of the world of food.
Food Taboo: Evolution, Theory and Practice
Taboos constitute information that is created, transmitted, and held by human minds. When similar
ideas occur in markedly disparate cultures, it is likely that these ideas are a product of either:
1. Features of panhuman psychology
2. Recurrent features of the environment
3. Interaction of 1 and 2.
Learning Goals:
- Why do cultures develop taboos around foods?
- What theories can be used to analyse food taboos?
- Why is meat a good taboo?
Food as a Way to Categorise People
- Food is ‘culture’
- By studying food we can study aspects of our culture
o Food rules
- The strongest food rules = every culture has them
Applications of Taboo
- Distinguishing specific members of a society
- Highlight special events
- Protect human health, animal health
- Regulate emotion
- Reproduction
- Protect resources
- Monopolize resources
- Empathy
- Group cohesion
- Group identity
What is Disgust
- Disgust evolves culturally
- Develops from a system to protect the body from harm to a system to protect the soul from
harm
- Revulsion response: function is to reject offensive-tasting food from the mouth
- Characteristic facial expressions of disgust
o Gaping, nose wrinkling, raising the upper lip, feeling of nausea and a general sense of
revulsion
Disgust versus Distaste
- Distaste relates to dislike
- Distaste has more to do with individual food preferences (preference rather not to eat something)
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