How Culture, Gender, Religion, Social Class, and Voyeurism Together Shape Individuals’ Eating Behaviors: A Discourse on Food Communication

Abstract

Food is a way of communication that many of us aren’t often aware of because most of us think that we only consume food to satisfy our temporary hunger. However, food can, in fact, be approached from a semiotic perspective because it includes many signs such as culture, gender, religion, class, and voyeurism within. Therefore, food should be examined from a semiotic perspective just as Roland Barthes has said. Barthes claims that how the food appears on a plate, with which methods it has been prepared, how it is served, the way it is eaten with table manners, the senses that it creates all convey some meanings because they are all a combination of different sign systems which help people to communicate (Faber & Claramonte, 2017). Therefore, in this research paper, how consuming a type of food can actually shape an individual’s identity and how the discourse on food from many different angles, which are culture, gender, religion, class, and voyeurism, can be formed are discussed. (Fiske, 2003) mentions that people sharing the same codes and using the same semiotics systems will be able to look from the same perspective and will perceive signs in a similar way, so this is about the frame of reference that we use in communication because the reader uses her/his own experiences and emotions while giving a meaning.