Food Discourse Research Articles

Spanish Food in Light of the Humanities - Multiple Meanings of the Food Discourses in Don Quijote -

Spanish Food in Light of the Humanities - Multiple Meanings of the Food Discourses in Don Quijote -

Food discourses in Cape Breton: Community, economy, and ecological food practices

This project investigates ecological food practices on Cape Breton Island as legacies of traditional lifestyles and responses to the acceleration of global capitalism. I examine the multifarious discourses that frame ecological food practices such as organic gardening and farmers’ markets in this region. People have many reasons for producing and consuming ecologically. For some, interest in local, organic food arises from health concerns; for others, involvement constitutes active resistance to environmental degradation or corporate control. These varying perspectives give rise to, and are reflected in, divergent discourses that shape people’s values and identities. I explore possibilities and constraints, including economic benefits, social connections, and healthy lifestyles; as well as time and energy demands, modest financial compensation, and environmental factors. The importance of sustainable food practices raises important questions: Who performs this labour and how is it financially compensated? How are products distributed and shared? What kinds of support would make ecological practices more feasible on a broader scale? To address these questions and contextualize my investigations, I interview farmers, consumers, restaurateurs, and policy makers, and analyze archival and policy documents. I situate my observations within broader circumstances to link local initiatives with global developments and illuminate possibilities for enacting change and collaboratively developing sustainable food practices (Starr 2014).

Love in a Hot Climate: Foodscapes of Trade, Travel, War, and Intimacy

This article is about mapping—about charting dominant ways of seeing and understanding place, and the interruption of those ways. The argument traces a twentieth-/twenty-first-century culinary journey from Sri Lanka, through the Strait of Malacca, to the Pacific Ocean. Critical destinations on this route include the port cities of Colombo, Malacca, and Singapore. The journey, however, is not predominantly one shaped by oceans, nations, or the urban fabric of cities. Instead, we enter the “private” spaces of domestic kitchens to record glimpses of “mixed” food practices, characteristic of local Eurasian and Peranakan (Straits Chinese) communities. Drawing on traditional family dishes recorded in “cultural retrieval” cookbooks, the argument speculates that food discourses and meanings embedded in kitchens' everyday practices evade incorporation into the national culinary imaginary simply as representative of a “Sri Lankan,” “Malaysian,” or “Singaporean” heritage. Instead, the marriage of ingredients and distinctive flavors recorded in Peranakan and Eurasian recipes begs some unraveling of their complex histories. Within the intimacy of “mixed” marriages and the legitimacy of “mixed” cuisines, the article teases out how “the food of love” (Hutton 2000, 2007) becomes a powerful signifier of cuisine, tradition, memory, identity, and place—through and beyond the parameters of the “national.” Here, Yi-Fu Tuan's “fields of care” (1979) provide rich possibilities for meditation on alternative ways to chart territories of difference and intimate connection, and to acknowledge, within these territories, the ghostly labor of mothers, aunts, and servants.

“Bagels and doughnuts … round food for every mood” food advertising discourses

Purpose– The relationship between food and mood has been discussed for many years. The purpose of this paper is to extend that debate by exploring how food advertising, a key source of consumer information about food, utilises and implies varied associations between food and mood.Design/methodology/approach– The research combines a textually oriented analysis with an analysis of the visual images in a sample of typical food advertisements drawn from women’s magazines.Findings– Although healthy foods have the potential to enhance mood this is not often used as a key advertising message. Conversely, advertisements for foods that can depress mood frequently adopt messages of happiness and wellbeing.Research limitations/implications– This exploratory research provides an initial investigation of advertising discourses of food and mood at a snapshot in time. Based on the findings derived from this limited sample, further research is suggested which would provide a more comprehensive survey of food advertising.Practical implications– The research is of value to food promoters in suggesting that they review food messages and the use of emotional appeals in the light of developing scientific research on the link between food and mental wellbeing.Social implications– The growing interest in promoting mental health and wellbeing means that consumers and governments are keen to understand the relationship between food and mood and its potential influence on consumer food choices.Originality/value– This research indicates that some food advertising diverges from the scientific evidence on food and mental health and wellbeing. The research is therefore of value to food promoters and advertising regulators.

Globalization, Land Grabbing, and the Present-Day Colonial State in Uganda

Much has been written recently about the nature, drivers, and impacts of large-scale land acquisitions or “grabbing” in Africa. We argue that current land grabs are a product of ecological scarcity and the opportunities this presents for accumulation and logics of state building. In effect, land grabs represent a reinscription and deepening of sociospatial power inequalities associated with previous eras. Together we term these combined processes ecolonization, as discourses of climate change mitigation and food and energy security facilitate continued and deepening domination of ecological space by domestic political elites and transnational investors, through the United Nations’ Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and enhance forest carbon stocks projects, for example. The new internal frontiers opened up by processes of capital accumulation are, in turn, fundamental to the reproduction and strengthening of colonial African state formations. Land dispossession thus serves hybrid economic accumulation and political logics across different scales and temporalities. The ways in which these processes are empirically expressed is explored through two case studies from Uganda.

Creative Digital Arts Education: Exploring Art, Human Ecology, and New Media Education through the Lens of Human Rights

The development of an innovative pedagogical model based on case study research about human rights education regarding discourses of power and food in relation to visual arts education and human ecology education will be examined. The authors outline two ongoing studies about “digiART” and Human Rights: New Media, Art, and Human Ecology Integrated Projects. These projects have been held at the University of Manitoba, Canada for pre-service teachers training to be secondary level educators: the research has been ongoing since 2013. As a result of the studies, meaningful curricula and innovative pedagogy have been developed using contemporary technologies. Key to the studies is not only the incorporation of creative teaching and learning about digital technologies at the higher education level but also integrating human rights issues into curricula. The authors’ approaches to teaching human rights issues to pre-service teachers are described in which they incorporate creative technologies to foster an innovative pedagogical model, and develop productive learning using digital technologies. Student’s new media practices from preproduction to postproduction are delineated and benefits from using this approach are discussed.

IMPASSES, DESAFIOS E AS INTERFACES DA EDUCAÇÃO ALIMENTAR E NUTRICIONAL COMO PROCESSO DE PARTICIPAÇÃO POPULAR

Este artigo apresenta experiências de nutricionistas em atividades de educação alimentar e nu-tricional desenvolvidas, nos últimos dez anos, nas escolas de Duque de Caxias, município do estado do Rio de Janeiro. A metodologia de sistematização de experiência tem como pressuposto que esta atividade coletiva de aprendizagem se dá a partir da interpretação crítica das práticas em diálogo com a teoria. Foram realizadas consultas em acervos pessoais e de projetos e, posteriormente, entrevistas individuais e coletivas com nutricionistas. Pôde-se registrar grande diversidade nas ações desenvolvidas, interesse na atuação intersetorial e progressiva incorporação do discurso do direito à alimentação. As parcerias estabelecidas entre nutricionistas e movimentos populares marcam a descrição das experiências. A educação alimentar e nutricional foi afirmada como campo de atuação interdisciplinar. Em contextos de grande injustiça torna-se essencial incorporar princípios da educação popular, tais como amorosidade, diálogo e compromisso com os oprimidos. A sistematização sinaliza que nutricionistas, responsáveis, professores, merendeiras e outros profissionais da escola têm sido importantes atores nas experiências, além de indicar o potencial de ampliação da participação de estudantes.

Finance Capital, Food Security Narratives and Australian Agricultural Land

The growing involvement of financial actors in food production has been one of the major recent transformations in the global agri‐food system. This ‘financialization’ of the agri‐food sector has been observed at various levels, from commodity speculation to direct investment in agricultural production, along with farmland itself. While there has been concerted effort to track new landownership and control associated with financial actors, especially in the Global South, there has been less impetus to examine the motives of financial actors' engagement in food production and the narratives upon which such engagement is based. This paper examines the way in which a productivist food (in)security discourse is employed by financial actors to legitimate their actions and to position themselves to win public approval. We analyse two cases of agri‐finance investors in the Australian context engaged in the discourse of food (in)security in relation to their agricultural investments – the Macquarie Group and Hassad Australia.

Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat. By Harvey Levenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. vii plus 218 pp.)

Harvey Levenstein's Fear of Food is an extension of his previous work tracing the development of the American public's relationship to the evolving industrialized food system in relation to an increasingly globalized form of capitalism. For Levenstein, Americans' understanding of what is on their plates—how it gets there, what it contains, and what it should be—is the result of the nation's history as punctuated by specific events, which, though isolated as unique moments within Levenstein's narrative, are situated along a continuum of the constantly changing social world. Through these circumstances, as manifest from the inextricable connection between the political, cultural, and economic, Americans come to have seemingly rapid shifts in their understandings of food and diet. Thus, while Levenstein emphasizes the paramount role of the ideologies of choice and personal responsibility in individuals' food consumption, his focus on the hands of government, science, and industry in the formation, continuation, and renovation of American food discourse clearly reveals the historical situatedness and societal construction of personal decision-making regarding what to eat.

Transforming Food Systems Through Food Sovereignty: An Australian Urban Context

AbstractThis article draws on La Via Campesina's definition of food sovereignty and its potential for reconceptualising food as a basic human right within the dominant Australian food discourse. We argue that the educative value that emerges from urban food production in Australia stems from the action of growing food and its capacity to transform individuals’ social and environmental concerns over food systems. Community participation in urban food production can promote a learning process that generates political understanding and concerns over food systems. We use the education theories of transformative learning and critical consciousness to discuss how Australian urban food production systems can create this social and environmental support for alternative food systems. By having control over food production practices and building collective understandings of how food choices impact global food systems, elements of food sovereignty can develop in an Australian urban context.

Choosing health: embodied neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the “do-diet”

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated how women are constrained through dieting discourse. Today’s scholars wrestle with similar themes, but confront a thornier question: how do we make sense of a food discourse that frames food choices through a lens of empowerment and health, rather than vanity and restriction? This article addresses this question, drawing from interviews and focus groups with women (N = 100), as well as health-focused food writing. These data allow us to document a postfeminist food discourse that we term the do-diet. The do-diet reframes dietary restrictions as positive choices, while maintaining an emphasis on body discipline, expert knowledge, and self-control. Our analysis demonstrates how the do-diet remediates a tension at the heart of neoliberal consumer culture: namely, the tension between embodying discipline through dietary control and expressing freedom through consumer choice. With respect to theory, our analysis demonstrates how the embodied dimensions of neoliberalism find gendered expression through postfeminism. We conclude that the do-diet heightens the challenge of developing feminist critiques of gendered body ideals and corporeal surveillance, as it promises a way of eating that is both morally responsible and personally empowering.

Discours alimentaire et figure du médecin dans la littérature russe du XIXe siècle

Food and the Figure of the Physician in 19th-Century Russian Literature. this article focuses on the depiction of food in russian classical texts involving figures of physicians, from narezhny to Chekhov. It first examines the link between food and medicine in these texts, then considers the evolution of the physician figure in the context of the evolution of food discourse throughout the 19th century. Finally, it adresses the radical change undergone by the association of food and medicine in Chekhov’s literary discourse. In the first part of the century, physicians are described as promoting modern and healthy foodways ; on the contrary, texts from the second half of the century use the depiction of physicians’ food habits to show them in a negative light, wether as deprived glutons or alcoholics, or as dangerous radicals. Finally, the association of physicians with food in Chekhov’s texts is used only to emphasize their dramatic lost of status.

Why Do Some Consumers Prefer Organic Food? A Discourse Analytical Perspective

In an attempt to better understand the main motives behind organic food consumption, this study explores the consumer discourses of organic food. In all, 35 in-depth interviews were conducted, from which three major discourses were identified. These discourses were named primitivist, retro, and racialist. The data suggest that these Romantic discourses play on images of a supposedly glorious and innocent past. Consequently, consumers using these three discourses were more likely to prefer organic food, as they had a tendency to construct this type of food as more natural, authentic, and real. In this sense, Romantic discourses seem to offer more resonant themes for consumers than contemporary modern science can ever provide.

National Food Security Act, 2013 and Food Security Outcomes in India

The National Food Security Act (NFSA) of India aims to provide subsidized food grains to approximately two-thirds of India’s 1.25 billion population. The introduction of this Act in 2013, marks a major paradigm shift from a welfare based to a rights based approach to address food insecurity. This article attempts to understand the effect of NFSA on food security outcomes in India. It attempts to analyze the origin of right to food discourse and factors behind perpetual failure in food security outcomes by applying food security measurement framework. The article then focuses on the persistent failure in redressing childhood undernutrition. The article elaborates the impact of NFSA on food security outcome indicators for India. The article concludes that the policy needs to look beyond subsidized food grain assistance for ensuring the nutritional security of people of India.

Moralities in food and health research

Society has imposed strict rules about what constitutes a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ food and ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ eating behaviour at least since antiquity. Today, the moral discourse of what we should and should not eat is perhaps stronger than ever, and it informs consumers, researchers and policy-makers about what we all should consume, research and regulate. We propose four types of moralities, underlying sets of moral assumptions, that orient the contemporary discourses of food and health: the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nature of food items, the virtue of self-control and moderation, the management of body size and the actions of market agents. We demonstrate how these moralities influence consumer behaviour as well as transformative research of food and health and develop a critical discussion of the impact of the underlying morality in each domain. We conclude by providing a few guidelines for changes in research questions, designs and methodologies for future research and call for a general reflection on the consequences of the uncovered moralities in research on food and health towards an inclusive view of food well-being.

“Like, Pasta, Pizza and Stuff” – New Trends in Online Food Discourse

This paper examines two examples of online food discourse to illustrate how the medium changes parameters established in print recipes: food blogs for written and Skype talks for oral computer-mediated discourse about food. The language of food blogs will be analysed with the help of examples from the Food Blog Corpus (Diemer and Frobenius 2011),i compiled at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. This corpus includes 100 blog posts in total from The Times Online. Skype conversations about food between non-native speakers of English are taken from CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (Diemer et al. forthcoming),ii also compiled at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. For the purpose of this analysis, a subcorpus of food-related conversations was extracted, containing seven conversations (5.5h) between 14 German and Italian participants in total. The two corpora were examined in terms of contextualisation (reference to place, time, and personal background), register (audience, and linguistic features), as well as personal opinions and lifestyle comments. The paper suggests that both discourse types make use of the multimodal online environment and add evaluative content, for example integrating positively connoted terms to describe food-related issues. The paper also illustrates possible trends towards an increasing inclusion of non-expert language features, such as vagueness and a reduction of presuppositions, and of cultural and personal references, integrating individual background information.

Sensuous Pageantry

ABSTRACTThis article proposes an exploration of taste through the lens of certain events organized by the Slow Food movement. It aims, first, to situate Slow Food discourses in the practices carried out in particular sites, and second, to account for sensuous relations established between people and food in events such as fairs, festivals, and markets. In redirecting attention to the specificity of sensory practices of the organization, the article contributes to a little-explored field in Slow Food studies. It shows how micro-practices enrich and continuously shape the Slow Food principle of sensory education. Research from fairs, festivals, and markets in England and Italy provides insight into the interactions and strategies of producers, organizers, and visitors, and evaluates modalities of taste-making and taste formation. The article introduces the concept of sensuous pageantry in order to explore multiple ways of engaging with various sensory orders pertaining to the what, who, and how of tasting. It is argued that sensuous pageantry, an often overwhelming and dominant sense of taste and sensing at fairs, brings multiple sensory orders together and creates tensions which alternately undermine or reinforce those sensory orders. As such, fairs offer distinctive conceptual insights for a sociology of taste and the senses, which aims to assess emerging sensory constitutions as potential catalysts and drivers of change.

Pork, Beer, and Margarine. Danish Food Consumption 1900-2000: National Characteristics and Common Nordic Traits

In recent years the idea of New Nordic Food has dominated food discourse in Denmark. Debates have rested on the dual assumption that Nordic food is healthy and that a common Nordic food culture is both a historical and contemporary fact. However, statistics have long shown significant disparities in the health of Nordic populations. For decades, Denmark has been singled out as significantly unhealthier than its Nordic neighbours. This article investigates the long-term development of the Danish diet to understand how it differs from those of Finland, Sweden and Norway in the latter half of the twentieth century. The aim is to highlight historical developments and differences that shape our understanding of dietary patterns and underlie the health status of the Nordic populations. The article contributes new insights into both the national characteristics and long-term shifts in the Danish diet in the twentieth century and insights into historical similarities and differences in the food cultures of the (largest) Nordic countries.

“Cheese and Chips out of Styrofoam Containers”: An Exploration of Taste and Cultural Symbols of Appropriate Family Foodways

“Cheese and Chips out of Styrofoam Containers”: An Exploration of Taste and Cultural Symbols of Appropriate Family Foodways

Horsemeat-gate

Academic and lay debates about food variously articulate the ways in which contemporary food provisioning systems are inherently problematic and unstable. Drawing evidence from the seeming prevalence of adulteration scandals, moral panics and other food crises, these debates reproduce a set of entangled moral discourses about food, its consumption and production. Within these discourses, ideological lines are drawn, and particular types of consumers (typically poor and working class), particular types of producers (those that produce for the agri-industrial food complex) and particular types of retailers (typically “budget” and “corporate” supermarkets) are vilified as the loci of all that is supposedly wrong with food. Missing, however, is a more nuanced social and cultural reading that unpacks these discourses and analyses failings within food through multiple lenses such as class, social deprivation, and their multi-scaler geographical implications. Using the recent horsemeat scandals that dominated headlines in spring 2013, the purpose of this commentary is to unpack and disentangle these discourses of food. We argue that “what is wrong with food” is less related to its systems of provision, but rather more the ways its various agents are discursively cast and subsequently moralized as perpetrators of a globalized and industrial food system