Mass-produced Foods Research Articles

Food laborers as stewards of island biocultural diversity: reclaiming local knowledge, food sovereignty, and decolonization

Creating nutritious and ecologically regenerative food cultures depends on the local knowledge of food system laborers. Food producers in small island developing states center socioecological interdependence in their livelihoods and, as such, conserve biocultural diversity. Amid burgeoning health, economic, and climate crises brought on by colonialism, reclaiming food sovereignty requires a critical and embodied scientific approach, one that considers what traditional ecological knowledge is and who creates and sustains it. This study positions laborers as the primary sources of knowledge in island food systems; discusses declines in nutrition and agrobiodiversity as consequences of food labor loss; and proposes laborers' stewardship as essential to regenerating self-determination. Using critical quasi-ethnographic methods, this report synthesized primary data from narrative interviews in Guam (Guåhan, n = 13) and Puerto Rico (Borikén, n = 30), two former colonies of Spain and current territories of the United States, as specific examples of place-based knowledge production, interwoven into critical discussion of broader literature in this space. Our findings show that local food laborers combine intergenerational, ecosystem-specific knowledge with robust human value systems, negotiating across competing economic, cultural, and ecological needs to sustain livelihoods and regenerate biodiversity. As well-connected nodes in family and community networks, laborers serve as the scaffolding on which compassionate and relational care can thrive. Trade policies and the market dominance of transnational food corporations have severely reduced local food production in favor of food import dependence in islands, aggravating labor shortages and augmenting food insecurity. Through waves of out-migration and cash remittance, social care relationships have become monetized, reinforcing mass-produced food consumption and dietary diversity loss as islanders, both at home and in the diaspora, transition to an industrialized diet. The loss of local labor similarly poses threats to agrobiodiversity, with export-oriented agribusiness simplifying landscapes to streamline extraction. This study demonstrates that to reclaim food systems in Guam, Puerto Rico, and similar island settings, laborers must be valued as stewards of cultural and agrobiodiversity and can be integral to efforts that preserve cultures, agroecosystems, and health.

Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food

Acquired Tastes may be an edited collection, but it makes a single, convincing argument—the modern US food system is a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not of the last seventy years, as so many food writers (e.g., Michael Pollan) have argued. The volume's editors and authors effectively trace to this earlier period many aspects we think of as integral to “modern” food, including celebrity endorsements, plant-based meat, transnational distribution, and the labeling of mass-produced foods as “natural.” Acquired Tastes is a fun collection of well-written pieces that will be useful for scholars, viable for the classroom, and entertaining for foodies.The collection is divided into three sections. The first concerns the constriction of time and space that made modern food possible. The second concerns contests over trust—in both industrialized food products and in the system that provides this food. The third and final section considers the scientific advances that made “modern” food possible—and how people sold those advances to consumers.The editors are (perhaps rightly) loose in their definition of “modern” food; hence, the topics covered by this collection are myriad and fascinating. Readers will learn about the replacement of “real” sugar by corn syrup, the selling of bananas through both sex and race, and the importance of urban food carts, which reduced the likelihood that transported fruits would decay. Authors introduce mysteries that readers might not have considered. Want to know why the United States fails to feature many Filipino restaurants or how European beer styles were invented? Readers will find intriguing answers in this volume. Despite the pieces' variety, many themes run through the collection, including the importance of light versus dark foods, the growing use of food science, and the significance of food justice before we had a name for it.The volume, of course, does not cover every aspect of modern food. The book focuses largely on the United States, with some attention to other locations, most of which are in Europe. Some of the authors discuss the growing and raising of food. For instance, we hear about the role of 4-H in bringing nutritional science to rural areas and about the “ghost acres” created when California's Central Valley became a wheat producer, but the book's authors place more of an emphasis on the roles played by industrial packaging, laboratory work, and advertisers than on farms and agricultural labor.This reader is a sucker for edited volumes—there is something wonderful about a shared intellectual project. Such collections do, of course, face common pitfalls, most of which this collection artfully avoids. One common issue for edited volumes concerns the often uneven quality of contributions, particularly of the writing. However, the editors of this book cared deeply about the craft of writing. The acknowledgments section explains that the editors held a workshop about nonfiction writing with many of the contributors. They even asked a writing coach to provide guidance! The result is a collection written mostly by academics (and hence with their attention to citations, historical context, and the research process), but its brief pieces read more like magazine essays than like scholarly articles. Acquired Tastes, therefore, provides an engaging set of snippets from exciting recent and forthcoming projects. It deserves wide readership.

The Microorganism Concern in the Aquaponics System

Aquaponics system (AP) is a promising form for mass-produced food in the future. The system reduces the mass water demand for food production. It solves the problem of nitrogenous waste removal from the recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) by connecting with the hydroponic system (HP) in series. Microorganisms are essential in biochemical activities in an aquaculture system, such as nitrogen cycling, waste decomposition, and detoxification. However, excessive microorganisms in the system will increase the disease risk for aquatic organisms and plants. In the RAS system, high-density breeding enriches nutrients. That microbial management is even more critical. Through the design of zone isolation, the system confines different biochemical reactions to specific intervals, enhances its performance by shaping the dominant bacterial phase with environmental advantages, and simultaneously reduces the disturbance of microorganisms to the cultured organisms. Aquaponics farming, which emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between plants, aquatic organisms, and microorganisms, would create a more diverse and complex microbiota than the RAS system. Relevant studies have shown that the uncoupled aquaponics system using microbial zone management may be the right way to reduce management risks and increase production capacity. Research on the microbial phase of aquaponic systems is still minimal; limited research shows that the microbiota in the aquaponics system may vary considerably with the seasons and the geographical location of the farm. More active bacterial research and the establishment of effective management measures are the core technologies of future aquaculture management.

Consumption, Wellness, and the Far Right

Consumption, Wellness, and the Far Right

Healthy eating: a matter of prioritisation by households or policymakers?

I reflect upon the potential reasons why American low-income households do not spend an optimal proportion of their food budgets on fruits and vegetables, even though this would allow them to meet the recommended levels of fruit and vegetable consumption. Other priorities than health, automatic decision-making processes and access to healthy foods play a role, but solutions for the persistent socio-economic inequalities in diet should be sought in the wider food system which promotes cheap, mass-produced foods. I argue that, ultimately, healthy eating is not a matter of prioritisation by individual households but by policymakers.

Drying Applications during Value-Added Sustainable Processing for Selected Mass-Produced Food Coproducts

Developing circular value chains for continuing the use of and reducing the waste of the resources of industrial processing would eliminate impairments to the environment. The generation of nutrient-dense byproducts and coproducts with high-moisture contents are considered to be an issue for global food industries. These byproducts and coproducts spontaneously undergo chemical, biochemical, or microbial deteriorations due to high storage-temperatures, and consequently are turned into direct animal feed sources or even just treated as waste with eutrophication activity. This review provides an overview of selected mass-produced botanical food byproducts and coproducts (BFBC) including soybean okara, wheat germ, banana, and spent coffee grounds, with respect to value-added sustainable processing via proper drying technologies being employed. This review includes the current production of the above-mentioned agricultural products, the nutritional aspects of them, and the sustainable utilization of their coproducts. Additionally, the possible drying kinetics for value-added prospects are discussed.

The chef and the flavorist: reflections on the value of sensory expertise

ABSTRACTFlavor expertise can be found across different disciplines and practices, spanning from science to industry to gastronomy. Through an ethnographic exploration of sensory expertise, this article brings detail to the question of what makes up flavor expertise and how it is valued, juxtaposing the work of the high-end chef with that of the flavorist—a producer of flavorings for mass-produced foods and beverages. These two worlds of flavor are generally differently valued (i.e., chefs are seen as creative geniuses, while flavorists are considered fraudulent tricksters). However, as the article will contend, these worlds are actually closer than is recognized and share common ground in the development of sensory acuity. As an analytic framework, the concept of acuity understood as keenness of understanding and feeling is used and how acuity-in-action operates in both fields is illustrated. Overall, the article makes a case for studying expertise ethnographically, by suggesting that the traditional approach to sensible skills, with its subjectivist bias and emphasis on physiological traits, is insufficient insofar as it neglects the communal space where flavor becomes an object of concern and appropriation. This space is intersubjectively shared and constituted through experimentation, communication, and collective action.

Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India.

This article explores genealogies of food, taste, nutrition and questions of governance through attempts to regulate the production and sale of vanaspati ghee in interwar India. It explores the "ghee wars" of 1927-29, when Punjab Province pushed to regulate the production of ghee alternatives so as to ensure the quality of the products on offer and regulate the trade in mass-produced food commodities. The possibility of a regulatory system brought to the fore a series of questions about the role of the Raj and the power of provincial legislatures as interwar structures of governance in India took hold: what was the responsibility of the provincial government to its citizens? Could taste and desire be gauged in rational terms? Could authenticity and fraudulence be measured? Finally, could food be governed? This article uses these questions to examine the unusual debates about clarified butter, its forgeries, and the context of interwar citizenship.

Associations between school lunch consumption and urinary phthalate metabolite concentrations in US children and adolescents: Results from NHANES 2003–2014

Diet is a major route of phthalate exposure in humans due to use in food packaging materials. School lunches may be an important contributor to phthalate exposure in children and adolescents in the US because of the large amount of packaging necessary for mass-produced foods. We used 2003–2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data to study the association between school lunch consumption and urinary phthalate metabolite concentrations in children (ages 6–11 years, N = 2196) and adolescents (ages 12–19 years, N = 2314). After adjustment for other covariates, children who Always consumed school lunch had significantly elevated urinary concentrations of the following phthalate metabolites compared to levels in children who Never ate school lunch: sum of di(2‑ethylhexyl) phthalate metabolites, (28% higher, 95% confidence interval, CI: 10, 49%); mono‑(carboxy‑octyl) phthalate (MCOP; 43% higher, 95% CI: 17, 76%) and mono‑n‑butyl phthalate (18% higher, 95% CI: 3.5, 34%). We did not find statistically significant associations in adolescents, but the trend for MCOP concentrations was similar to that of children. In sensitivity analyses, associations between 24-hour recall of cafeteria food and urinary phthalate metabolites were not statistically significant, which could indicate that associations observed with Always consuming school lunch are due to residual confounding. Our findings show that children who Always eat school lunch had higher levels of exposure to some phthalates, but the source of differences in exposure need to be evaluated in additional studies.

The Social Process of Defining Quality Food, Based on the Opinions of Polish Consumer Cooperative Members

This article describes how members of consumer cooperatives define quality food. Cooperatives are seen as one of the forms of Alternative Food Networks. The concept of quality food is defined subjectively. The analysis presented in the paper is based on the results of a questionnaire conducted in winter 2015/2016 among members of consumer cooperatives in Poland. The spontaneously made three main associations with the notion of “high quality food” indicate that customers consider qualities that are the result of the ways and methods of production. Food quality and safety are the results of individual and organisational trust and mutual relations, among consumers themselves as well as between consumers and producers. In the case of mass-produced food, issues of safety have become crucial: for the indicated group food safety means shifting from the rules of the “industrial world” to the rules of the “domestic world” where safety is the result of trust, direct consumer/supplier relations, and/or traditions rather than standardised norms.

Improving the nutritional value of pulse crops

Improving the nutritional value of pulse crops

So Many Brands and Varieties to Choose from: Does This Compromise the Control of Food Intake in Humans?

The recent rise in obesity is widely attributed to changes in the dietary environment (e.g., increased availability of energy-dense foods and larger portion sizes). However, a critical feature of our “obesogenic environment” may have been overlooked - the dramatic increase in “dietary variability” (the tendency for specific mass-produced foods to be available in numerous varieties that differ in energy content). In this study we tested the hypothesis that dietary variability compromises the control of food intake in humans. Specifically, we examined the effects of dietary variability in pepperoni pizza on two key outcome variables; i) compensation for calories in pepperoni pizza and ii) expectations about the satiating properties of pepperoni pizza (expected satiation). We reasoned that dietary variability might generate uncertainty about the postingestive effects of a food. An internet-based questionnaire was completed by 199 adults. This revealed substantial variation in exposure to different varieties of pepperoni pizza. In a follow-up study (n= 66; 65% female), high pizza variability was associated with i) poorer compensation for calories in pepperoni pizza and ii) lower expected satiation for pepperoni pizza. Furthermore, the effect of uncertainty on caloric compensation was moderated by individual differences in decision making (loss aversion). For the first time, these findings highlight a process by which dietary variability may compromise food-intake control in humans. This is important because it exposes a new feature of Western diets (processed foods in particular) that might contribute to overeating and obesity.

Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık by Orhan Pamuk

the street, Ildi will at last “fly off” to a tiny flat on a bypass near the city center. With Nomi leaving flowers in a communal Swiss graveyard to commemorate Mamika and their vanished homeland, she embraces a future that yokes her present to her past. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Orhan Pamuk. Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık. Istanbul. Yapı Kredi Yayınları. 2014. isbn 9789750830884 Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s ninth novel, Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık (A Strangeness in My Mind, forthcoming in English translation in fall 2015 from Knopf) chronicles the life of an eccentric street vendor, Mevlut, whose enduring passion is to sell the long-forgotten Ottoman drink boza in Istanbul. “I will sell boza until the end of time!” declares the protagonist of this bildungsroman who lives in the strangest of times and in the strangest of love stories. Narrated by multiple characters, between 1969 and 2012, the novel explores Pamuk’s persisting questions about solitude, belonging, happiness, and poverty. Unlike his Museum of Innocence (2009; see WLT, March 2010, 67) or Snow (2004; see WLT, Jan. 2005, 109), however, this novel shows little interest in the East/West question, and for the first time Pamuk narrates his beloved Istanbul primarily though the eyes of a workingclass Anatolian. Although somewhat reminiscent of the poet Ka in Snow, Mevlut is not one of Pamuk’s typical middle-class Istanbulites. Severed from his village in Konya and his mother at age twelve, he has to join his father and uncle in Istanbul. Tormented by long work hours and loneliness, he finds himself amid the military coups of 1971 and 1980, Kurdish and Alawite conflict, nationalist extremism, and, above all, with a bitter father. When he is finally saved by the love of Samiha, a girl he meets once at a wedding and writes love letters to for three years, he is tricked by his cousin into eloping with the wrong girl, Samiha’s older sister, Rayiha. All this time, Mevlut confesses that he harbors a “strangeness in his mind,” evoking a line from Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Pamuk’s tender and compassionate narration describes an inborn strangeness in Mevlut—which is at the heart of the novel—but this condition is equally forged by the transformations of late-twentiethcentury Turkey. Uneducated and without capital—like most immigrants in Istanbul —he works odd jobs as a parking lot security officer, ice cream seller, rice vendor , lottery inventor, and debt collector. Although Turkey gets more politically and economically divided in the 1980s, Mevlut declares his independence and lacks any form of class consciousness. A Strangeness in My Mind is imbued with ornate insights into the changing urban landscape of Istanbul and economic character of Turkey: the birth of chain restaurants, supermarkets, malls, factories, bottled drinks, mass-produced foods, the emergence of real-estate moguls, a skyline in Istanbul, the enclosures of the shantytowns , the economic consequences of military coups, and the rise of the nouveaux riches. Amid this dizzyingly rapid change, Mevlut remains as outdated yet unchanged as the boza he sells, missing opportunities for entrepreneurship and apathetic to becoming a wage earner. He treads the streets of Istanbul, catering to the palates of a few dedicated boza drinkers, devoid of material longings, comfortable in his solitude, like a dervish. His voyeuristic tendencies , spiritual wanderings, enigmatic naïveté, and indifference to materiality make Mevlut a subject of mockery among his opportunist friends. But this strangeness also shields him from the tyranny of time and ambition. His bohemian habits might be perplexing, his career choices inexplicable, yet, undoubtedly, he is one of the most sui generis, unforgettable characters in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Iclal Cetin SUNY at Fredonia Doron Rabinovici. Elsewhere. Tess Lewis, tr. London. Haus (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2014. isbn 9781908323491 For a writer born in Israel, living in Austria , and writing in German, it is not surprising that themes such as Jewish identity World Literature in Review 116 wlt may / august 2015 ...

Elsewhere by Doron Rabinovici

the street, Ildi will at last “fly off” to a tiny flat on a bypass near the city center. With Nomi leaving flowers in a communal Swiss graveyard to commemorate Mamika and their vanished homeland, she embraces a future that yokes her present to her past. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Orhan Pamuk. Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık. Istanbul. Yapı Kredi Yayınları. 2014. isbn 9789750830884 Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s ninth novel, Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık (A Strangeness in My Mind, forthcoming in English translation in fall 2015 from Knopf) chronicles the life of an eccentric street vendor, Mevlut, whose enduring passion is to sell the long-forgotten Ottoman drink boza in Istanbul. “I will sell boza until the end of time!” declares the protagonist of this bildungsroman who lives in the strangest of times and in the strangest of love stories. Narrated by multiple characters, between 1969 and 2012, the novel explores Pamuk’s persisting questions about solitude, belonging, happiness, and poverty. Unlike his Museum of Innocence (2009; see WLT, March 2010, 67) or Snow (2004; see WLT, Jan. 2005, 109), however, this novel shows little interest in the East/West question, and for the first time Pamuk narrates his beloved Istanbul primarily though the eyes of a workingclass Anatolian. Although somewhat reminiscent of the poet Ka in Snow, Mevlut is not one of Pamuk’s typical middle-class Istanbulites. Severed from his village in Konya and his mother at age twelve, he has to join his father and uncle in Istanbul. Tormented by long work hours and loneliness, he finds himself amid the military coups of 1971 and 1980, Kurdish and Alawite conflict, nationalist extremism, and, above all, with a bitter father. When he is finally saved by the love of Samiha, a girl he meets once at a wedding and writes love letters to for three years, he is tricked by his cousin into eloping with the wrong girl, Samiha’s older sister, Rayiha. All this time, Mevlut confesses that he harbors a “strangeness in his mind,” evoking a line from Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Pamuk’s tender and compassionate narration describes an inborn strangeness in Mevlut—which is at the heart of the novel—but this condition is equally forged by the transformations of late-twentiethcentury Turkey. Uneducated and without capital—like most immigrants in Istanbul —he works odd jobs as a parking lot security officer, ice cream seller, rice vendor , lottery inventor, and debt collector. Although Turkey gets more politically and economically divided in the 1980s, Mevlut declares his independence and lacks any form of class consciousness. A Strangeness in My Mind is imbued with ornate insights into the changing urban landscape of Istanbul and economic character of Turkey: the birth of chain restaurants, supermarkets, malls, factories, bottled drinks, mass-produced foods, the emergence of real-estate moguls, a skyline in Istanbul, the enclosures of the shantytowns , the economic consequences of military coups, and the rise of the nouveaux riches. Amid this dizzyingly rapid change, Mevlut remains as outdated yet unchanged as the boza he sells, missing opportunities for entrepreneurship and apathetic to becoming a wage earner. He treads the streets of Istanbul, catering to the palates of a few dedicated boza drinkers, devoid of material longings, comfortable in his solitude, like a dervish. His voyeuristic tendencies , spiritual wanderings, enigmatic naïveté, and indifference to materiality make Mevlut a subject of mockery among his opportunist friends. But this strangeness also shields him from the tyranny of time and ambition. His bohemian habits might be perplexing, his career choices inexplicable, yet, undoubtedly, he is one of the most sui generis, unforgettable characters in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Iclal Cetin SUNY at Fredonia Doron Rabinovici. Elsewhere. Tess Lewis, tr. London. Haus (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2014. isbn 9781908323491 For a writer born in Israel, living in Austria , and writing in German, it is not surprising that themes such as Jewish identity World Literature in Review 116 wlt may / august 2015 and belonging remain central to his existence . What is unanticipated, however, is the consistency with which Doron Rabinovici proves able to counter gaiety with solemnity, calamity with cheerfulness, and displacement with inclusion. The uncanny ability to...

Filling the Box: Television in Higher Education

is not a stable object. It has never been one, nor will it ever be one. As the most provocative work in Television Studies makes manifest, television functions less as a stable object than as an empty box into which we put our hopes and anxieties about modern life. While the content of that box certainly engages us, it's the box itself that matters most: a discursive structure with permeable borders yet with material presence. Although always contentiously defined and regarded, it has also been the cultural nexus of much of the world for the past six decades. As the twentyfirst century rolls on, however, it is also increasingly apparent that television is a box designed for a prior age of centralized, regimented, and unidirectional media distribution, and its concomitant subjectivities. Nonetheless, like the governments we elect, the roads we drive on, and the mass-produced foods we eat, TV is still very much part of the larger inherited environment in which we live. Regardless of how we define it, television, or more specifically concepts of television as a technology, an industrial system, a set of aesthetic practices, an ideological apparatus, or even a plug-in drug will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. Given that television will be there, in many forms, we must continue to pursue why and how it matters. Throughout television's history, and outside the medium itself, this task has largely been fulfilled in another prominent modern box: the university. There, despite continual doubts, fears, and dismissals of the medium, television has at least been regarded, quite broadly, and often only at a safe distance, as a phenomenon worthy of academic concern. Although it took until the 1970s, following the work of Horace Newcomb and others, for cultural and textual analysis of television to be accepted as a legitimate academic approach to the medium, and even longer for Television Studies, as a distinct field, to gain a modest footing in the humanities, TV has certainly always been studied in academia. Broadly speaking, Television Studies' place in the academy, and particularly in the humanities, has now seemingly been won, if not in every college or university. But this position is far from secure. First, television's perpetual cultural and industrial instability has extended in recent years into more radical reconfigurations, as the medium has migrated from domestic set to networked node, and as many long-standing practices such as broadcast schedules and broad national address have been challenged. Second, and more critically, higher education is itself undergoing its most significant transformations in centuries. like television, Television Studies may be a box ill equipped for the emerging environment.

Supermarkets and Agro-industrial Foods

There is increasing evidence of a weakened platform of consumer trust in mass produced food products. The resistance shown by consumers to the agro-industrial paradigm is evident in an emergent phase of reflexive consumerism, public reactions to an overly-concentrated retail sector and the rise of alternative food networks such as farmers' markets and organic box schemes. Supermarkets are responding strategically by aiming to manufacture new trust relations with consumers. This paper identifies three key strategies of trust manufacturing: (i) reputational enhancement though the institution of “behind the scenes,” business-to-business private standards; (ii) direct quality claims via private standard certification badges on food products; and (iii) discursive claimsmaking through symbolic representations of “authenticity” and “tradition.” Drawing upon the food governance literature and a “visual sociology” of supermarkets and supermarket produce, we highlight how trust is both commoditized and increasingly embedded into the marketing of mass-produced foods.

Molecular Gastronomy: A Food Fad or an Interface for Science-based Cooking?

A review is given over the field of molecular gastronomy and its relation to science and cooking. We begin with a brief history of the field of molecular gastronomy, the definition of the term itself, and the current controversy surrounding this term. We then highlight the distinction between molecular gastronomy and science-based cooking, and we discuss both the similarities and the distinctions between science and cooking. In particular, we highlight the fact that the kitchen serves as an ideal place to foster interactions between scientists and chefs that lead to benefits for the general public in the form of novel and high-quality foods. On the one hand, it can facilitate the implementation of new ideas and recipes in restaurants. On the other hand, it challenges scientists to apply their fundamental scientific understanding to the complexities of cooking, and it challenges them to expand the scientific understanding of many chemical and physical mechanisms beyond the common mass-produced food products. In addition, molecular gastronomy forms an ideal base to educate the general public about the basic principles of science and cooking and how they can be utilized to improve the awareness of the role of food and nutrition for the quality of life.

Re-embedding trust: unravelling the construction of modern diets

Recent controversies surrounding the food industry and its contribution to diet-related illnesses provide fertile ground for re-examining where power lies in food systems. A review of the literature reveals a wide range of powerful actors, contradictory assessments about consumer power and numerous examples of producers and medical authorities expending significant effort to shape the criteria by which consumers exercise choice. Expertise from the fields of marketing, advertising, psychology and nutrition science has been marshalled for close to a century to create commodity contexts that are sympathetic to mass-produced foods. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, a new dynamic entered the equation: the battle between technical rationality and reflexive consumers. Consumers are questioning the credentials of foods and those who promote them and, simultaneously, are seeking hope and help from the food system. As a result, health claims have become a most important ingredient in the fight for competitive advantage. This paper describes how the re-embedding of trust in a food supply dominated by corporations is being attempted through the nutritionalization of the food supply. On the basis of two studies, the authors identify the actors, processes, ideological basis and points of resistance that comprise what they are terming an emergent ‘diets-making complex’ (DMC). By intensifying the influence of science and nutritional claims in dietary discourse, the DMC has the potential to circumscribe policy options about food and health, because appeals to individual health are obscuring a social view of the food supply.

Packaging Jewishness: Novelty and Tradition in Kosher Food Packaging

Many packaged food companies construct their product identities using mythological tropes as a means to link their products with a particular idea. By linking their product to notions of tradition, the manufacturers of mass-produced foods obfuscate the real and eminently modern conditions that make packaged foods possible. References to tradition help to obscure the paradoxical effect in which the very mass production processes that make a packaged product possible are the same processes responsible for eroding traditional production methods and practices. The commodification of tradition through marketing is a way for makers of packaged foods to endow their products with the kind of artisanal aura that, by definition, is unavailable to objects of mass production. Since any actual link to the premodern past has been disrupted by the effects of modernization, advertisers construct mythical product genealogies as substitutes for real histories.2 This paper examines the role of nostalgia in the design of package labels. It will focus on a particular phenomenon within a particular category of products. I am interested in the dissemination of cultural values through the mass market, specifically, in the commodification of Jewishness or yiddishkeit through the use of mythological devices in kosher packaged foods. To a certain degree, packaged kosher foods exist as a paradox. It embodies the dichotomies of traditional lifestyles in a modem world. It is the reification of an ancient ritual and, at the same time, an emblem of modern convenience. It is the intersection of the rational and irrational, the practical and impractical, and the esoteric and the banal. One might wonder if it isn't the stark contrast of values expressed in the gesture of packaging and marketing something so symbolic as kosher foods that makes the arena of the label so inviting to nostalgic expressions. As the above quote of Roland Barthes shows, however, a longing for the past, represented though a dramatization of culinary culture, is not exclusively a product of a Jewish-American worldview. Barthes saw nostalgia as a sign of the modern condi1 Roland Barthes, from Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food

The Rise of Mass-Produced Foods

Journal of American CultureVolume 2, Issue 3 p. 500-502 The Rise of Mass-Produced Foods First published: Fall 1979 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1979.0203_500.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume2, Issue3Fall 1979Pages 500-502 RelatedInformation