Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning (Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress Book 19)

This volume offers new insights into food and culture. Food habits, preferences, and taboos are partially regulated by ecological and material factors - in other words, all food systems are structured and given particular functioning mechanisms by specific societies and cultures, either according to totemic, sacrificial, hygienic-rationalist, aesthetic, or other symbolic logics. This provides much “food for thought”. The famous expression has never been so appropriate: not only do cultures develop unique practices for the production, treatment and consumption of food, but such practices inevitably end up affecting food-related aspects and spheres that are generally perceived as objectively and materially defined. This book explores such dynamics drawing on various theoretical approaches and analytical methodologies, thus enhancing the cultural reflection on food and, at the same time, helping us see how the study of food itself can help us understand better what we call “culture”. It will be of interest to anthropologists, philosophers, semioticians and historians of food. Foreword: Good to Think With Acknowledgments Contents Editors and Contributors 1 Food for Thought: An Introduction References Part I Food, Taste, and Global Cultures 2 Alimentation: A General Semiotic Model of Socialising Food 2.1 Alimentation as a Scientific Problem 2.2 The Alimentary Text 2.3 A General Semiotic Model for the Analysis of Alimentation References 3 On the Face of Food Abstract 3.1 Sweet Simulacra 3.2 Sweet Sacrifices 3.3 A Semiotics of Sacrifice 3.4 Sacrifice and Sacred Face 3.5 En-visaging and De-facing 3.6 Heads 3.7 A Patterned Geography of Head-Eating 3.8 Conclusions References 4 Phenomenology of a Symbolic Dish: What Su Porceddu Teaches Us About Food, Meaning, and Identification 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Cutting or Deconstructing? On the (Apparent) Opposition Between Common and Scientific Perception of a Symbolic Dish 4.3 Continuity or Discontinuity? Contemporary Assessment of the Bone and Bronze Fragments Evidence 4.4 One’s Own or Someone Else’s? Eating as Speaking: The Inedible and the Incomprehensible as Forms of the Untranslatable 4.5 Knowledge or Taste? Or How the Suckling Pig Makes the Nation 4.6 Memory or Forgetfulness? Semiopolitics of the Contemporary Piglet References 5 Food Heritage, Memory and Cultural Identity in Saudi Arabia: The Case of Jeddah 5.1 Introduction 5.1.1 Food, Memory and Identity 5.2 The Research Perspective 5.3 Saudi Arabia’s Cultural Identity Between Gradual Development and “Cultural Explosions” 5.3.1 Saudi Arabia. Bedouins’ Diet and Food 5.4 Jeddah “Ghair” 5.4.1 Exploring Jeddah: Food as the Sign of Epochal Changes and Connections 5.4.2 The Efficacy of the Discourse on Food Heritage 5.4.3 The Role of Religious Rituals in Remembering and Forgetting 5.4.4 Adaptation, Authenticity and Identity Crisis 5.5 Conclusion References 6 Bittersweet Home: The Sweets Craft in the Urban Life of Tripoli, Lebanon 6.1 Introduction 6.1.1 What Are Sweets? 6.1.2 Historical Overview 6.1.3 Hallab 6.1.4 Methodology 6.2 City and Sweets in Time and Space 6.3 Sweets in Society 6.3.1 Nutrition and Protocol 6.4 Product as Palimpsest 6.4.1 Innovation and Health 6.5 Conclusion References Part II Law, Power, and Media 7 “An Act Authorizing Sterilization of Persons Convicted of Murder, Rape, Chicken Stealing...”: Southern Chicken Theft Laws as an Expression of Racialised Political Violence 7.1 Missouri House Bill No. 290 7.2 A Foundation of Racist Stereotypes 7.3 Chicken Theft Punishment Under Slavery 7.4 Chicken Theft Laws Under Reconstruction and the Early Jim Crow South 7.5 Chicken Theft Laws During the Progressive Era 7.6 Conclusion References 8 Free Breakfast and Taco Trucks: Case Studies of Food as Rhetorical Homology in Political Discourse 8.1 Brief History of Food as Political Rhetoric 8.2 Food and Political Rhetoric: 1970–2016 8.3 The Rise of Social Media: 2016—Present 8.4 I-Collective 8.5 Power of Social Media 8.6 Conclusion References 9 “Superfine Quality, Absolute Purity, Daily Freshness”: The Language of Advertising in United Cattle Products’ Marketing of Tripe to British Workers in the 1920s and 1930s 9.1 Introduction 9.2 United Cattle Products 9.3 Prejudice 9.4 Advertising Tripe 9.4.1 Textual Thematic Content 9.4.2 Images and the Concept of Re-contextualisation 9.4.3 Advertising Tripeand the Hierarchy of Needs 9.5 Disdain, Disgust, and Ridicule 9.6 The Decline of Tripe 9.7 Conclusion References 10 New Generations and Axiologies of Food in Cinema and New Media 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Food, Adolescents, Media, Culture 10.3 New Generations, Values and New Media: A Model References Part III Nutrition and Culture 11 Beyond Nutrition: Meanings, Narratives, Myths 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Food, Health, and “Myths” 11.3 Nutrition(ism) in Contemporary Gastromania 11.4 Organic Versus GM Food: The Nature/Culture Myth 11.5 Conclusion References 12 Laughing Alone with Salad: Nutrition-Based Inequity in Women’s Diet and Wellness Media 12.1 Introduction 12.2 Women Laughing Alone with Salad 12.3 Sad Salads: Mixing Negative Calorie Lore with Lack and Normative Discontent 12.4 From Sad Salads to Power Bowls: Gender in the Shift from Diet to Wellness 12.5 Conclusion: Why “Salad is Feminine” Matters References 13 Virtue and Disease: Narrative Accounts of Orthorexia Nervosa 13.1 Introduction 13.2 The Birth of a Disease 13.3 ON and Contemporary Eating 13.4 Criteria in Context 13.5 Recovering Orthorexics Speak References Index