API tools faq
paste
Advertisement
jonstond2

Food (Sociology)

jonstond2
Jul 18th, 2017
544
0
Never
Add comment
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 75.13 KB | None | 0 0
raw download clone embed print report
  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Food is a relatively new empirically distinct area within sociology. Previously, studies of food production and consumption typically fell under the purview of research on health, agrarian studies, development sociology, agricultural economy, or social anthropology. Rural and natural resource sociologists especially have long emphasized the management and impacts of food production systems in their work. In classical tomes food was typically mentioned as an example of social classification or of social problems rather than a distinct object of study. Since the 1980s sociologists’ attention to how food strengthens social ties; marks social differences; and is integrated into social organizational forms, ranging from households to empires, has grown. Early-21st-century interest in food by both researchers and the larger public follows heightened awareness of the global character of markets and politics, concerns with health and safety, and the ways cooking and dining out have become fodder for media spectacle. Today sociologists of food display considerable diversity in their theoretical approaches, research methods, and empirical foci. Sociologists draw upon both classic and contemporary sociological theorists to study food’s production, distribution, and consumption as well as how food and eating are integrated into social institutions, systems, and networks. Topically, sociologists contribute to research on inequality and stratification, culture, family, markets, politics and power, identity, status, migration, labor and work, health, the environment, and globalization. Late-20th- and early-21st-century sociological work on food is characterized by two overlapping threads: food systems (derived in part from scholarship on agricultural production and applied extension as well as environmental, developmental, and rural sociology) and food politics, identity, and culture (which reveals social anthropological and cultural-historical undertones). Both are nested in the emerging interdisciplinary research field of food studies, which has gained greater institutional footholds at universities in Europe and Australia than in the United States and Canada. Sociologists working across the two threads examine issues of food and inequality, trade, labor, power, capital, culture, and technological innovation. This article maps out social science research and theorizing on what we eat, how we produce and procure food, who benefits, with whom we eat, what we think about food, and how food fits with contemporary social life.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6.  
  7. The 1980s and 1990s saw the publication of several landmark works (in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia) providing overviews of food and eating as specifically sociological topics of inquiry. Early British volumes, such as Murcott 1983 and Beardsworth and Keil 1997, draw from microsociological subfields, such as gender and interactionist perspectives, and focus on the social and cultural meanings of everyday food experiences. Caplan 1997 incorporates health considerations into these experiences. Warde 1997 uses changing trends in food practices to examine cultural theories of taste and consumption. Maurer and Sobal 1995 and McIntosh 1996 filter food issues through the lenses of social constructionism and social problems. Coveney 2006 analyzes food meanings in relation to theories of governance and the state.
  8.  
  9. Beardsworth, Alan, and Teresa Keil. 1997. Sociology on the menu: An invitation to the study of food and society. London: Routledge.
  10. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  11. Highlights social organization, forces, and mechanisms within the food system (with an empirical focus on Great Britain) from production to consumption. Chapters stress relationships with age/gender, family, class, health and body image, anxiety over food scares and safety, and related policy issues. A useful text for undergraduate courses.
  12. Find this resource:
  13.  
  14. Caplan, Pat, ed. 1997. Food, health, and identity. London: Routledge.
  15. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  16. Unique compilation of fieldwork findings by sociologists and anthropologists on food practices in the British context. Contributes to knowledge of health-related aspects of food and social identity.
  17. Find this resource:
  18.  
  19. Coveney, John. 2006. 2d ed. Food, morals, and meaning: The pleasure and anxiety of eating. London: Routledge.
  20. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  21. Uses a Foucauldian analysis to examine notions of governmentality in the rationalization of food choices, diet, nutrition, and guilt. This edition adds discussion of national and international moral panics about obesity. Originally published in 2000.
  22. Find this resource:
  23.  
  24. Maurer, Donna, and Jeffery Sobal, eds. 1995. Eating agendas: Food and nutrition as social problems. Social Problems and Social Issues. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
  25. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  26. A valuable compilation of issues of food and nutrition from a social constructionist/social problems perspective. Chapters highlight the quantity of food people eat or to which they have access, problems associated with the qualities of these foods (such as concerns over contamination or meat eating), and issues related to the food industry and government policies.
  27. Find this resource:
  28.  
  29. McIntosh, W. Alex. 1996. Sociologies of food and nutrition. Environment, Development, and Public Policy: Public Policy and Social Services. New York: Plenum.
  30. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  31. An early and important book focused on nutrition as a social fact, meaning a community-based concept or value that constrains behavior. Emphasis is on nutrition’s relationship to class and social change at the macro level of the state (using World Bank and United Nations data). The conclusion attends to theoretical questions in studying food and nutrition as social problems.
  32. Find this resource:
  33.  
  34. Murcott, Anne, ed. 1983. The sociology of food and eating: Essays on the sociological significance of food. Gower International Library of Research and Practice. Aldershot, UK: Gower.
  35. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  36. Offers an introductory essay that discusses the sociological significance of researching large-scale food production separately from food and eating. Useful empirical chapters on research conducted in Great Britain on vegetarianism, agribusiness and industry, household and family, the morality of diet and food choices, food during pregnancy, men’s cooking, working-class mothers’ views on food and health, and wedding meals.
  37. Find this resource:
  38.  
  39. Warde, Alan. 1997. Consumption, food, and taste: Culinary antinomies and commodity culture. London: SAGE.
  40. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  41. A theoretically dense book on how taste is expressed through consumption using food habits and expenditure patterns in late-20th-century Great Britain as lenses. The “cultural antimonies” of the subtitle are meaning-based oppositions (such as economy versus extravagance) used in making and representing food choices in both commercial and informal venues.
  42. Find this resource:
  43.  
  44. Textbooks and Encyclopedias
  45.  
  46. Several useful textbooks and encyclopedias of food history and culinary culture have been published in recent years. General textbooks suitable for undergraduate courses include Belasco 2008, Germov and Williams 2008, and Guptill et al. 2013. The edited collections Counihan and Van Esterik 2008 and Watson and Caldwell 2005 offer an empirical breadth of topics of sociological and anthropological interest in food. The encyclopedic collections Davidson 2006, Smith 2004, and Erdkamp 2011, the latter a six-volume set tracing food history from Antiquity to the early 21st century, provide useful starting points for students and scholars beginning new research projects.
  47.  
  48. Belasco, Warren. 2008. Food: The key concepts. Oxford: Berg.
  49. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  50. A useful and clear overview for undergraduate sociology of food classes. Belasco, an American studies scholar, creates (and then unpacks) a “culinary triangle” that eaters must negotiate: identity, responsibility, and convenience. Chapters contain summary points and optional exercises; suggested essay and discussion questions are in a separate section at the end.
  51. Find this resource:
  52.  
  53. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik, eds. 2008. Food and culture: A reader. 2d ed. New York: Routledge.
  54. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55. A good handbook for undergraduate studies that compiles essays and empirical chapters—classic and contemporary—and arranges them into themes: foundations of food studies, gender and consumption, identity politics, and political economy. Originally published in 1997. This second edition is accompanied by new online supplements and an instructor’s manual.
  56. Find this resource:
  57.  
  58. Davidson, Alan. 2006. The Oxford companion to food. 2d ed. Edited by Tom Jaine. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  59. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  60. Contains 2,650 entries on the historical background of different food items.
  61. Find this resource:
  62.  
  63. Erdkamp, Paul, ed. 2011. A cultural history of food. 6 vols. Oxford: Berg.
  64. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  65. A six-volume set with contributions from established food studies scholars. Volumes move through Antiquity, medieval times, the Renaissance, the early modern period, the age of empire, and the modern age.
  66. Find this resource:
  67.  
  68. Germov, John, and Lauren Williams, eds. 2008. A sociology of food and nutrition: The social appetite. 3d ed. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford Univ. Press.
  69. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  70. Reviews sociocultural, political, economic, and philosophical influences that shape food production, distribution, choice, and consumption. Written in a textbook style and updated several times since its initial publication in 1999; each chapter includes key terms, summaries of main arguments, and classroom discussion questions.
  71. Find this resource:
  72.  
  73. Guptill, Amy E., Denise E. Copelton, and Betsy Lucal, 2013. Food and society: Principles and paradoxes. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
  74. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  75. A solid and timely text for undergraduate sociology of food courses. While the text can be a little citation-heavy, chapters cover an array of topics and case studies from competitive eating and ‘food porn’ to industrial food production and food access. Chapters include suggested discussion questions and student activities.
  76. Find this resource:
  77.  
  78. Smith, Andrew F., ed. 2004. The Oxford encyclopedia of food and drink in America. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  79. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  80. Two-volume set of topics on food cultural histories and geographies, ethnic cuisines, corporations, politics and policies, emerging technologies, inventions, holidays, people, and social movements—from “apple pie” to “zombies.”
  81. Find this resource:
  82.  
  83. Watson, James L., and Melissa L. Caldwell, eds. 2005. The cultural politics of food and eating: A reader. Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  84. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  85. This reader brings together previously published research in sociology and anthropology that explores global food markets and cultural identity politics. Chapters include the foundational work of Daniel Miller on Coca-Cola as a metasymbol that integrates into non-American cultures and William Roseberry on gourmet coffee culture and social class.
  86. Find this resource:
  87.  
  88. Data Sources
  89.  
  90. Sociologists of food often need to be creative in collecting data. Many work qualitatively and comparatively, compiling their own datasets out of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews; news, policy-related, or historical documentary sources; or materials such as food magazines, food packaging, cookbooks, advertisements, and so on. Aside from data collected by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), few quantitative datasets that deal directly with food behaviors and the food system exist in the public domain. Other government-collected surveys that touch upon topics related to food and eating include the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the American Time Use Survey, and the Food Attitudes and Behaviors Survey. United Nations data on international food trade and policies are available from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistical Database. The International Food Policy Research Institute shares its reports and data on international food- and agricultural-related policies in developing countries. The Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University collects and publicizes data related to contemporary American food consumption patterns. Although food industry and advertising firms have copious data on which to base their business strategies, that information is largely proprietary and inaccessible to academic researchers. Other general survey organizations sometimes ask questions related to food choices, food behaviors, and eating habits.
  91.  
  92. American Time Use Survey.
  93. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  94. Conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) offers nationally representative data on time spent eating, purchasing, and preparing food and on food-related travel on both weekdays and weekends. The survey’s Eating and Health Module was fielded from 2006 to 2008, and microdata files are also available online. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (cited under US Department of Agriculture) maintains a user guide for this module.
  95. Find this resource:
  96.  
  97. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistical Database.
  98. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  99. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) collects and offers the most comprehensive data available on international food and agriculture for two hundred countries. Statistics are collected on issues of food security, forestry and fishery resources, hunger, land use, agricultural exports and imports, and commodity markets.
  100. Find this resource:
  101.  
  102. Food Attitudes and Behaviors Survey.
  103. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  104. Administered by the National Cancer Institute since 2007, the Food Attitudes and Behaviors Survey (FAB) evaluates factors related to vegetable and fruit intake by American adults: attitudes and beliefs, shopping patterns, consumption, eating behaviors, environmental influences, and physical activity. The survey instrument and codebook are available via the Internet, and raw data must be requested.
  105. Find this resource:
  106.  
  107. International Food Policy Research Institute.
  108. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  109. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) collects survey data related to fighting hunger and poverty in developing countries at household, community, and institutional levels. Researchers can access these data and the IFPRI’s reports on its website or on CD-ROM.
  110. Find this resource:
  111.  
  112. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
  113. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  114. Administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) since the 1960s, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) surveys the health and nutritional status of American children and adults through a nationally representative sample of approximately five thousand persons each year. Importantly, the NHANES combines standardized interview data with physical examinations.
  115. Find this resource:
  116.  
  117. Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
  118. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  119. This nonprofit research and policy-focused organization, housed at Yale University, conducts social science research with the goal of combating obesity in the United States and abroad. The center’s website offers databases of publications, policy reports, and legislation related to food policy as well as podcasts, teaching resources, and community-based program development information.
  120. Find this resource:
  121.  
  122. US Department of Agriculture
  123.  
  124. Numerous datasets applicable for sociologists and social scientists are available through the following offices located within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Agricultural Research Service researches economic and policy issues mostly related to natural resources and rural America. The National Agricultural Statistics Service conducts hundreds of surveys pertinent to US agricultural statistics each year. The Foreign Agricultural Service provides international agricultural trade data, and the Agricultural Marketing Service offers data on domestic and international agricultural marketing and data and reports relevant to the US National Organic Program and direct-to-consumer marketing programs. The Food and Nutrition Service supplies data and reports on the food and nutrition assistance programs that it administers, including the National School Lunch Program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly the Food Stamp Program).
  125.  
  126. Agricultural Marketing Service.
  127. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  128. Data on standardization and grading for US commodity programs (dairy, fruit and vegetable, livestock and seed, cotton, tobacco, and poultry and eggs). A separate branch accredits and administers the National Organic Program.
  129. Find this resource:
  130.  
  131. Agricultural Research Service.
  132. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  133. Provides fact sheets by state and data on rural development, natural resources, and some global agriculture and commodities. The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Food Surveys Research Group monitors food consumption and behaviors in connection with the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (cited under Data Sources).
  134. Find this resource:
  135.  
  136. Food and Nutrition Service.
  137. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  138. Data and reports on nutrition assistance programs.
  139. Find this resource:
  140.  
  141. Foreign Agricultural Service.
  142. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  143. Data on agricultural imports, exports, and trade policies.
  144. Find this resource:
  145.  
  146. National Agricultural Statistics Service.
  147. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  148. Offers US agricultural production statistics and census, demographic, geospatial, and commodity data.
  149. Find this resource:
  150.  
  151. Library Collections
  152.  
  153. Several libraries around the United States have become well regarded for their focused collections of materials related to food and cuisine in American social history. In New York City the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University and the Culinary History research guide at the New York Public Library house expansive collections of culinary history and ephemera, including private collections and historical menus. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Library will be especially useful for sociologists doing historical research on American food policies. The Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University focuses on women’s history and food. The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan includes rare books, documents, and ephemera and curates well-received special exhibits. The Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson and Wales University, housed within a culinary school, collects historical collections related to the food service industry. Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project at Michigan State University consists primarily of archived and digitized cookbooks. The David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection at the University of Alabama will be a terrific resource for scholars working at the intersections of food and African American history.
  154.  
  155. Culinary Arts Museum. Johnson and Wales Univ.
  156. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  157. These archives began with a set of books, menus, and other artifacts donated in 1989. They contain more than 250,000 items donated by prominent chefs, authors, journalists, and restaurateurs. The museum has been called “the Smithsonian Institution of the food service industry.”
  158. Find this resource:
  159.  
  160. Culinary History. New York Public Library.
  161. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  162. An expansive collection related to foods, beverages, and cooking, including more than sixteen thousand cookbooks and twenty-five thousand historical menus (strong for the turn of the 20th century) housed in the Rare Books Division.
  163. Find this resource:
  164.  
  165. David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection at the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library. Univ. of Alabama.
  166. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  167. This collection will especially interest those studying relationships between food and African American culture. The collection includes 450 volumes published between 1827 (with the first book of recipes published by an African American) and 2000.
  168. Find this resource:
  169.  
  170. Fales Library and Special Collections. New York Univ.
  171. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  172. The Food and Cookery collection is the largest of any US research library. The collection documents evolving 20th-century American food and culinary practices with a particular focus on New York City and includes various collections of private papers, culinary-related ephemera, and organizational archives, including those of James Beard and Les Dames d’Escoffier. Researchers must make appointments in advance. Titles may be searched through the online catalogue Bobcat.
  173. Find this resource:
  174.  
  175. Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project. Michigan State Univ.
  176. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  177. This project’s website offers page images from seventy-six digitized historic cookbooks and has been selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials. The Michigan State University Cookery Collection consists of more than ten thousand cookbooks.
  178. Find this resource:
  179.  
  180. Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. William L. Clements Library, Univ. of Michigan.
  181. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  182. Besides books, this collection includes more than twenty thousand documents and materials from the 16th to the 20th centuries; curates rotating special exhibits; and covers a number of subjects, including regional foodways, the history of food advertising, charity cookbooks, and war cookery. The Clements Library offers a variety of fellowships for short-term research visits.
  183. Find this resource:
  184.  
  185. National Agricultural Library. United States Department of Agriculture.
  186. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  187. The USDA’s library and archives. The website contains a database of citations to agricultural articles, books, and electronic resources accessible through the online catalogue AGRICOLA. Main archives and collections are located in the Washington, DC, area, and appointments should be made in advance for access to the library’s rare and special collections.
  188. Find this resource:
  189.  
  190. Schlesinger Library. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard Univ.
  191. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  192. The Schlesinger’s culinary holdings began through collections recording women’s work and domestic lives in US history. The holdings include fifteen thousand titles, many of them rare, covering culinary history, culinary professions, domestic history and household management, and the role of food in American gender history and culture. Collections of private papers include those of Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, and Elizabeth David.
  193. Find this resource:
  194.  
  195. Journals
  196.  
  197. Sociological studies of food are appearing with increasing regularity in general and rural sociology journals as well as specialized journals focused on interdisciplinary food research and scholarship. Two of the most prominent specialized journals published in the United States are Food, Culture, and Society and Agriculture and Human Values; the first leans toward food studies, whereas the latter takes a more food systems–oriented approach. Gastronomica combines scholarly work on food with articles and art appealing to humanist and general audiences interested in food. There is also much international research on food, and many journals are edited outside the United States. Some well-known journals include Food and Foodways, Appetite, Food Policy, the British Food Journal, and the International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food.
  198.  
  199. Agriculture and Human Values. 1984–.
  200. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  201. The journal of the Agriculture and Human Values Society. Publishes interdisciplinary research on past, current, and alternative food production and agricultural and environmental systems. The journal’s aim is to provide links between liberal arts and agricultural disciplines, especially rural sociology.
  202. Find this resource:
  203.  
  204. Appetite. 1980–.
  205. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  206. An international journal that specializes in behavioral nutrition, dietary attitudes, and practices that tie to the physiology of consumption, food attitudes, and marketing exposure. The journal mainly publishes short articles, book reviews, and conference abstracts.
  207. Find this resource:
  208.  
  209. British Food Journal. 1899–.
  210. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. Interdisciplinary publishing of food-related research, both theoretical and applied, with frequent special issues on themed topics. This journal is an especially useful resource for understanding current issues in the global food industry.
  212. Find this resource:
  213.  
  214. Food and Foodways. 1985–.
  215. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  216. Publishes interdisciplinary peer-reviewed articles and essays on the culture and history of food and the roles food plays in human relations, especially folklore.
  217. Find this resource:
  218.  
  219. Food, Culture, and Society. 1996–.
  220. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  221. An interdisciplinary journal published by the Association for the Study of Food and Society. It publishes peer-reviewed articles on topics of food politics, culture, media, history, and culinary consumption and reflections on methodological and pedagogical issues and book reviews.
  222. Find this resource:
  223.  
  224. Food Policy. 1975–.
  225. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  226. A multidisciplinary journal that publishes empirical research and theoretical essays on policy issues for the food sector across developing and developed countries, including trade, security, environment, and food safety.
  227. Find this resource:
  228.  
  229. Gastronomica. 2001–.
  230. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Offers food-focused nonfiction essays, fiction, poetry, and art related to the critical, theoretical, and cultural impact of food as cuisine. This is a visually attractive publication with many photographs and color images that is appealing to a more general readership.
  232. Find this resource:
  233.  
  234. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food. 1991–.
  235. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  236. Published in the United Kingdom, this journal includes interdisciplinary articles and often sponsors debates related to agriculture and agricultural change, with contributions from leading sociologists of food and agricultural production.
  237. Find this resource:
  238.  
  239. Classic Works
  240.  
  241. Scholarly underpinnings of today’s sociology of food include classic research from anthropologists and cultural historians. Topics structuring this contributive work include structuralist analyses of food taboos, symbolism, social hierarchies, gender, and the social organization of food practices and preferences across classes, nations, and cultures. These works are discussed here for the frequency with which they are referenced by and contribute to shaping the ideas of sociologists of food.
  242.  
  243. Anthropological Foundations
  244.  
  245. Sociologists of food who work in areas related to culture often rely on foundational anthropological theories. Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1979a, Lévi-Strauss 1979b) is widely renowned for his semantic and structural analyses of food as myth and as a vehicle for codifying universal structures of human thought. Marshall Sahlins (Sahlins 1990) and Mary Douglas (Douglas 2000, Douglas 1972, Douglas 1984) also famously adopted a structuralist view of foods and meals as symbolic codes or texts with rules about the social order to be “deciphered” through analysis.
  246.  
  247. Douglas, Mary. 1972. Deciphering a meal. Daedalus 101.1: 61–81.
  248. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  249. An oft-cited essay that structurally analyzes the “proper meal” and its derivations (using the “traditional” British meal as the object of study). Available online by subscription.
  250. Find this resource:
  251.  
  252. Douglas, Mary. 2000. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.
  253. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  254. Investigates food prohibitions as maintaining symbolic boundaries rather than regulating health, showing concern with the human component of the meal process. Originally published in 1966.
  255. Find this resource:
  256.  
  257. Douglas, Mary, ed. 1984. Food in the social order: Studies of food and festivities in three American communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
  258. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  259. An edited collection that explores how food patterning is learned from shared cultural experiences and signals membership in three different ethnic and class-based social groups.
  260. Find this resource:
  261.  
  262. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1979a. The origin of table manners. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row.
  263. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  264. Expands the author’s earlier structuralist analyses of South American native mythology to considerations of eating and appetite practices as indicative of social rules and order.
  265. Find this resource:
  266.  
  267. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1979b. The raw and the cooked. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Mythologiques. New York: Octagon.
  268. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  269. A foundational piece of structural and linguistic anthropology and part of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques series, this work offers structuralist models of the rules and conventions that govern the ways food items and cooking practices in Native American mythology are classified by social norms and expectations and deeper social structures.
  270. Find this resource:
  271.  
  272. Sahlins, Marshall. 1990. Food as symbolic code. In Culture and society: Contemporary debates. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, 94–101. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  273. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  274. Within his extensive body of work, Sahlins examines the symbolic values and cultural-moral orders attached to different animals as, or not as, foodstuffs. Making distinctions between the culinary value and taboo of eating different animals—namely, eating cows versus horses or dogs—he explains human food habits as a reflection of cultural rather than utilitarian reason.
  275. Find this resource:
  276.  
  277. Cultural Histories of Food Production and Consumption
  278.  
  279. Cultural historians built a solid foundation for modern food scholarship. Some are more sweeping and others more focused in their claims; both types are full of useful, sociologically relevant information. Examples of important resources in this area highlight issues of identity and cultural norms (Visser 1986), immigration (Gabaccia 1998), and political and corporate influences on the food system (Levenstein 1993).
  280.  
  281. Gabaccia, Donna R. 1998. We are what we eat: Ethnic food and the making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  282. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  283. A readable and interesting look at ethnic food integration and influences on American food and eating habits. Also discusses mass corporatization of these foods into American food culture.
  284. Find this resource:
  285.  
  286. Levenstein, Harvey. 1993. Paradox of plenty: A social history of eating in modern America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  287. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  288. Charts the rise and fall of economic, political, and cultural influences on American eating habits from the Great Depression to the Ronald Reagan era. The“paradox” of the title is the accounting for hunger in a time of agricultural bounty.
  289. Find this resource:
  290.  
  291. Visser, Margaret. 1986. Much depends on dinner: The extraordinary history and mythology, allure and obsessions, perils and taboos, of an ordinary meal. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
  292. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  293. A cultural history of dinnertime that focuses on how and why we eat as we do and that argues, in a reader-friendly manner, that food rules (and their teaching) are necessary for social group identity and continuity.
  294. Find this resource:
  295.  
  296. Contributions outside the United States
  297.  
  298. Two important works by British savants in the early 1980s, Goody 1982 and Mennell 1996, set an agenda for materialist, comparative, and empirically focused case studies of food and cuisine within sociology. Bourdieu 1984 similarly straddles anthropology and sociology in theorizing how class structures underlay food practices and tastes in mid- to late-20th-century French society. Fischler 1990 also compiles massive amounts of data on French eating choices and habits.
  299.  
  300. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  301. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  302. This foundational tome uses empirical food consumption patterns and choices from different French social classes to explore the social distribution and class reproduction of tastes. The essence of Bourdieu’s model is that of internalized social and cultural capital as distinguishing class status. Food is a key social agent of this important and oft-referenced theory.
  303. Find this resource:
  304.  
  305. Fischler, Claude. 1990. L’homnivore: Le goût, la cuisine et le corps. Paris: Jacob.
  306. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. Fischler, a French sociologist, has devoted his career to empirically analyzing French eating habits, choices, and anxieties, coining the term gastro-anomie. This text, published fifteen years before Michael Pollan’s best-selling Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2006) and addressing similar questions, focuses on the “omnivore’s paradox” or social responses to the biological need for diversified nutrients in a rapidly changing food environment.
  308. Find this resource:
  309.  
  310. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking, cuisine, and class: A study in comparative sociology. Themes in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  311. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511607745Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  312. The author challenges conventional hierarchical notions of “high” and “popular” cuisine put forth by Western cultural understandings with this study of culinary patterns in Ghanaian tribes, in which wealth translates as access to more of the same food rather than dividing into elite and peasant cuisines.
  313. Find this resource:
  314.  
  315. Mennell, Stephen. 1996. All manners of food: Eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present. 2d ed. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
  316. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  317. An impressive and famous comparison of historical and political differences shaping the historical development of food cultures and taste standards across British and French contexts. Originally published in 1985.
  318. Find this resource:
  319.  
  320. Food and Agricultural Production
  321.  
  322. In the early 21st century more than twenty million Americans work in the food domain, from agricultural production and processing to distribution and retail. Research on food and agricultural systems within rural sociology programs gained particular strength beginning in the late 1970s, with scholarly centers developing at the University of Missouri, the University of Wisconsin, and Cornell University. These hubs have crucially shown how food commodities and agricultural industry concentration function within national and transnational market and governance systems. In 1978 an International Sociological Association research committee formalized the sociology of agriculture as a distinct research area. “Food” was added to the group’s name in 1987 (making it the Research Committee on the Sociology of Agriculture and Food). This vein of research and theory draws primarily from schools of thought in environmental sociology, world systems theory, and neo-Marxist analyses and theories. Scholars working in these areas, including many highlighted here, have necessarily recognized that national agricultural policies operate in the shifting contexts of the world economy, transnational migration, the social organization of agricultural production, and transnational corporations. Additionally, social problems have long accompanied behind-the-scenes work in the food industry around the globe, from the (often negative) physical-environmental effects of agriculture to the farm labor system to the work of preparing, serving, and cleaning up in restaurants and food retail establishments on the retail side of the equation. In the United States post–North American Free Trade Agreement social economics have seen demographic shifts and transnational migration to new destinations, especially rural areas, for work in agriculture, meatpacking, and poultry processing. Sociologists of work, rural communities, occupational segregation by race and ethnicity, labor organizing, social networks and labor recruitment, and neoliberalism’s impacts on local economies will be interested in these themes.
  323.  
  324. Classic Statements
  325.  
  326. In the 1980s and 1990s sociologists began addressing questions focused on the systematic analyses of global processes underlying food system modernization and agrarian change in the 20th century. Works such as Friedmann 1982 and Friedmann and McMichael 1989, discuss state-level politics and restructuring of national agricultural models, redefining them as global “agrofood regimes” to account for the new roles of private global regulation initiatives and transnational agribusiness corporations. Edited volumes such as McMichael 1994 and Bonanno, et al. 1994 further these insights. Structural changes in agriculture have also been documented, analyzed, and critiqued by leading rural and political-economic sociologists in works such as Heffernan 1972; Friedland, et al. 1981; Kloppenburg 2004; and Buttel, et al. 1990. These studies’ trajectories have laid important groundwork for more recent studies of agricultural privatization, commodity value chains, land rights and development, social problems of risk, genomic politics and biopolitics, and transnational food-based resistance movements.
  327.  
  328. Bonanno, Alessandro, Lawrence Busch, William Friedland, Lourdes Gouveia, and Enzo Mingione, eds. 1994. From Columbus to ConAgra: The globalization of agriculture and food. Rural America. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.
  329. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  330. A far-reaching overview of divisions of labor and capital in the globalization of agrofood regimes, especially in regard to the emerging role and power of transnational agribusiness corporations.
  331. Find this resource:
  332.  
  333. Buttel, Frederick H., Olaf F. Larson, and Gilbert W. Gillespie Jr. 1990. The sociology of agriculture. Contributions in Sociology 88. New York: Greenwood.
  334. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. Comprehensive overview of ninety years of rural sociological research on agricultural topics organized by temporal periods of schools of inquiry.
  336. Find this resource:
  337.  
  338. Friedland, William H., Amy E. Barton, and Robert J. Thomas. 1981. Manufacturing green gold: Capital, labor, and technology in the lettuce industry. Arnold and Caroline Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  339. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  340. Bridges sociology of agriculture and food with rural sociology in applying neo-Marxist theory to corporate evolution and power concentration in the iceberg lettuce industry in the United States.
  341. Find this resource:
  342.  
  343. Friedmann, Harriet. 1982. The political economy of food: The rise and fall of the postwar international food order. American Journal of Sociology 88:S248–S286.
  344. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  345. A historical analysis of the post–World War II rise of an international food order based on food aid from the United States to agrarian countries and the social consequences of these policies. Available online by subscription.
  346. Find this resource:
  347.  
  348. Friedmann, Harriet, and Philip McMichael. 1989. Agriculture and the state system: The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia Ruralis 29.2: 93–117.
  349. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9523.1989.tb00360.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  350. Looks at the role of agriculture in nation-state formation and policy making in global context. Introduces the concept of food regime, which links international relations of food production and consumption from different time periods with different characteristics of capital accumulation and transformation post-1870. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  351. Find this resource:
  352.  
  353. Heffernan, William D. 1972. Sociological dimensions of agricultural structures in the United States. Sociologia Ruralis 12.2: 481–499.
  354. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9523.1972.tb00156.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. Part of a larger body of work that documents and critiques structural changes in agrifood commodity chains, such as the evolution of contract farming and vertical integrated production, transformed power relations, and social effects and consequences for farmers, primarily among livestock operations. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  356. Find this resource:
  357.  
  358. Kloppenburg, Jack Ralph, Jr. 2004. First the seed: The political economy of plant biotechnology, 1492–2000. 2d ed. Science and Technology in Society. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
  359. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  360. A landmark study of the intersections between capitalism and agriculture first published in 1988. In-depth examination of plant breeding, the seed industry, and emergent biotechnology firms.
  361. Find this resource:
  362.  
  363. McMichael, Philip, ed. 1994. The global restructuring of agro-food systems. Food Systems and Agrarian Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
  364. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  365. An edited volume of essays by prominent rural and development sociologists that locates transformations of food and agricultural systems in questions of global political economy, state-level restructuring, and international capital markets.
  366. Find this resource:
  367.  
  368. Modern Perspectives on Food Systems
  369.  
  370. Work in the early 21st century has continued to build on questions and consequences of food system modernization and industrialization, moving to closer examinations of different food industries in this larger theoretical paradigm. Lobao and Meyer 2001 provides a solid review of the evolution of farms and farming communities in the United States, pointing to a dearth of general sociological attention to this important population. Winders 2009 focuses on the policy-based ebbs and flows of three major American commodity programs. Narrowing in further to vexing aspects within meat industries, Striffler 2005 and Warren 2007 exemplify work on food systems’ integration with power and control.
  371.  
  372. Lobao, Linda, and Katherine Meyer. 2001. The great agricultural transition: Crisis, change, and social consequences of twentieth century US farming. Annual Review of Sociology 27:103–124.
  373. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.103Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  374. Chronicles the 20th-century exodus from farms and farming communities and notes a lack of sociological attention, outside of specialty publishing outlets, to farmers in the early 21st century. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  375. Find this resource:
  376.  
  377. Striffler, Steve. 2005. Chicken: The dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
  378. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. Chronicles the dramatic rise of chicken as an industry and as part of the American diet and chicken’s equally dramatic drop in price. Ethnographic work was conducted in a large poultry processing plant and considers the poultry industry’s growing dependence on Latin American immigrant labor.
  380. Find this resource:
  381.  
  382. Warren, Wilson J. 2007. Tied to the great packing machine: The Midwest and meatpacking. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press.
  383. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  384. With a lens that reflects Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906), this book examines how meatpacking shaped cultural, economic, community, and environmental development across the Midwest. The book also looks at changing patterns of meat consumption and concerns about animal welfare.
  385. Find this resource:
  386.  
  387. Winders, Bill. 2009. The politics of food supply: U.S. agricultural policy in the world economy. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
  388. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  389. Follows the theories of Karl Polyani regarding the dialectic between market forces and government regulation. Empirically traces US agricultural policy decisions on three commodity programs from the New Deal (cotton, corn, and wheat) through the passage of the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act in 1996 and highlights relationships between US agricultural policies and other nations’ policies.
  390. Find this resource:
  391.  
  392. Food and Social Inequality
  393.  
  394. Earlier and more recent sociologists of food have focused analytic lenses on gender, racial, and class inequities in food practices, preferences, and work. The overview texts (see General Overviews) all contain one or more chapters about inequalities in social practices and patterns related to food and eating. In some such studies food itself is the empirical subject of investigation. In others food serves as a case, or indicator, of other social practices, patterns, or trends. Although gender, race, and class are inextricably linked, they are separated here simply to highlight key scholarly contributions in each area. Sociologists of food and inequality will be well served by relying on very good research conducted by scholars in neighboring social science disciplines: anthropology, American studies, geography, public health, cultural history, gender studies, African American studies, environmental studies, and others. The works listed here are a sampling of social science work that will prove useful for sociologists and students.
  395.  
  396. Gender
  397.  
  398. Feminist perspectives have played a large role in generating sociological attention to gendered power relationships in food’s production, service, and consumption. One important theme in this literature is the body. Lupton 1996 sets theoretical groundwork for understanding the social construction of various foods as gendered and for linking the physical body, emotion work, and nutrition and diet campaigns. Sobal and Maurer 1999 similarly addresses body weight issues as social problems, focusing on fat and obesity. Oliver 2006 offers a political science viewpoint on the politics of fat. A second theme is how men and women “do gender” through food, such as consuming gender-appropriate food or cooking at home (and all that it entails). Charles and Kerr 1988 provides one of the first detailed qualitative looks at cultural assumptions about food provision for men, women, and children in 1980s England. DeVault 1991 theorizes gendered efforts and care in “invisible” food work as caring work in the United States. A third related theme traces and analyzes femininity and masculinity in food work. Theophano 2002 aggregates three centuries of cookbooks to show how they help construct women’s lives and social experiences. Shapiro 2004 focuses scholarly attention on food and gender roles in a particularly emblematic decade, the 1950s. Meat is recognized as especially gendered; Sobal 2005 examines its links to ideas about masculinity and Adams 2010 to sexual politics more broadly.
  399.  
  400. Adams, Carol J. 2010. The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory. New York: Continuum.
  401. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  402. A landmark tome for students of animal rights and veganism as a belief system. Argues that vegetarianism should be considered an essential part of feminism because of meat’s gendered political associations with patriarchy and violence.
  403. Find this resource:
  404.  
  405. Charles, Nickie, and Marion Kerr. 1988. Women, food, and families. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
  406. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. A landmark study that examines food practices and beliefs within families using data from interviews and time diaries with two hundred mothers in England in the 1980s. Findings include gendered social concerns about family health and diet and about providing a “proper meal” as a fundamental role in domestic life.
  408. Find this resource:
  409.  
  410. DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the family: The social organization of caring as gendered work. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  411. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  412. In this “institutional ethnography” of lower- and middle-class mothers in late-1980s Chicago, DeVault contends that food work is tied to ideologies of wife and mother and of how women define and produce family life. She demonstrates how food work can draw women into subordinate household relations and give them social agency and pleasure. A classic text.
  413. Find this resource:
  414.  
  415. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the body, and the self. London: SAGE.
  416. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  417. Details the ways food takes on embodied moral meanings related to risk, self-control, consumption, emotion, and health.
  418. Find this resource:
  419.  
  420. Oliver, J. Eric. 2006. Fat politics: The real story behind America’s obesity epidemic. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  421. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  422. A political scientist’s approach to the 21st-century politics of obesity that will be useful for sociologists of contemporary food and consumption politics. Oliver asserts that concern for obesity is fueled by economic and political causes and by culturally and historically stigmatizing attitudes toward fatness rather than real concerns with health and wellness.
  423. Find this resource:
  424.  
  425. Shapiro, Laura. 2004. Something from the oven: Reinventing dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking.
  426. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. Analyzes the post–World War II dinner table, the growth of cookbooks and other domestic guides, and the influence of convenience foods (and the companies that produce and market them) on the American diet. An important and detailed work for cultural-historical scholarship on the American relationships among food, family, and gender roles.
  428. Find this resource:
  429.  
  430. Sobal, Jeffery. 2005. Men, meat, and marriage: Models of masculinity. Food and Foodways 13.1–2: 135–158.
  431. DOI: 10.1080/07409710590915409Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  432. Studies masculinity through “doing meat” as an archetypal male food and as a contested food object within marriages. Suggests the activation of multiple gendered cultural scripts about food choices. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  433. Find this resource:
  434.  
  435. Sobal, Jeffery, and Donna Maurer, eds. 1999. Weighty issues: Fatness and thinness as social problems. Social Problems and Social Issues. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
  436. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  437. One of the first volumes to look at body weight concerns and issues, especially those related to fat and obesity, as social problems. Chapters include empirical analyses of weight control among children, self-surveillance, the diet industry, and the size acceptance movement.
  438. Find this resource:
  439.  
  440. Theophano, Janet. 2002. Eat my words: Reading women’s lives through the cookbooks they wrote. New York: Palgrave.
  441. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  442. Explores cookbooks from the 17th to the early 21st centuries as primary texts to show how women have used them in structuring their lives, from self-education to celebrating cultural heritage to political activism. An especially good resource for researchers interested in using documents, books, and ephemera as data.
  443. Find this resource:
  444.  
  445. Race/Ethnicity
  446.  
  447. Gender inequalities in food and foodways frequently intersect with race and ethnicity. Sociologists studying race and ethnic inequality often look at food production and consumption, from fields and factories to restaurants and retail operations, and at foods’ ties to identity politics. Barndt 2002 uses the tomato as a way to link racial inequalities in food systems from field to retail. Witt 1999 looks at the politics of racial identity and food for African Americans through the lens of soul food. Williams-Forson 2006 offers a cultural perspective on female black racial stereotypes in popular culture. These issues also manifest materially in stark inequalities of food availability and consumption (see Social Change, Activism, and Ethical Consumerism).
  448.  
  449. Barndt, Deborah. 2002. Tangled routes: Women, work, and globalization on the tomato trail. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Ethnographically traces the tomato’s path from Mexican fields to fast-food restaurants and supermarkets in Canada using gender, race, and globalization as orienting frames. Sheds important light on the global food economy’s interconnected racialization, feminization, skill segmentation, and lowered wages. A solid precursor to Barry Estabrook’s popular nonfiction book Tomatoland (Kansas City, MO: McMeel, 2011).
  452. Find this resource:
  453.  
  454. Williams-Forson, Psyche A. 2006. Building houses out of chicken legs: Black women, food, and power. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
  455. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  456. Documents and analyzes stereotypes of black women in food images across magazines, literature, film, historic documents, and popular culture from an American studies perspective.
  457. Find this resource:
  458.  
  459. Witt, Doris. 1999. Black hunger: Food and the politics of U.S. identity. Race and American Culture. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  460. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  461. This book uses the popularity of soul food among the black middle class in the 1960s and 1970s to explore how racial and gender stereotypes are enacted and challenged through popular food images and discourse. Revised edition, Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (2004).
  462. Find this resource:
  463.  
  464. Social Class
  465.  
  466. Many sociologists interested in food and inequality in the early 21st century are simultaneously interested in issues of class and social stratification. Poppendieck 1986, Poppendieck 1999, and Poppendieck 2010 blazed trails, analyzing the social history of food access and governmental provisioning policies for both adults and children and their ties to politics. Rank and Hirschl 1995 and Rank and Hirschl 2005 exemplify sociological questions and concerns about hunger and food stamp participation through their multidecade research trajectory. Social class inequalities in food consumption also manifest in middle- and upper-middle-class cultural concerns, as analyzed in Glassner 2008 and exemplified in Johnston and Baumann 2010.
  467.  
  468. Glassner, Barry. 2008. The gospel of food: Why we should stop worrying and enjoy what we eat. New York: HarperCollins.
  469. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  470. A skeptical scrutiny and evaluation of fads, claims, beliefs, and conventional wisdom in middle- and upper-middle-class American food culture.
  471. Find this resource:
  472.  
  473. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. 2010. Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape. Cultural Spaces. New York: Routledge.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Blends interviews with self-professed “foodies” and content analysis of contemporary American food journalism to advance understanding of how food as cultural consumption sustains elite status and reproduces inequality in food consumption practices.
  476. Find this resource:
  477.  
  478. Poppendieck, Janet. 1986. Breadlines knee-deep in wheat: Food assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
  479. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  480. Connects two historically important themes for sociologists of food—hunger and farming in the 20th-century United States—by examining the linked development of national food assistance programs and the farm lobby.
  481. Find this resource:
  482.  
  483. Poppendieck, Janet. 1999. Sweet charity? Emergency food and the end of entitlement. New York: Penguin.
  484. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  485. Scrutinizes the expansion and work of emergency food and hunger relief programs and social and political constraints upon them.
  486. Find this resource:
  487.  
  488. Poppendieck, Janet. 2010. Free for all: Fixing school food in America. California Studies in Food and Culture. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  489. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  490. This book has played an important role in early-21st-century critiques of the United States’ National School Lunch Program regarding its political history and corporate ties and the general nutritional state of foods provided to children.
  491. Find this resource:
  492.  
  493. Rank, Mark R., and Thomas A. Hirschl. 1995. The food stamp program and hunger: Constructing three different claims. In Eating agendas: Food and nutrition as social problems. Edited by Donna Maurer and Jeffery Sobal, 241–258. Social Problems and Social Issues. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
  494. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. Analyzes participation, duration, and claims regarding food stamp use, including misunderstandings and purposeful avoidance by some potential beneficiaries.
  496. Find this resource:
  497.  
  498. Rank, Mark R., and Thomas A. Hirschl. 2005. Likelihood of using food stamps during the adulthood years. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 37.3: 137–146.
  499. DOI: 10.1016/S1499-4046(06)60268-6Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  500. Uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1968 to 1997 to show that slightly more than half of all Americans between twenty and sixty-five years old will receive food stamps (administered in all states as an electronic benefit transfer debit card since 2004) at some point during their lifetimes, with significant effects for race and education. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  501. Find this resource:
  502.  
  503. Food Markets and Food Nations
  504.  
  505. Markets for food production and consumption have always traveled alongside people and have always transformed cultures and societies in the process. Today the food system is truly global, as contextualized in Inglis and Gimlin 2009, among other works. This globalization provides vehicles for identity construction or rejection through food choice, with those choices marking group membership within national and transnational flows. Mintz 1985 is considered a classic work in this regard. Pilcher 1998 and Ferguson 2004 are important contributions for thinking about the development and cultural power of national identity. In some cases, it is foods themselves that move between points of origin and points of consumption. In others it is people and businesses that move, introducing new practices and ideas and creating new meanings for local products in the context of internal and external markets. The global spread of fast-food restaurants and American food icons, epitomized by companies such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, has been a well-studied phenomenon, exemplified in Ritzer 1993, Fantasia 1995, and Watson 1997. Modern food production continues to have provisional impacts on ideas about global and local markets and cultural identities, as shown in Trubek 2008 and DeSoucey 2010. These works represent only a sample of what has been published on these topics since the 1980s.
  506.  
  507. DeSoucey, Michaela. 2010. Gastronationalism: Food traditions and authenticity politics in the European Union. American Sociological Review 75.3: 432–455.
  508. DOI: 10.1177/0003122410372226Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  509. Examines the macro- and micropolitics of national identity for artisanal food producers in pan-national Europe. Analyzes the European Union’s program for designation of origin labeling and the case of foie gras in France to highlight social contention with pan-national cultural integration. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  510. Find this resource:
  511.  
  512. Fantasia, Rick. 1995. Fast food in France. Theory and Society 24.2: 201–243.
  513. DOI: 10.1007/BF00993397Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  514. Considers the expansion of fast-food restaurants throughout the 1980s and 1990s in France, a national cultural context that at the time seemed anathema to such an institution.
  515. Find this resource:
  516.  
  517. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2004. Accounting for taste: The triumph of French cuisine. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. Chronicles how “French cuisine” and “gastronomy” were invented as a Bourdieuian cultural field at the end of the 19th century and served as mobilizing vehicles for nationalist identity construction strategically linked to cultural and political ideology.
  520. Find this resource:
  521.  
  522. Inglis, David, and Debra Gimlin, eds. 2009. The globalization of food. Oxford: Berg.
  523. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  524. Chapters point out some of the many ways food affects and is affected by global social relations of culture, markets, and politics. The editors’ introduction especially provides a thorough sociological overview of these issues in attempting to bridge different strands of the literature on food and society.
  525. Find this resource:
  526.  
  527. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking.
  528. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  529. One of the first books to investigate the extensive social history of a single food, setting the stage for a proliferation of books in this vein. Mintz, an anthropologist, explores the power of sugar as a commodity tied to global trade and politics in the Atlantic world and its evolution as a cultural marker of class identity.
  530. Find this resource:
  531.  
  532. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 1998. Que vivan los tamales! Food and the making of Mexican identity. Diálogos. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
  533. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  534. Examines the origins and creation of a national Mexican cuisine as it was used to forge a unified Mexican national identity, illuminated by contests between elite (Europeanized) culinary tastes and regional, corn-based diets and dishes.
  535. Find this resource:
  536.  
  537. Ritzer, George. 1993. The McDonaldization of society: An investigation into the changing character of contemporary social life. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. The “McDonaldization” thesis has been a powerful one for teaching and research: that the fast-food restaurant—epitomized by McDonald’s—represents a contemporary societal paradigm characterized by efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) later expanded this idea of McDonald’s restaurants growing to shape the social organization of choices and expectations in American consumer culture.
  540. Find this resource:
  541.  
  542. Trubek, Amy B. 2008. The taste of place: A cultural journey into terroir. California Studies in Food and Culture. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  543. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  544. Applies the French concept of terroir—foods’ embodiment of place-based landscapes, peoples, and cultural practices—to food production initiatives in the United States.
  545. Find this resource:
  546.  
  547. Watson, James L., ed. 1997. Golden arches east: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  548. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  549. A key contribution to the globalization of markets and food consumption canon. Looks at how McDonald’s restaurants penetrated several East Asian consumer markets and in turn shaped new cultural practices—such as learning to stand in line or choosing bread versus rice for a meal—in those countries.
  550. Find this resource:
  551.  
  552. Food Politics
  553.  
  554. Food systems and politics are shaped by moral, economic, and political concerns. These include the global diffusion of modern food and culinary styles that favor agribusiness, industrial food production, and fast or mass food consumption; the paradox of simultaneous food abundance and insecurity; concerns about knowledge, risk, and the power and reach of corporate interests in food production; and the safety and environmental impacts of the foods being produced and the welfare of the animals used in their production. Scholars and activists alike well recognize the ways interconnected politics and markets can both hinder and assist the institutionalization of these practices and goals.
  555.  
  556. Contested Production Systems
  557.  
  558. Research perspectives reveal the contested nature of food politics and food systems and the sometimes contradictory policies that such systems condone. Nestle 2007 is considered a bible of food studies scholarship and is an important starting point for researchers interested in how American national food policy is shaped and has affected markets. Belasco 2007 illustrates how the food industry has transformed in response to and capitalized on 1960s countercultural challenges and social claims. Lien and Nerlich 2004 is a collection of chapters that broadens sociological ideas about food politics to both international contexts and arenas not traditionally considered political. Globalization and neoliberal market structures are also implicated in rising food costs and food insecurity, as shown in Carolan 2011. Criticisms of production systems often incorporate suggested alternatives for social reform (Allen 1993, Lyson 2004). Attention has also been paid to the institutionalization of reformist models (Howard 2009) and cooptation of these models by conventional food systems (Guthman 2004), showing that contests over food systems do not cease and demonstrating the need for future social and sociological research.
  559.  
  560. Allen, Patricia, ed. 1993. Food for the future: Conditions and contradictions of sustainability. New York: Wiley.
  561. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  562. A landmark volume that discusses the goals, values, institutional structures, and obstacles engaged with the concept of sustainability (a ubiquitous term in the lexicons of the sociology of food) as an agenda for social reform.
  563. Find this resource:
  564.  
  565. Belasco, Warren J. 2007. Appetite for change: How the counterculture took on the food industry. 2d ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
  566. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  567. This important book establishes strong historical connections among 1960s countercultural social movements, developments in activism concerning health and consumption, and organized resistance to the American mass food industry. The work also established Belasco as a key voice in the field of food studies.
  568. Find this resource:
  569.  
  570. Carolan, Michael. 2011. The real cost of cheap food. London: Earthscan.
  571. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  572. A rich account of the invisible costs in the global food system of the early 21st century, including political, economic, cultural, health, and environmental impacts.
  573. Find this resource:
  574.  
  575. Guthman, Julie. 2004. Agrarian dreams: The paradox of organic farming in California. California Studies in Critical Human Geography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  576. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  577. A scholarly challenge to the positive virtues attached to organic food and farming. Analyzes how the California organic industry (the largest in the United States) has become corporate and industrial, mirroring conventional production systems. Also a solid critique of the agrarian ideal of organic in relation to labor and land issues.
  578. Find this resource:
  579.  
  580. Howard, Philip H. 2009. Consolidation in the North American organic food processing sector, 1997 to 2007. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 16.1: 13–30.
  581. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  582. Alongside the National Organic Program (1990) and institutionalization of a national organic certification label by the United States Department of Agriculture (2002) came significant market shifts in production and distribution. Howard’s research offers an important perspective on inequalities, consumer interest, and market consolidation in the food system.
  583. Find this resource:
  584.  
  585. Lien, Marianne Elisabeth, and Brigitte Nerlich, eds. 2004. The politics of food. Oxford: Berg.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. Chapters consider the diverse interests and regulatory frameworks enrolled as food items make their way from producer to consumer. Food for thought includes the role of the consumer-citizen in managing risk and safety, transnational activism, and the implementation of global standards.
  588. Find this resource:
  589.  
  590. Lyson, Thomas A. 2004. Civic agriculture: Reconnecting farm, food, and community. Civil Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Medford, MA: Tufts Univ. Press.
  591. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  592. Oft-cited by development and community sociologists. Chronicles how agricultural production in the 20th century followed pathways similar to those of other industrial sectors in terms of commodification, consolidation, and closures. Argues for “civic agriculture” as a way to reembed food and agricultural production in community-based systems, such as farmers markets and community-supported agriculture.
  593. Find this resource:
  594.  
  595. Nestle, Marion. 2007. Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health. Rev. ed. California Studies in Food and Culture. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  596. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  597. This book examines and deconstructs the evolution of federal food and dietary policy in the 20th-century United States from debates over federal dietary guidelines to the influence of professional lobbies to food choices offered in schools. Originally published in 2002.
  598. Find this resource:
  599.  
  600. Social Change, Activism, and Ethical Consumerism
  601.  
  602. The early 2000s witnessed growth in scholarly interest and debates concerning alternative food production, movements, and consumption, mirroring the increased groundswell of initiatives, including the local food movement, farmers markets, organic and air trade certification programs, urban and community-based agriculture, and food justice imperatives (Hinrichs and Lyson 2007; Wright and Middendorf 2008; Goodman, et al. 2012). Activists emerged at multiple institutional levels and mobilized around a variety of issues, from vegetarianism (Maurer 2002) to schools (Morgan and Sonnino 2010) to international biotechnology (Schurman and Munro 2010). Connections to issues of social inequality and food justice pervade this scholarship, for example, Raynolds, et al. 2007 and Alkon and Agyeman 2011. Their supporters often implicate consumers’ choices in framing these initiatives as solutions to social problems and impacts caused by agriculture’s industrialization and globalization and related government policies.
  603.  
  604. Alkon, Alison Hope, and Julian Agyeman, eds. 2011. Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability. Food, Health, and the Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  605. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  606. Combines insights from environmental justice scholars, critical race theorists, and food studies scholars to advance arguments on how race and class inequalities have shaped, pervaded, and been institutionalized within the food system and within efforts to improve it.
  607. Find this resource:
  608.  
  609. Goodman, David, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Michael K. Goodman. 2012. Alternative food networks: Knowledge, practice, and politics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
  610. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  611. Offers a theoretically rich and critical review of the growth of alternative food production-consumption networks and relationships between food and environmental activism in the United States and western Europe.
  612. Find this resource:
  613.  
  614. Hinrichs, C. Clare, and Thomas A. Lyson, eds. 2007. Remaking the North American food system: Strategies for sustainability. Our Sustainable Future. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.
  615. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  616. Discusses interest in and efforts to create alternative food production and provisioning systems in ways that affect social, environmental, and economic development conditions for food producers.
  617. Find this resource:
  618.  
  619. Maurer, Donna. 2002. Vegetarianism: Movement or moment? Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.
  620. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  621. One of the few sociological books on vegetarianism as a collective identity and social movement.
  622. Find this resource:
  623.  
  624. Morgan, Kevin, and Roberta Sonnino. 2010. The school food revolution: Public food and the challenge of sustainable development. London: Earthscan.
  625. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  626. Broadens contemporary debates about food provisioning in schools as social institutions across a variety of transnational sites with an eye toward sustainability and community engagement. Also examines the United Nations’ school food program in developing countries.
  627. Find this resource:
  628.  
  629. Raynolds, Laura T., Douglas L. Murray, and John Wilkinson, eds. 2007. Fair trade: The challenges of transforming globalization. London: Routledge.
  630. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  631. A straightforward synthesis of fair trade’s growth as a movement, a market, and a certification labeling system promoted by alternative globalization initiatives to create better conditions for the producers of certain foods (such as coffee) in the global South and to construct moral value for consumers in the global North.
  632. Find this resource:
  633.  
  634. Schurman, Rachel, and William A. Munro. 2010. Fighting for the future of food: Activists versus agribusiness in the struggle over biotechnology. Social Movements, Protest, and Contention 35. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
  635. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  636. Historicizes and details the interplay of social movements, culture, and politics in controversies over genetically modified (GM) food. Compares how the “lifeworlds” of anti-GM activists and biotechnology industry members shape their organizational strategies and opportunities and ultimately the creation of (and resistance to) policy. Lucid analysis of a complex subject.
  637. Find this resource:
  638.  
  639. Wright, Wynne, and Gerad Middendorf, eds. 2008. The fight over food: Producers, consumers, and activists challenge the global food system. Rural Studies. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.
  640. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  641. A collection of essays and case studies by leading rural sociologists of agriculture and food that uses the theme of agency to analyze mainstream and alternative food systems, viewing them as contemporary arenas of struggle over topics such as animal welfare, genetic engineering, and social justice.
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement
Public Pastes
Advertisement
We use cookies for various purposes including analytics. By continuing to use Pastebin, you agree to our use of cookies as described in the Cookies Policy.  OK, I Understand
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!