Anne Murcott

The cultural significance of food and eating

From a strictly nutritional point of view it may not much matter what you eat as long as you are getting a balanced diet in suitable amounts. So, fish, pulses, meat or eggs can equally well provide proteins; what is important is their quantity and relation to other essential components of the diet. Sociologists and anthropologists, however, recognize that, nutritional concerns aside, it can matter very much what you eat. Smoked salmon, lentils, steak or coddled eggs, might be more or less equivalent nutritionally, but they carry markedly different connotations socially. Elaboration of the cultural significance of food and eating focuses on social values, meanings and beliefs rather than on dietary requirements and nutritional values. In this paper, I have outlined a sociological approach to studying cultural aspects of eating, illustrating various facets with reference to three pieces of recent work (James, 1979; Atkinson, 1980; Murcott, unpublished results). This approach starts by appreciating that peoples’ food choice is neither random nor haphazard, but exhibits patterns and regularities. Further, sociologists are compelled to realize that eating habits are not solely a matter of the satisfaction of physiological and psychological needs, nor merely a result of individual preference. Food has also to be seen as a cultural affair; people eat in a socially organized fashion. There are definite ideas about good and bad table-manners, right and wrong ways to present dishes, clear understandings about food appropriate to different occasions. Foods themselves can be seen to convey a range of cultural meanings; the four examples mentioned earlier communicate information in terms not only of occasion but also social status, ethnicity and wealth. These meanings, however, are not inherent in foodstuffs. They depend on the social context in which the items are found. As Atkinson (1980) has remarked, a ‘mouthful of wine will convey very different meanings to the professional wine taster, the bon viveur, the Christian celebrating Holy Communion and the alcoholic down-and-out’. Habits of eating and drinking are invested with significance by the particular culture or sub-culture to which they belong.

A brief pre-history of food waste and the social sciences

Food waste is a compelling and yet hugely under-researched area of interest for social scientists. In order to account for this neglect and to situate the fledgling body of social science scholarship that is starting to engage with food waste, the analysis here does a number of things. It explores the theoretical tendencies that have underpinned the invisibility of waste to the sociological gaze alongside the historical transitions in global food relations that led to the disappearance of concerns about food scarcity – and with them, concerns about food waste – from cultural and political life. It also sketches out some of the processes through which waste has recently (re-)emerged as a priority in the realms of food policy and regulation, cultural politics and environmental debate. Particular attention is paid to the intellectual trajectories that have complemented food wastes rising profile in popular and policy imaginations to call forth sociological engagement with the issue. With this in place, the stage is set for the individual contributions to this Sociological Review Monograph – papers that engage with food waste in a number of contexts, at a variety of scales and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Together they represent the first attempt collectively to frame potential sociological approaches to understanding food waste.

Women's place: cookbooks' images of technique and technology in the British kitchen

Abstract This paper considers the import of cooking techniques and kitchen technology for the domestic basis of womens place. It takes as its data images presented in popular cookbooks and household manuals—sources as yet insufficiently examined. It is suggested that the conventional wisdom that views domestic technology as ‘liberating’ is to disregard its social and historical context. The discussion rests on work still in preliminary stages concluding with the provisional proposal that the analysis of the more familiar social implications of the introduction of technology in industrial production is applicable to examining the impact of technology in the household.

“The nation’s diet”: an overview of early results

“The nation’s diet” is a six‐year basic social science programme funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, consisting of 16 projects located in universities across England, Scotland and Wales. Explains the overall purpose of this multi‐disciplinary programme in social scientific terms as the examination of the processes affecting human food choice. The programme’s central concern ‐ “why do people eat what they do?” ‐ is amenable to study using a variety of social scientific research approaches, designs and techniques of data collection and analysis. Illustrates this methodological variety selectively in reporting a few of the programme’s early results from three of its projects. The findings confirm that people eat what they do for a multiplicity of reasons in addition to, and sometimes in conflict with, hunger, properties of the food itself or people’s own valuation of health and nutrition.

Food and Culture

Talk of food and culture extends well beyond the boundaries of arcane university research projects in social anthropology and sociology. Examples can be found with little effort — the following (with the emphasis added) were noted in passing while obliged to concentrate on something quite other: A book review by Michael Bateman in one of the British broadsheet newspapers reports that the author, a top London chef is ‘somewhat surprised’ after a childhood diet of baked beans on toast ‘to find that in 20 years he has ridden out a revolution in British food, even played a part in shaping a new food culture’. (The Independent on Sunday 8 July 2001)

Anthropology (Sociology?) and Food: Diversity in Scope, Approach and Evidence

The social anthropology of food and eating displays considerable diversity in theoretical approach, research strategy and substantive focus. Raises the question of whether this form of diversity is located within the discipline or whether it results from drawing on work from other disciplines. Compares selected works in social anthropology with works in sociology, a relative newcomer to the field. Reviews three “matched” pairs of studies; two each investigating attitudes between dietary complexity and socio‐economic aspects, two on gender and drink, both alcoholic and non‐alcoholic, and two on cuisines in comparative cultural and historical perspective. Proposes that the study of food and eating is an especially appropriate arena in which to develop systematically a more considerable cross‐disciplinary fertilization.

Teoria agro-alimentare e sociologia dell'alimentazione

Renewed public and policy concerns across most industrialised nations about food safety and public health - e.g. those focused on GM food crops - make the growth of sociological interest in food timely. The main aim of this paper, is to provide an introductory survey of «the sociology of food». A subsidiary aim takes the case of GM to illuminate the limitations of this field and to suggest that, in order to characterise the topic in adequate sociological terms, a bridge is needed to the different field of «agri-food theory», thus encompassing the whole food chain. A brief review of the interlinking of UK supermarkets and New Zealand food exporters provides the background to our argument that, in respect of events surrounding GM, supermarkets have to be seen not just as producers in the retail part of the supply side, but also as regulators/ auditors and even consumers in the food chain.

American pie and food for thought

The academic study of food and eating will have achieved a legitimate place among scholars when authors no longer need to defend their subject matter from accusations of triviality or frivolity, and when writers of dust-jacket blurbs stop having to describe a book on its social history as “thoroughly entertaining”. Despite still having to suffer these minor indignities, Donna R. Gabaccia’s book goes a long way towards making them obsolete. Like others in the field, it considers the puzzle that human beings are simultaneously conservative and adventurous eaters. Like others, it plays about with Anthelme BrillatSavarin’s aphorism of 1825: “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.” These beginnings are the springboard for its examination of about two hundred years of recurrent ethnic exchanges of both food and people that will reveal the identity of Americans. In the process, though, this book takes us further than others by exemplifying some intellectual attitudes that are well worth considering. Organized largely chronologically, the book wisely avoids puns on melting-pots and cooking-pots, relying instead on creolized eating, a notion used here in a loose sense without reference to dominant or dominated groups. It begins in colonial times, takes us through the most fevered period of the mixing of cultures, tastes and immigrants (roughly from the 1880s to the Second World War), past a self-conscious 1970s reassertion of ethnic variety, to reach the present and the mildly surprising claim that the “foods we eat commemorate a long history of peaceful cultural interaction”. Plenty of thought-provoking and probably little-known details are presented along the way. For instance, slaves would sell their surplus home-grown vegetables and fresh meat to their masters. Both Chinese and non-Chinese lunch counters in a small area of Massachusetts served chow-mein sandwiches, an enterprising 1920s invention; as if it were not enough of a cross-cultural blend to mix chow-mein noodles, bean sprouts, chopped meat, onions and gravy in a hamburger bun, non-meat versions were available for Roman Catholic customers on a Friday. And later in this century, in an anonymous memoir, an Italian boy wrote that it never occurred to him that “just being a citizen of the United States meant that I was an ‘American’. ‘Americans’ were people who ate peanut butter and jelly on mushy white bread that came out of a plastic package.” Gabaccia has a lightness of style, but this should not beguile readers into thinking that this is just a pleasing story-book with vivid illustrations. It is a skilfully written professional history imbued with a social anthropological sensibility. I wish that more British social anthropologists (and sociologists) in this field would trouble themselves to return the compliment by paying such diligent attention to social history. Gabaccia not only embraces the anthropological insight that human beings bestow meaning on food, making it not just good to eat but also good to communicate with, but goes on to grasp the other side of the anthropological debate, which requires detailed analysis of the material and economic circumstances that bring people and food together to allow communicative meanings to be created. But more than this, Gabaccia recognizes that understanding eating habits requires not just one but several histories: of recurring human migrations, of agriculture, of (big) business and of consumption. This intellectual attitude and methodological grip on the study of food and eating is the book’s great strength. It is this attitude — not its substantive, and slightly unconvincing, conclusions, including the declaration that Americans’ eating habits show them to be a nation of multiethnics rather than a multiethnic nation — that guarantees the book’s respectable academic scholarship. And it is this attitude that students would do very well to follow. The book will help to give students a good start. But it is frustrating to find so lean an index, and that not all sources are referenced. Was this to try and keep the price

Food Consumption in Global Perspective

Recenzovaná kniha je sbírkou deseti esejí různých autorů na téma antropologie jídla, která vyšla na počest třicátého výročí vydání knihy Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982) britského antropologa Jacka Goodyho.1 Myšlenka takto poctít autorův příspěvek do jmenované oblasti vznikla na sympoziu pořádaném Food Studies Centre při School of Oriental and African Studies v Londýně (Klein and Murcott 2014: 1-2). Abychom lépe porozuměli recenzovanému dílu, je třeba si nejprve přiblížit obsah Goodyho práce, jíž tento sborník příspěvků vzdává poctu. V historickém pohledu na vývoj disciplíny antropologie jídla je Goodyho kniha Cooking, Cuisine and Class označována za zlomové, ale částečně nedoceněné dílo (takto např. Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 100, nebo Klein and Murcott 2014: 2-4). Největším přínosem a inovací této Goodyho práce byla skutečnost, že nezkoumala jídlo pouze prizmatem tehdy dominantních symbolicky orientovaných perspektiv, ale byla schopna zachytit ho také v kontextu sociální stratifi kace, materiálních faktorů a historické změny pohledem historické a komparativní analýzy (Klein and Murcott 2014: 2). Tato analýza přitom zohledňuje celou řadu do té doby opomíjených faktorů. Těmi jsou především problematika ekonomického pozadí zacházení s jídlem a zohlednění dodatečných dimenzí, jako jsou výrobní možnosti, logistika, distribuce atd. (Klein and Murcott 2014: 6). Mintz a Du Bois toto období dokonce označují jako okamžik, kdy antropologie jídla dospěla (2002: 100). Co se empirického materiálu týče, Goodyho kniha je postavena na historickokomparativní metodě srovnání euroasijských a afrických společností, kombinované s etnografi ckým výzkumem v různých oblastech západní Afriky. Euroasijské společnosti jsou v knize označovány jako hierarchické, zatímco společnosti africké jako hieratické. Goody si všímá toho, že odhlédneme-li od skladby jídelníčku,