Charlotte Biltekoff

Consumer response: the paradoxes of food and health.

The papers in the session “Food Culture and Consumer Response,” show how important peoples values, beliefs, aspirations and social context are to their dietary health. They also reveal several tensions that shape consumer responses to healthy food. This essay discusses the paradoxical nature of eating habits in general, and describes three paradoxes related specifically to the challenges of providing food for health in the 21st century: pleasure/health, technology/nature, innovation/nostalgia.

“Strong Men and Women are not Products of Improper Food”: Domestic Science and the History of Eating and Identity

This paper presents preliminary thinking on food reform movements as a site for the continuous shaping and reshaping of the relationship between eating, Identity, and citizenship in America. It examines the turn of the century domestic science movements and argues that its goals included not only bread baking, but citizen making, and that its effects included not only changes in eating habits, but changes in the significance of eating habits. The author contends that domestic scientists made eating available as a system of self making and in so doing naturalized class differences and normalized a middle class standard for “alimentary subjectivity.”

The frontiers of food studies

From the First Lady’s organic garden to policy proposals that would tax soda consumption to Julia Robert’s meal-based healing on the big screen, food is a site of American political, social and popular fixation. This, then, is a cultural moment when food studies scholars have an opportunity to stretch beyond the archive, the text, or the performance and say something about food issues. A recent panel at the Association for the Study of Food and Society drew several food studies scholars together to consider

Healthy, Vague: Exploring Health as a Priority in Food Choice

Abstract Given public health priorities to improve people’s diets, an accurate understanding of what influences food choice is fundamental. Yet “food choice” is a highly complex, personal process, in which health may be more or less of a priority depending on the person. Guidance on how to eat a healthy diet should be personalized. A cross-disciplinary lens is used to explore how the experiences and priorities of individuals intersect with what they understand to be true regarding food and health to produce decisions about what to eat. During in-depth interviews conducted with twenty-five health-conscious adults, the term “healthy” itself proved to be elastic, encompassing foods that are nutritionally healthy and foods that simply fit into the course of our own lives and experiences, including foods perceived as enjoyable regardless of nutritional value.

Abundance, Control and Water! Water! Water!

Abstract Working in the workplace requires a labor all of its own. In addition to the work of simply provisioning food, the twenty-five university office workers interviewed in this interdisciplinary study also put considerable labor into developing and maintaining complex systems for making choices about what, how and where to eat while working. These systems, which were designed to meet varying individual definitions of “health,” were then strained and frequently sabotaged by food that simply materialized in the workplace through catered meals and office “food altars.” The work of avoiding and compensating for these appeared foods emerged as a central theme in the research. For many, the consumption of water offered a virtuous solution to the conundrum. Articulated as a chant and a dictum, “Water! Water! Water!” propelled workers toward self-described “good choices” in their patterns of workplace consumption and navigation.