Views and Reviews
A New Perspective on Foodways: An Inspiration from the Journey to a Documentary Film, “ Food Inc.”
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tsuiping Chen
Inspired by the documentary films demonstrated in Berlinale Culinary Cinema during the past ten years, the researcher took on an action research with 154 culinary students and aimed to enhance their feelings of mission for culinary profession. It was also expected through the film watching and discussion to assist these culinary students to establish a new perspective on “foodways” before they join the catering industry. The researcher worked with the 154 culinary students watching, discussing, and analyzing a documentary film, “ Food Inc.” directed by an American film maker, Robert Kenner. Eighteen one-hour-long focus groups were conducted by the instructor to collect students’ perspectives on the products and practices of modern foodways demonstrated in the film. Using Glaser and Strauss’ Grounded Theory (1967) constant comparison method, eighteen hours of focus group discussion and students’ reflection on the films were recorded and collected for further analysis. The findings suggest that the journey of the culinary documentary film watching encouraged students to take responsibility in their future profession and also helped them construct new perspectives on foodways. Two salient perspectives emerged from the data analysis: When food is mass produced for a mass population, it means a mass of animals and workers are abused; The new and enormous utilization of technology in the food industry is like two sides of the same coin, it brings great benefit and great danger to human beings.
The Food in Film Factor: Image and Expression
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Esposito
The powerful influence that films have on viewers’ thinking about an array of issues from racial prejudice and gender stereotypes to childhood violence and international relations has been duly recognized. Relatively little attention, however, has been devoted to uncovering the connections between the messages found in films and chronic international ills, such as hunger and famine. Because eating habits are closely aligned with cultural values, both are continually reinforced through popular narratives projected on the silver screen. Indeed, cinematic images and expressions provide a ripe area for understanding the homogenization of food customs and dietary choices in a wide array of countries over the past century. As a first step in coming to terms with the implications of such a global transformation, this paper seeks to identify the most prominent messages about food found in a random selection of films deemed culturally significant.
Gendering Food Security: A Genealogy of the Gender Perspective in Global Food Security Policy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andres Sarabia
This paper examines the production and dissemination of texts by international governing institutions concerning the relationship between food and gender as objects of knowledge that need to be managed, in particular as they are heralded by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Through a discourse analysis of gender perspective in contemporary international food policy, I argue that the current confluence of the health and agriculture sectors under the term "food security" obeys a global political economy that allowed the rise of nutrition science as a discursive machine that transforms nutrients into commodities. The global discourse on "food security" shifted in the early 1990s from world food security to household food security. Here I bring gender to the center to explore how this shift of scale away from the global and into the individual has had effects on the ongoing medicalization of childcare and motherhood. Building on biopolitics scholarship, the understanding of human life as biological that favors the creation and exploitation of nutrients as biovalue allowed nutrition to gain prominence in the international policy landscape. International agricultural trade had centered in the biotechnification of the reproduction of foodstuff, leading to the massive production and commercialization of nutrients. A new discourse on nutrition provided a biological understanding of care, where nutrients became central objects of development policy, parallel to rural women. A new subjectivity of women as caregivers was set in motion that was congruent with the expansion and abundance of nutrients in the marketplace.
