Shifting Realities (Asynchronous - Online Only)
A Public University’s Approach to Student Food Insecurity : Student User Perception of University of California, Irvine’s Supplemental Food Program View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vivianna Goh, Teresa Dalton
According to recent surveys, nearly half of University of California (UC) undergraduate students have experienced food insecurity. Research suggests that food insecurity, a social and economic condition in which individuals have limited access to food, has detrimental effects on student health and academic performance. Few studies have examined university efforts to address food insecurity. At the University of California, Irvine, the FRESH Basic Needs Hub promotes equitable access to supplemental food for more than 33,000 students through a student pantry, food stamp (SNAP) application assistance, educational workshops, and other services. This mixed-methods study will analyze FRESH user survey data and open-ended feedback, in order to: 1) examine relationships between food insecurity, food stamp eligibility, expected pantry use, and types of residence, and 2) identify students’ perceived program benefits and potential areas of improvement. These findings can assist FRESH in enhancing services while providing general recommendations for basic needs initiatives and policies at other large institutions.
Culinary Authenticity and Chinese American Restaurants View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Wang
Within our modern cultural landscape, the value of cuisine is directly associated with its authenticity. The qualities which define authentic culinary experience in relationship to less genuine meals however, are entirely arbitrary; there is no single empirical basis for the designation of ‘authentic’ dining. My focus in this paper is to understand the paradox between the definite valence of authenticity and its artificial characterization. It is not the material composition of the cooking but the fabricated conditions of the fictional—decor and service—that conduce to the experience of ‘true’ authenticity. This paper specifically analyzes the commensal relationships which occur in Chinese-American restaurants where this binary opposition is activated. By commensal relationships I understand the social interaction which occurs between diners during the consumption of food, whereby cultural values are established and communicated. Over the course of two years I repeatedly visited three restaurants within the Greater Boston area, interviewing and observing both staff and clientele. I conclude by demonstrating how physiology is the drive which activates a ritual consumption of food, that is, authentic commensality, and how there are three elements at play in this model. Firstly, there is human metabolism, the need to eat; secondly, there is the act of commensality or human sociability; and thirdly, there is the experience of devised nostalgia which accompanies communal dining. Cuisine is not merely a reflection of diet but is a frame for the production of social landscapes and a process which makes the fictional become real.
The EU Farm to Fork Strategy: Do Front of Pack Labels Inform Consumers Adequately on Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Regimes? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alessandra Narciso
The Farm to Fork Strategy (FFS) under the umbrella of the Green Deal also focuses on how better to promote the consumer empowerment through the role of labels in the goal of promoting healthy and sustainable diets. The COVID-19 pandemic increased the need to reflect upon food strategies and the threats beyond them, which could potentially link to world pandemics. The Farm to Fork Strategy proposes a plan of action in order to inform consumers of the power they have in choosing what is at the same time healthy but also socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable. A resilient consumer will be the one able to embrace “conscious” choices. However, consumer’s information on agro-food products is unevenly spread in various countries in the EU. Diverse voluntary Front of Pack (FoP) labels co-exist across EU Member States. An interesting case study is how agro-food Geographical Indications (PDO, PGI), well promoted in the EU CAP policy, could possibly be left without protection and even classified at times as “unhealthy” or “unsustainable” according to the information present in some FoP. The paper highlights this information asymmetry gap and the role that European consumers could potentially play in improving the current approach to EU agro-food policies towards diets that are both healthy and sustainable. Consumers should therefore be empowered to make the “right choice” based on equally distributed information across European Union member states; information that should not be driven by market stakeholders or laid on exclusively medical requirements.
Gendering Food Security in Havana: How Women Navigate the Cuban Food System from Urban Organic Food Gardens to Genetically Modified Fish View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karina Cespedes
This paper looks at pre-Covid Havana and tracks the gendered expectations women bear to feed their families. It provides an analysis of the ways Cuban women navigate Cuba’s troubled food ration system. By tracing where and how Cuban women obtain food the paper provides an assessment of the ecologically fraught measures taken by the Cuban state to increase food access alongside strategies of survival deployed by Cuban women to feed their families. Utilizing as examples what Cuban women are able to obtain from organoponicos (urban organic food gardens that serve as ecotourism destinations) as well as via the food ration system the paper provides a window into the gendered expectations and demands women face daily to feed their families. Of particular interest in the paper is the expressed disgust over the introduction of the genetically modified Claria fish, introduced by the state into the ecosystem and food ration system. In the paper, I draw on my ethnographic accounts in which Cubans, repulsed by the fish known to eat anything that comes to the water’s edge (rodents, birds, wildlife and pets). The paper trails after the Claria while accompanying Cuban women through the maze of formal and informal food distribution, food payment, and food collection to showcase the precariousness of securing access to nutritious food and how doing so has fallen on women as traditional roles have blended with ideals of revolutionary womanhood; which impose upon Cuban women the burdens of gendered reproductive labor and care work--acquiring food, cooking, and feeding.
The Politics of Childhood Obesity in a Pandemic: Historically-Grounded Analysis of Chile’s Food Policies During and Beyond Covid-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jael Goldsmith Weil
The Covid-19 pandemic, economic crisis, and government measures to contain the spread of the virus have created a shock to Chile’s food system, and the burden of increased food insecurity is unequally distributed among a population already segmented by wealth and nutritional status. The sanitary crisis was layered onto a foodscape and political context intervened by social protests and a pre-existing obesity pandemic concentrated amongst socioeconomic vulnerable populations. In conjunction, these factors have resulted in an increase in childhood malnutrition in all its forms (hunger and obesity). For the first time in four decades, undernutrition has reversed its downward trend and there are clusters of infant malnutrition as well as an unprecedented acceleration of severe obesity amongst school-aged children. This has revealed the inequality in Chile’s social pact, barring the precarious nature of even the most minimal levels of social welfare and illustrating both frailties and strengths in the political decision-making and policy implementation that shape the state’s ability to cope with this crisis. This presentation will present the design of a three-year research project organized around capturing the way that the Covid-19 pandemic, the sanitary measures to contain it and the ongoing economic crisis, exacerbate pre-existing nutritional segregation and increases childhood malnutrition in all its forms, and the hypothesis that political decisions and public policies have the potential to ameliorate or exacerbate effects on childhood nutritional inequality.
The Role of Community Kitchens in Food Democracy: A Systematic Review View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarthak Agarwal
Food democracy derives its strength from alternative foods movement initiatives including community kitchens. In addition to ameliorating food security and nutrition of underserved and vulnerable populations; community kitchens serve as group facilitators, incubators for social enterprises, support systems for struggling communities, drivers of sustainability, and bridges between the masses and local governments. No research, however, has been undertaken to explore the contribution of community kitchens to food democracy. Understanding the role of community kitchens in pushing forward food democracy is important in how they are perceived and understood in the domain of food policy. We performed a systematic search of three literature databases in June 2021 (Scopus and Web of Science) and July 2021 (PubMed) for studies reporting findings and/or outcomes of community kitchens. 16 studies were identified after rigorous screening and quality criteria, and their empirical insights were matched against the five dimensions of food democracy – collaboration, knowledge, deliberation, efficacy, and community good. While the article does not limit its focus on a particular geographical region, more than half of the studies (n = 9) were based in Canada. Knowledge and Deliberation were the most commonly reported dimensions (n = 15) of food democracy. This review finds that there is a strong evidence that community kitchens contribute to food democracy.
Sweet and Juicy: Intergenerational Negotiations on Sweet Preferences Through Liquid Textures View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Veronica Vargas Roman
This ethnographic research approaches the process leading to an increment of sweet intake throughout three generations in Nayon, a rural Ecuadorian settlement in process of urbanization. Tensions between discourse and practice allow an immersion in moral scopes. While negative qualities and apparent rejection is attributed to artificially sweetened foods, naturally sweet foods are perceived as noble and said to be ‘sweet and juicy’. The interchangeable connection of senses, in this case, sweet taste with liquid textures, known as synaesthesia, allows the association of paradigms of natural sweetness with positive moral values. Consequently, liquidity becomes a vehicle of sweet taste modification, a space where negotiations of sweet types and intensity of sweetness take place. The daily consumption of sugary liquids, camouflaged within main meals, positively alters the perception of soft drinks and increases the tolerance of sweet taste. Taste, therefore, as an embodied social construct, prioritizes an indulgence of the senses regarding sweet flavour preferences, thus challenging rational nutritional discourses and imposing new challenges for public health policy aiming to control sweetened beverages consumption.
Featured Food Labeling, Politics, and Morality: How Food Labeling Restrictions Shape the Vegan Food Market View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Miri Eliyahu
In recent years, while the vegan food market in the US had experienced unprecedented expansion industry, rivals in the meat and dairy industry took steps to try and restrict this market growth through labeling legislation efforts both on the state and federal levels, after the FDA refused to weigh in on questions of labeling of vegan products. In soy milk a milk? Can a vegan product be labeled a burger or a hot dog if there are no animal by products in it? Several states including California, Louisiana, Oklahoma and others had taken it upon themselves to restrict labeling on vegan products as an effort to aid the animal-based food market. This study explores the politics of these legislations, through archival analysis and interviews, and analyzes the impact on the vegan market, and the outcomes of those legal battles on the vegan food industry in the US. I argue that attempts at post consumption restrictions have little impact on product sales when it comes to labeling, because “A rose by any other name” is not just a Shakespearean saying but rather a valid description for consumer behavior. This recent occurrence in the food industry can provide a road map to how regulation and restrictive attempts impact expanding niche markets within an industry.
Risk Cultures, Beef Traceability, and Food Safety in the United States and Zambia View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Victoria Mukuni
Understanding ways of improving the safety of food is an important area of research. In this project, I explore the history of the food safety systems in the United States and the Republic of Zambia. Focusing on the traceability of meat (as a form of risk management), I reveal the factors shaping each of these systems, with an eye towards their similarities and differences. I argue that food safety systems come to look different due to how these regulatory systems differently define risk, some of which traceability has brought to light. In both countries, what influences risk cultures is trust in institutions, political leaders and in science and technology. For the Zambian public, trust is in local political leaders, in individuals and in brands. For the US public, trust is in information and knowledge of producers, which is found on labels. While the Zambian public generally trusts institutions, the US public, due to its history of institutional failures, does not.
An Internationally Recognized Cake : Strawberry Shortcake, Millefeuille, and Napoleon View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Masahiro Miyake
This paper investigates what makes a classic cake. How are cakes changing in this time of globalization? Macha cake has spread out to many different countries in a short time. You can find Macha cake under the same name in a lot of different countries. Millefeuille/Napoleon has been available in many countries for a long time. It can be found under different names in many different countries. The name given to a cake is strongly related to the period of time when it was introduced to a particular country. The focus of this research is about millefeuille, a traditional pastry in France, and Castella in Japan. The method used was to visit and to conduct interviews at a different bakery-patisserie in different neighbourhoods at random every day continuously for 365 days, and research the 365 millefeuille in order to analyze the tastes and ingredients from April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014 in France. And the resulting analysis were detailed along with detailed watercolors of 365 millefeuille. In 2010, I also analyzed tastes and package boxes of one traditional cake (Castella) from 365 different patisseries every day through visiting and doing interviews with detailed watercolors of 365 cakes in 365 patisseries in Japan (27th August 2010 to 26th August 2011).
