Social Reflections (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Addressing Food Insecurity in Higher Education – Challenges and Opportunities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shannon Orr
A 2018 national study of university students conducted by the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that 36% of university students in the United States were food insecure in the 30 days prior to the survey. Food insecurity is associated with lower grades, depression, higher perceived stress, and lower graduation rates. Campuses across the country are responding to the problem in a variety of ways, including distribution of food directly to students such as through food pantries, bags of food, grocery gift cards and more. Starting a campus program is not easy - it requires organizational decision-making, administrative support, funding, space, personnel and more. To better understand the challenges of starting and running such programs, we did a national web-based survey of campus food programs in the United States. This research identifies the scope of campus food programs, and more importantly the challenges and opportunities of campus action plans to address food insecurity.
Featured Clinically, She Looks Well: A Research-creation Project on Embodied Experiences in Clinical Eating Disorder Treatment View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathryn Huckson
Clinically, she looks well, is a grouping of research-creation projects that explore how common medical treatment of eating disorder (ED) emphasizes a patient’s pathological food and weight related behaviours, despite that these behaviours are responses to sociocultural and medical prescriptions for ideal corporeal health. Appropriating philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories on how bodies are disciplined through technologies within cultural institutions like the clinic to produce docile, normative, and productive subjects, feminist scholars have highlighted the ED patient as embodied contradiction, where a desire to maintain a thin body is both a pathological attitude and social expectation (Bordo, 1993; Saukko, 2006; Weiss, 1999). As stated in “Normal Eating is Counter-cultural”, Andrea Lamarre and Carla Rice (2015), state “[w]hile prescriptions for recovery may keep participants ‘in check’, they may also reinforce problematic relationships with food and control” (Lamarre & Rice, p. 146). Beyond focus on weight-maintenance in treatment, there are also measures of self-monitoring and regulating food intake built into treatment protocols which reinforce self-surveillance and mirror pathologized ED symptoms. This contradiction confounds the possibility of a normal relationship to food and body image, particularly those with ED. The artworks I present express the difficulty in distinguishing between a health-conscious concern about weight and disordered attitudes towards food and body-image, especially for contemporary western women. Through performances in which I embody the roles of artist-as-ED-patient or artist-as-ED-clinician, I consider ways my body and subjectivity have been negated or manipulated in treatment for ED and by sociocultural prescriptions for the thin ideal.
The Mobility of Tradition and Taste: Case Studies from France and India View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julie Jacquet
Ancient and neglected grains, such as quinoa, teff, and amaranth, are gaining popularity across the globe in response to a number of modern-day circumstances such as environmental and health concerns. The author has chosen to take a closer look at the rise of millets in southern India and the revival of buckwheat in Brittany, France, to better understand how traditional crops go from low status crops and foods to major food trends in urban centres in the span of a few years. Following a food systems approach, the author critically unpacks the roles of economic, political, and media actors in the constantly evolving construction of taste, health, and what we wish to eat or not eat.
Food and the Non-human: Recontextualizing Anthropocentrism in Massimo Mongai’s Spaceship Chef View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Norman Rusin
Winner of the most prestigious Italian science-fiction award in 1997, Spaceship Chef: A Memoir (my translation) tells the story of Ruby “Basilico” Turturro, a human chef from Hearth who works onboard a spacecraft travelling across the universe. The spaceship hosts different species of sentient animals, both human and non-human, each bringing their culture to the communal table. Chef Turturro’s culinary arts face an unusual challenge: designing menus and preparing dishes that do not harm or violate both human and nonhuman alimentary needs, restrictions, or taboos. In this paper, I read Massimo Mongai’s work as a radical critique of anthropocentrism by considering food—from its design and preparation to its consumption and appreciation—as a political event. In his fictional memoir, Mongai repositions traditional definitions of consumer and consumed and provokes deeper considerations of food ethics and social justice. Moreover, his mix of narrative, essay, and recipes profoundly reorients humanity’s standing in relation to the world, to one another, and to oneself by placing human bodies in a broader network of bodies (such as the bodies of animals) and situating them within larger processes (such as evolution).
Beyond Health and Animal Rights: Reasons for American Black Veganism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wendy Rib
Veganism is recognized by nutritionists as a lifestyle choice associated with good health and lower prevalence of diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and heart disease. It is also a lifestyle that is frequently associated with being white and affluent. While many studies show that health and animal rights are the primary reasons that people choose to become vegan, few studies look at how these reasons vary by ethnicity. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews, this study investigates the lived experience of Black veganism in the US. Participants identify obstacles in maintaining a vegan lifestyle and describe motivating factors beyond health and animal rights.
Exhibitions of Masculine Fitness through Food Consumption on the Presidential Campaign Trail View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jan Wilson
Presidential politics in the United States are the site of an ongoing struggle over the meaning of American manhood. As scholar Paul Cohen puts it, a candidate’s ability to appear the most manly “has played an outsized role in deciding who will be president.” The conspicuous consumption of food on the campaign trail is central to the way in which candidates for president attempt to display the proper masculinity essential to and, in fact, constitutive of the most important and powerful job in the world. Curiously, few scholars have analyzed the centrality of food consumption to the performances of gender at the heart of presidential campaigning and politics. And while several scholars have emphasized the importance of gender, race, and class in shaping hegemonic ideals of masculinity, very few have investigated how ideas of proper manhood are indelibly constructed and made legible by discourses of disability. An analysis of how and what candidates for the US presidency eat and drink on the campaign trail, I argue, reveals not only the centrality of food consumption to displays of proper manhood required of the chief executive but the constitutive role of disability in shifting meanings of hegemonic masculinity throughout US history.
Culinary Art as a Refuge: Food and Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mrs. Sen’s
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shrimoyee Chattopadhyay
Culinary art, such as cooking food, serving and other skills related to the preparation of meals, is usually regarded as a practice that confines women within the world of domesticity. At the same time, food is also related to one’s native culture. In this paper, I explore how culinary art, apart from reflecting a nostalgic longing for home, act as a refuge to women, especially South Asian diasporic women, who despite being away from their homeland are victims of patriarchal oppression. For the diasporic women, food is not only associated with their gastronomy but it also helps in recollecting their pasts. Even in the absence of authentic ingredients, they insist on cooking traditional food by modifying old recipes. The emotional and psychological turmoil that female immigrants undergo result in being rooted in their pasts and can lead to alienation, melancholia and nostalgia. This struggle is depicted in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s,” the sixth short story in her collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The narrative explores the life of a young Indian woman, Mrs. Sen, who accompanies her husband to the US. For her, “home” refers to Calcutta and not the apartment in New England. Her desire to recreate home culture in the host nation acknowledges the pain that is involved in the journey and the process of settling down. I investigate how culinary art not only acts as a medium of preserving and recreating home culture for the protagonist but also how it contributes to the transformation of female identity.
Gateway Bugs: Taste and Disgust in Food System Pedagogy View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation MacKenzie Wade
How can we use taste and, conversely, disgust to educate publics about the ago-industrial food system? Edible insects, as a sustainable, healthy, yet often detested food source, offer a gateway into critical conversations about food normality and issues within the agro-industrial food system. Drawing from fieldwork behind edible insect educational booths at public events, this workshop will introduce my work on edible insects and food perception, and will walk attendees through the sensory experiences and thought processes of those who encounter my booth. The workshop will then lead attendees in a conversation about how we may better engage public audiences in critical discussions about why we eat what we eat, and what impact it may have. For those interested in public food system education, edible insects provide a tool for considering how we may best prompt publics to rethink food norms toward a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient food system.
Urban Food Cultures of Ahmedabad View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jerene George
The paper uses food as an analytical tool to understand experiences of cosmopolitanism and urbanity in a city in Gujarat, Western India. In a rapidly urbanising city of Ahmedabad, food serves as a powerful reflection of deep hegemonic cultural codes, people's aspirations and their engagement with modernity. The study uses qualitative ethnographic data collection methods in order to unpack and answer these questions. The findings of the study adds a nuanced understanding to the changing urban landscape of a city and its relationship with food, the entanglement of food with the politics of space and urbanisation, religion and caste. The concept of vegetarianism and non vegetarianism, Hindu Muslim spatial politics are explored through the case study of the cheliya muslims (a community that owns the majority of restaurants and hotels of the State) of Gujarat.
Featured Planning, Violence, and Crisis in Sociohistorical Perspective: Avocado Commodity Chains and Cartelization in Tancítaro, Michoacán View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stefan Norgaard
Social life in Mexico’s state of Michoacán is consumed by a crisis of violence. Foregrounding critical planning, this paper presents a grounded local history of the municipality of Tancítaro, Michoacán, which has the largest concentration of avocado production globally. It analyzes violence in Tancítaro in light of the production of space, uneven development, and the spatial politics of land. The distinctive type of Hass avocados that Americans love requires unique and rare agro-ecological conditions, present in a small number of places like Tancítaro and Michoacán’s Tierra Caliente. The story of violence in Tancítaro speaks to politics, culture, and terroir, and specifically the role of scarcity and economic control in shaping dynamics of violence, even within nominally licit commodity chains. This quantitative and archival research, coupled with theoretical explanations on violence, suggests that considerations of crises and planning require situated analyses with ethnographic methods and embedded fieldwork that cross geographic scales and disciplinary boundaries as they foreground perspectives of affected community residents.
The Understanding of Sensory Descriptors of Wine by Australian-Italian and Vietnamese Non-expert Consumers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christina Thuy Hang Truong
Wine is one of the most interesting consumable subjects in the world (Wagner, 2013). The study of food sciences has drawn much attention to cross-cultural relations in wine appreciation, wine tasting and wine descriptions (Saenz-Navajas, 2014; Yoo, 2013; Rodrigues, 2019) used by international marketers when an international projection of wine is presented. The studies considers, in a cross-cultural perspective, whether opposites are useful to investigate non-experts’ comprehension of terms frequently used to describe the sensorial properties of wine. The study focused on a selection of 64 terms frequently used to describe the characteristics of the wine in the text of Product Specifications. These studies started from an initial study (Bianchi, Branchini, Torquati, Fermanin, Capitani, Barnarba, Savardi and Burro, 2021) and then tested whether significant difference emerged in the finding emerging when the same task was asked to a sample of Australian non-expert wine consumers (Study 2) and a sample of Vietnamese non-expert wine consumers (Study 3), (Truong, H., Burro, R., & Bianchi, I., 2021). One of the main findings emerging from all three studies is that the majority of participants (more than 80%) were able to think of the sensorial properties of wine in terms of opposites. The Italian participants were able to establish a richer set of alternative opposites for red wine than the Vietnamese participants. Australians are in an in-between position. The results are discussed in relation to some evident cross-cultural differences in wine understanding. The Implications of these results for international advertising of wine.
Adding Value to Stalked Barnacle (Pollicipes Pollicipes) from Berlengas Nature Reserve by New Food Development View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joaquina Pinheiro
The increase of world population and high consumption of natural resources has leading to the implementation of actions with positive impact on environmental, social and economic level, following the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations (UN). One crustacean highly appreciated by the Society, due to its quality attributes such as suis generis flavour, size and texture, is the stalked barnacle (Pollicipes Pollicipes) that growths in rocks of Berlengas Nature Reserve, in Portugal. Based on the growing demand both by professional fishers and consumers, the harvesting regulation of this from the Berlengas Nature Reserve, arises at 2002 the Ordinance n.º 378 and at 2011 is amends by Ordinance n.º 232. In this sense, the number of professional fishers, the quantity and size of stalked barnacle is limited leading to product surplus and consequent transformation in residue with negative impact on environmental, social and economic level. The project “PAS – paté de percebe e amora silvestre” – (barnacle pâté with blackberry) intend to show a potential solution of this “residue” by development of new food product: barnacle pâté enriched with blackberry (Rubus ulmifolius), one natural source of antioxidants compounds. The barnacle pâté enriched with blackberry is a potential new food product with an interesting quality attribute like colour, texture and bioactive properties.
