Edible Imaginaries (Asynchronous Session)
Sugar Babies in the Marketplace of Capital
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nancy Bookhart Wellington
There is a incessant virtual war in the commercialization of foods targeting our youth, our future. From McDonald's and other fast-food industries to so-called organic food offerings, to the foods constituted as junk food: such as chips and beverages, sugar is a mainstay in the ingredients. Those companies touting their products as organic whose ingredients are not clean are just as culpable. It is our youth who are inundated with the daily consumption of these products containing the most deadly and addictive substance outside of street and pharmaceutical drugs. This paper will attempt to survey the war on sugar that is transcribed with clarity in the text, Sugar Blues, along with other data-driven statistics relating to the concatenation of sugar and early onset diseases of the young body and mind. Consider the number of students who cannot concentrate on their studies, dropouts, or those labeled as troubled makers under the aegis of their social class. Instead they are strung out on the drug which is peddled in the marketplace as nutrition. What of the sugar babies suffering from depression, or ADHD stemming from the sugar they consumed? How will the companies reconcile their lost innocence, their unrealized potential? The severity of the problem is incomprehensible, and I argue changing the culture and mental habits of our youths. Manufacturers are mandated to include the ingredients on packaging, but sugar is inclusive, inconsequential. It is imperative that sugar is labeled as an ingredient of detriment, a signification of a pending crisis.
Tasting Tea, Tasting China: Tearooms and the Everyday Culture in Dalian View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yingkun Hou
Tea is a beverage that has long been taken to symbolize a key aspect of Chinese tradition and history. However, it is one of many beverages drunk in contemporary China, where in recent times knowledge of wine has come to stand for the West and as a much-desired cultural capital. My research examines everyday tea drinking and tea tasting in Dalian—a northeastern city in Liaoning Province, China. Through ethnography of practices, processes, and interactions taking place in daily events of tea drinking and tasting, this dissertation provides a window into social conflicts, ideas and desires, memory, and national identity, in a contemporary Chinese city. It explores questions of why and how people learn to taste tea by acquiring certain levels of knowledge and skill that is valued in tea culture, and how people drink and taste tea in different social scenarios and contexts. Then it explores the significance of tea drinking and tasting to people in their daily life and as part of ritualized social relations, and specifically in contrast to beverages such as wine. As representative of Chinese culture, tea tasting raises questions of how sensory capabilities should be honed and deployed, and the relationship between so-called “objective” scientific knowledge of taste and the tacit, embodied skill that is associated with traditional cultural understandings.
Featured From Culinary Medicine to Culinary Lifestyle: Food as a Key Pillar for People Living with Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nasiba Khodieva
As an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, I want to emphasize two types of foods that are primary and secondary. Primary food is considered as food that is off-the plate, whereas secondary food is the one that is on the plate. By demonstrating the connectedness of both categories, this topic addresses the importance of home cooking in terms of the nutritional values, the taste, the social interactions with food, and the human intention to make the process of cooking attainable, achievable, and pleasant. It also addresses the perspective from the personal narrative based on living with type 1 diabetes for 5 years and how food choices and knowledge of food do make an impact on the quality of life living with a chronic condition. The culinary medicine approach elaborates on the food as medicine as achievable, approachable action that any individual can take that will lead to developing a lifestyle in which healthy choices are made in both primary and secondary foods.
"Babette's Feast": Food, the Senses, and Mindfulness View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Conboy
"Babette's Feast" is about food, the senses, and transformative learning. Moreover, Gabriel Axel’s 1987 masterpiece is an invitation to engage in the world with wonder, with mindfulness, with a discerning heart, and with an open mind. Through the lens of mindfulness, a broader understanding of the film "Babette’s Feast" emerges as we explore its narrative and its characters from the perspective of nonjudgmental, intentional attentiveness to the moment, namely that of the eucharistic meal with which the film culminates. For the protagonist, a French refugee and former chef, food and its creation are symbols of life, love, gift, and hospitality. The film, and the celebratory meal she concocts, are an invitation to personal transformation for the benefit of the common good. In a close reading and critical analysis of the film, and specifically of two of the outsider characters, we suggest that the film, through its depiction and celebration of food, is a meditation on self-gift and loving kindness, in the acknowledgement that self-gift, as capacity to love, is the ultimate human vocation and true form of art.
"Portrait of a Cannibal" - Paradox of Interspecies Cannibalism in Jonasz Stern’s Artworks View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Agata Anna Stronciwilk
Jonasz Stern was a Holocaust survivor and one of the most prominent Polish artists of the XX-century. After the 60’ cannibalism became one of the crucial motifs in his art, which was interpreted as a reflection of his own traumatic past. Cannibalism is defined as a practice in which the flesh of one’s own species is consumed and this intraspecies aspect is seemingly unquestionable. However, the way Stern spoke about cannibalism was somewhat paradoxical. Stern moved cannibalism from “intraspecies” to the “interspecies” position. Artist inscribed all living species into one category; therefore, the very act of eating another being, also non-human animals (NAH) fell into cannibalism. In his moving and disturbing assamblages, Stern used animal bones and skins, fish bones and scales to speak about the tragedy of the life-death cycle in which sustaining life requires killing and eating the others. In his artworks, Stern portrayed a world which was perpetuated with unremovable guilt. The paper focuses on the roots and meaning of cannibalism in Stern’s oeuvre and connects it with contemporary posthumanist thought as well as the concept of a more-than-human community.
Dining at the Horizon : Cultivating Modern Vietnamese Tables through the Legacy of the Operation Passage to Freedom 1954 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Khanh Linh Trinh
In 2010, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam finally published a much-anticipated work by author Vũ Bằng, named Delicacies of Hanoi (Món ngon Hà Nội). First published in Saigon in 1960, the book is a love letter from the Northern-born and raised author to Hanoi after his departure to the South in the 1954 Operation Passage to Freedom. Barely reached the shelves, the newly printed books were already pulled off to be sent to the censorship authority for further examination. Vũ Bằng's dream of unification and the complexities, contradictions, and controversies in his life and work urged this project to look at the transformation of Vietnamese food through the legacy of the Operation Passage to Freedom. What does it mean to eat like Northerners/Southerners? What does it mean to eat like a North 54 in the South? How can Vietnamese identity, through food, be understood as negotiation and association between different regions, tastes, and ingredients? – This is a constellation of questions at the heart of this project. As the first cultural investigation of its kind, this paper argues that through the legacy of Operation Passage to Freedom, Vietnamese regional food became an expression of belonging, articulating the Northern, Southern, and ultimately cultivating the modern Vietnamese identity.
