You Are What You Eat (Asynchronous - Online Only)
A Reason Not to Eat Your Veggies: The History of How Drug Cartels Began Extorting the Agriculture Industry View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessica Rudo
Mexican drug organizations began more than a century ago, primarily fueled by the emergence of black markets created from American anti-drug laws. Despite bilateral attempts to bring these organizations down, the cartels have flourished. This study explores how Mexican cartels have steadily expanded over the decades. The more force brought down on the cartels, the more violence has erupted, with cartel-related deaths now registering in the tens of thousands every year in Mexico. When the strategy moved to combat cartels economically, the cartels simply diversified their portfolios, expanding their economic reach by squeezing fees from local businesses and residents. Cartels began kidnapping, extortion, piracy, and human smuggling shortly after the enactment of NAFTA. Avocado farmers in Michoacán have been one of the main targets of cartel extortion, but the extortion expanded to include limes, papayas, strawberries, mangos, and almost every exportable agricultural product out of Mexico. These farmers live in fear of a call from an unknown number demanding money or learning family members have gone missing.
The Policy of Indian Government Regarding Public Distribution System during COVID-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarveshwar Pandey
The global novel coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic slowdown have led to rising concerns of food insecurity across the world. The potential of any system is known only when it passes through a crisis. This paper discusses the situation of food security and Public Distribution System (PDS) in India during lockdowns at the times of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The economic slowdown, loss of employment and unorganized migration have resulted in widespread food insecurity. The sudden decision to impose the first lockdown on 24 March, the migrant crisis was immediately visible with thousands of migrants walking on the highways trying to get back to their homes. The big cities, which are known as economic hubs, could not provide food to the people even for a month. As compared to cities, villages provided shelter and food to the migrants, and the tradition of keeping granary stock in villages in India saved millions of lives. The social sensitivity that was visible from the villages was not seen in the so-called developed and educated cities. The government has made some interventions through schemes towards providing food and cash support to people, there are many gaps. In this context we analyse the government schemes and policies which are implemented during this crisis. This paper mainly focuses on the Central Government's response to the PDS in India's food security during the lockdown.
Cooking a Vegan Identity: Practice and Cuisine to Perform a Lifestyle View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Claudia Giacoman
Veganism is a political movement opposing all forms of exploitation and a lifestyle characterized by not consuming products of animal origin. The adoption of veganism implies assuming a new identity enacted mainly through food consumption. This study examines the role of cuisine and culinary skills in performing a vegan identity. To work on this issue, we analyze diverse qualitative material regarding the young vegan community in Santiago de Chile (interviews, videos, social media). Our analysis shows that cooking allows vegans to delimit their identity through feeding control, which implies learning a new cuisine with their classification of edible and inedible and specific techniques and practices to create and recreate plates.
Featured Food Politics and Gender: Why Home-cooking Matters View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vaishali Sharma
This paper, introduces a new question—at least one that is often overlooked. How should we address questions of gender, and particularly questions of the past and present nature of women’s cooking, in contemporary food politics? With a few important exceptions, neither scholars nor activists nor food critics typically spend much energy debating what these calls for home cooking (or other food reforms) might mean to gendered divisions of labor, to questions of gendered equity, or to the lives of women. But talking about women’s work isn’t simply airing old laundry. Thinking about gender gives us new questions to ask and new options for moving forward in food politics. Historical romanticization, have suggested, can too easily accompany calls for home cooking. But it’s often a particular romanticization of work that women have done. If we can’t think in gendered terms, we can’t really analyze these narratives. Attending to the mundane tasks that made up “women’s work,” understanding how romanticized notions of the past have long been used to constrain women, and expanding our vision of the past to encompass the “many stories” that make up women’s history of cooking is crucial. A smarter women’s history offers ways to counter current narratives—a way to think beyond the constraints that so often make it hard to move forward in food politics. It helps us to connect what can seem like individual consumer choices to larger social systems that also need changing.
Meal as Medium: Socially-engaged Arts Methodologies Employing Food to Cultivate Conviviality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathryn Huckson
A case study on performative, social, relational, and community-engaged artworks that have in common shared experiences over food. Beginning with Rirkrit Tiravanija's seminal work from Bourriaud's exhibition Traffic (1996), I look to the way artists cultivate sociality through food-related practices and processes. In this paper I propose the non-linear yet progressive turn in postmodern and contemporary art where relational, social, and community-centred approaches has moved from marginal to mainstream, using artworks that specifically engage food, cooking, and dining to punctuate this trajectory. In particular, I focus in on international yet grassroots community projects like Occupy the Kitchen (Vol. 1 and 2) by Franca Ferment and Evelyn Leveghi as a collaborative, site-responsive, relational, disruptive, and activist project that expands on notions of community by bridging national boundaries and harnessing the power of art for social change.
The Impasta-“Italian” Simulacra and TikTok View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Tortolini
Digital platforms such as TikTok are spaces where cultural trends are created and shared with audiences worldwide. Applying the critiques and theories that Jean Baudrillard presented in his work Simulation, trends such as baked feta pasta can be viewed as simulacra. The newly created dish can be viewed as an attempt to insert itself as a historical Italian culinary product. These dishes are created solely for digital audiences and potential sponsorships, engaging with capitalistic systems through multiple simulations at once. These dishes gain popularity and acceptance because they are dispersed within multiple simulations at once. Using the case study of baked feta pasta trend as a focal point, we will argue that these trends are part of the digital-colonial system that creates, defines, and positions newly created cultural products as part of historical and traditional legacies; in this case, Italian and Mediterranean cultural products. This study discusses and breaks down how TikTok’s baked feta pasta has on audiences’ understanding of cultural products and how these trends, which are, in fact, simulacra attempt to become cemented in the cultural identity of the culture it questions. This paper combines traditional cultural and food studies approaches and theoretical arguments with the introduction of newer ones to offer additional insights into how digital technologies are expanding the realm of cultural discourses. In turn, we consider how these newer digital technologies, structures, and spaces may be mobilised to encourage forms of digital food de-colonisation.
Eating Behaviour During Confinement: An Application of the Phenomenological Variant Ecological Systems Theory View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hennie Fisher, Ina Louw, Oratile Charmaigne Sehoole, Gerrie Elizabeth du Rand
Consumers often express reasons for not preparing meals from scratch at home. The phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) was utilised to analyse consumers’ self-reported eating behaviour during at-home confinement that affects health and wellbeing. The model offers a framework to investigate normative human development, such as risk and resilience, through characteristics of identity and context interactions, for example individual or household difference and their experience, perception, and negotiations of stress. This study aims to establish if, during a period of compulsory confinement when consumers had time, but limited access to convenience foods, changed their eating behaviour. The case study in an urban setting, used a questionnaire with structured and unstructured questions. The results show that whether a strategy is adaptive or maladaptive is not always conclusive, since context often plays a part. More participants prepared food from scratch when food establishments were locked, but many fell back into their old habits once they re-opened. Females remained primarily responsible for food preparation, and they were also the largest portion of our sample. The value of the study is that we could see that education regarding healthy eating should be done more aggressively. In conclusion, the usefulness of applying the PVEST model to understand modern consumers’ behaviour towards food and eating during confinement were shown, and the application of this model showed that normative eating behaviour can probably not be changed in a matter of weeks, as consumers may well return to less optimal eating behaviour soon after.
