Adults with dysphagia experience difficulties swallowing food and fluids with potentially harmful health and psychosocial consequences. Speech pathologists who manage patients with dysphagia are frequently required to address ethical issues when patients' food culture and/ or preferences are inconsistent with recommended diets. These issues incorporate complex links between food, identity and social participation. A composite case has been developed to reflect ethical issues identified by practising speech pathologists for the purposes of illustrating ethical concerns in dysphagia (...) management. The case examines a speech pathologist's role in supporting patient autonomy when patients and carers express different goals and values. The case presents a 68-year-old man of Australian/Italian heritage with severe swallowing impairment and strong values attached to food preferences. The case is examined through application of the dysphagia algorithm, a tool for shared decision-making when patients refuse dietary modifications. Case analysis revealed the benefits and challenges of shared decision-making processes in dysphagia management. Four health professional skills and attributes were identified as synonymous with shared decision making: communication, imagination, courage and reflection. (shrink)

The article deals with the development of gastronomic tourism as one of the important areas of tourism. The subject of the study is the food culture in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The object of this research is the promotion of food culture based on the technologies of gastronomic tourism on the example of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The article considers the food culture of the Yakut ethnic group, the trends of the restaurant (...) market, as well as local catering enterprises that specialize in the national Yakut cuisine. The concepts of tourism and gastronomic tourism and their state in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) are studied. The problems of popularization of national cuisine are touched upon. The article is devoted to the promotion of Yakut cuisine at the interregional and international levels. The necessity of promoting the food culture of the Yakut ethnic groups on the basis of participation in gastronomic festivals is identified and justified. The fundamental methodology for the study is a descriptive method, which includes the method of observation, interpretation, comparison, generalization. The presented article is relevant due to the fact that currently in modern culture there is a growing interest in the field of everyday food culture. In this regard, the term "food culture" correlates with the accumulated experience of the people, the bearer of culture, of satisfying the need for food. In modern science, everyday food culture correlates with the definition of "gastronomic culture", although to date there is no unambiguous understanding of this multidimensional cultural phenomenon, which is a specific attribute of each nation. The purpose of this study was to identify the features of everyday life through theoretical aspects and practical provisions that reveal the specifics of gastronomic tourism in the region, and the use of everyday food culture of the Yakut ethnic group for its further improvement and development. Based on the conducted study, the reasons for the positive impact of participating in gastronomic festivals are listed. (shrink)

The article examines the content of human nutrition, based on an axiological approach to understanding culture: food can become a carrier of spirituality and cultural value meanings. In this connection, the semantic meanings of such concepts as "food culture" and "gastronomic culture" are revealed. In modern science, everyday food culture correlates with the definition of "gastronomic culture", although to date there is no unambiguous understanding of this multidimensional cultural phenomenon, which is a (...) specific attribute of each regional culture. The subject of the study is the food culture in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The object of this study is the peculiarities of everyday food culture in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). To identify possible gastronomic brands of Yakutia, a pilot survey was conducted among residents of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The presented article is relevant due to the fact that currently in modern culture there is a growing interest in the field of everyday food culture. The topic of food covers all areas of popular culture. Many books and periodicals on culinary topics are published. Exhibitions and competitions of culinary art are held. The catering system is actively developing. And these issues seem relevant today from the point of view of cultural knowledge and deserve close theoretical study. (shrink)

1. IntroductionIn 2020, when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certified Chinese salted pickled vegetables from Sichuan called pao cai, hina’s media, including the state-run Global Times newspaper, reported the news as if China had won the international standard for kimchi making,1 although the ISO clearly stated in the certification document that the certification did not apply to kimchi.2 This reporting provoked Koreans, and it quickly became a cultural dispute between the two countries, at least in the media and social (...) media outlets. (shrink)

van Els, Paul. "Wereldverbeteraar in een eetcultuur" (Humanitarian in a Food Culture). Review of Mencius: Inleiding, vertaling en commentaar, by Karel van der Leeuw. China Nu 33, no. 3 (2008): 46–47.

In this paper, we provide an overview of research highlighting the relation between cultural processes, social norms, and food choices, discussing the implication of these findings for the promotion of more sustainable lifestyles. Our aim is to outline how environmental psychological research on urban affordances, through the specific concepts of restorative environments and walkability, could complement these findings to better understand human health, wellbeing and quality of life. We highlight how social norms and cultural processes are linked to (...) class='Hi'>food choices, and we discuss the possible health-related outcomes of cultural differences in food practices, their relation to acculturation and globalization processes. We also discuss the concepts of restorative environments and walkability as positive urban affordances, and their relation to human well being, and the possibile link with cultural process and sustainable lifestyles. Finally, we outline issues for future research and areas for policy making and interventions on the links between cultural processes, healthy and sustainable food consumption and urban affordances, for the pursuit of public health, wellbeing and environmental sustainability. (shrink)

Resurgent interest incommodities is linked to recent attempts toovercome the constraints posed by the binariesof economy/culture and production/consumption.Commodities and commodification represent acontentious convergence of economic, social,cultural, political, and moral concerns. Thisessay develops a conceptual framework forunderstanding this interconnectedness byexamining the relationship between commoditiesand our discourse, practices, and assumptionsabout food. We argue that the movement of afood artifact between local/global andglobal/local contexts is mediated by dynamicsof power and resistance that represent contestsof meaning regarding the criteria of that artifact's exchangeability. (...) We apply thisframework to the case of the tortilla, tracingits social life through an historical accountof its transformation from the staple food ofthe Mayan and Aztec people to its introductionas a fast food component of the diets of21st century Americans. This exampledemonstrates that food provides a powerful lensthrough which to trace and illustrate theinterconnectedness between material andsymbolic exchanges around the world that arecommonly associated with globalization. (shrink)

Food is a sine qua non for life on Earth. It has more significance than nutrition and sustenance, more variety than many aspects of human culture. Food has religious as well as historical dimensions. The complexity of the food chain and of the related ecological balance is one of the wonders of the biological world. In the human context, food has found countless expressions and regional richness. Food has provoked feasts, as its lack and (...) maldistribution have caused famines. While being a source of physical satisfaction food has also had environmental impacts. Some of these matters are explored in these reflections. (shrink)

In 1984, William Friedland proposed a Commodity Systems Analysis framework for describing the stages through which a commodity is transformed and how it acquires value. He challenged us to think of commodities as entities with a social as well as a physical presence. Friedland's argument enriched the concept of commodity production, but it remains essentially a supply side perspective.Since then, many commentators have argued that power is shifting from producers to consumers. Furthermore, some are claiming that, contrary to much traditional (...) Marxist thinking about how individuals find meaning through their productive capacities, it is now through consumption that individuals are identifying themselves. Given the significance of this view, it seems timely to extend Friedland's framework to incorporate the consumption perspective.In light of other claims that the distance between production and consumption is increasing, it is equally important to acknowledge the processes that structure the relationship between the two spheres. This entails using new retail geographical and cultural studies to explore further what takes place in distribution and exchange.This article describes a new model for understanding power in commodity systems, one that acknowledges the input and interests of a range of actors beyond the agricultural sector. The proposed cultural economy model also emphasizes a range of value adding processes that are wider than those that apply to commodity production. (shrink)

Biodiversity and genetic resources have become the focal point of major national and international biological and political debates regarding control, ownership, access, and erosion of critical resources. While these issues are key to environmental sustainability and food security, biodiversity and genetic resources must be seen in the broader context of their inextricable relationship to cultural diversity and to humans' view of nature. Nature is assumed to be constituted socially through a wide variety of human processes described collectively as (...) class='Hi'>culture. Three significant cultural factors, technology, science, and capitalism, are largely responsible for the secularization and homogenization of food and agriculture and the remaking of nature. These processes and forces may simultaneously and unwittingly create the problems of declines in biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food equity. Indeed, it may well be that the only way to conserve cultural biodiversity in the field is to conserve cultural diversity among peoples. This reunification of biodiversity and cultural diversity and food and agriculture will require new paradigms and institutional mechanisms that allow us to show our care for each other through our reverence for nature. (shrink)

Food satisfies hunger and hunger obeys desire. Accordingly, desire and longing result in societal problems. Food and love may be extreme needs of humans, but the fulfillment of a human’s wants through food and love may help ease such societal problems. This paper aims to unravel the culture of the Bicolanos as the theme highlighted in Merlinda Bobis’ Banana Heart Summer. As a contemporary novel, Banana Heart Summer depicts the material and nonmaterial culture of Region (...) V known as the Bicol Region. The paper presents an analysis of the novel’s creative representation of food towards characters and their relationships with one another. The researcher employed Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalyzes particularly on the pleasure and reality principles. Likewise, the cultural and gender studies and semiotics are applied in the treatment of material. This descriptive-qualitative type of analysis employed on the novel highlights how cultural-domestic issues and socio-political problems brought along by poverty for food and love can be triumphed over through strong family bonds, religion-induced faith, culture-bound tradition, and palatable dishes on the table. The entire novel suggests hope and positivity amidst the evident “hunger”. It offers awareness of the different types of hunger brought along by the socio-historical and political issues. The understanding of one’s culture provides a better view of the world; this worldview may help identify the locale’s distinctiveness. Keywords - Literature, Bicolanos material and nonmaterial culture, socio-historical andpolitical issues, descriptive- qualitative analysis, semiotics, cultural and genderstudies, Philippines. (shrink)

This article examines the nutritional and cultural meaning underlying the list of foods mentioned in the claims of the Israelites in Numbers 11:4–6. The foods eaten by the Israelites in Egypt express stability and a familiar routine, whilst the foods of Eretz Israel, although depicted as choicer, express uncertainty. The list of foods has a literary role on several spheres: (1) The foods are elements distinguishing the agricultural practices in Eretz Israel and Egypt. (2) Fish and vegetables are an indicator (...) of the low class of the Israelites – eating fish reflects the practice of obtaining protein from small animals available to the poor. In Egypt, vegetables were more readily available and were a more prominent ingredient in the diet of the poor and slaves. (3) The food is an indicator of the Egyptian cultural identity of the Israelites – the Bible identifies the longing for the fish and vegetables characteristic of their Egyptian diet as a sign of the Israelites’ cultural and mental affiliation with Egypt. Although they left Egypt physically, they remained affiliated with Egyptian culture and identity. Contribution: This article contributes to the understanding of the biblical story of the ‘desirers’ (Nm 11:4–6) from a multidisplinary perspective. It combines the fields of ancient Egyptian agriculture, nutrition, culture and research on features of immigrants’ foods. (shrink)

This volume offers new insights into food and culture. Food habits, preferences, and taboos are partially regulated by ecological and material factors - in other words, all food systems are structured and given particular functioning mechanisms by specific societies and cultures, either according to totemic, sacrificial, hygienic-rationalist, aesthetic, or other symbolic logics. This provides much “food for thought”. The famous expression has never been so appropriate: not only do cultures develop unique practices for the production, (...) treatment and consumption of food, but such practices inevitably end up affecting food-related aspects and spheres that are generally perceived as objectively and materially defined. This book explores such dynamics drawing on various theoretical approaches and analytical methodologies, thus enhancing the cultural reflection on food and, at the same time, helping us see how the study of food itself can help us understand better what we call “culture”. It will be of interest to anthropologists, philosophers, semioticians and historians of food. (shrink)

Consumer response to genetically altered foods has been mixed in the United States. While transgenic crops have entered the food supply with little comment, other foods, such as the bioengineered tomato, have caused considerable controversy. Objections to genetically engineered food are varied, ranging from the religious to the aesthetic. One need not endorse these concerns to conclude that food biotechnology violates procedural protections of consumer sovereignty and religious liberty. Consumer sovereignty, a principle especially valued in this country, (...) requires that information be made available so each individual or group may make food choices based on their own values. And as yet, there is no policy provision for informing consumers about the degree to which food has been genetically engineered. (shrink)

The agro-food domain in Europe is characterized by the appearance of recurrent unwanted surprises. These events, although causing obvious physical consequences, in essence depart from the expectations of the society. We argue that this unstable situation is best understood as an identity crisis of agriculture rather than as a contingent crisis of a specific economic sector. Thus the present agro-food crisis is in fact a crisis of identity. This is clearly reflected by the cohabitation within the agro-food (...) policy domain of different, often contradictory, policy discourses, namely: free tradism, multifunctionality, and agroecology. All of them try to impose their particular visions. All of them struggle to issue the policy measures they conceive as appropriate. (shrink)

Food consumption has been identified as a realm of key importance for progressing the world towards more sustainable consumption overall. Consumers have the option to choose organic food as a visible product of more ecologically integrated farming methods and, in general, more carefully produced food. This study aims to investigate the choice for organic from a cultural–historical perspective and aims to reveal the food philosophy of current organic consumers in The Netherlands. A concise history of the (...) organic food movement is provided going back to the German Lebensreform and the American Natural Foods Movement. We discuss themes such as the wish to return to a more natural lifestyle, distancing from materialistic lifestyles, and reverting to a more meaningful moral life. Based on a number of in-depth interviews, the study illustrates that these themes are still of influence among current organic consumers who additionally raised the importance of connectedness to nature, awareness, and purity. We argue that their values are shared by a much larger part of Dutch society than those currently shopping for organic food. Strengthening these cultural values in the context of more sustainable food choices may help to expand the amount of organic consumers and hereby aid a transition towards more sustainable consumption. (shrink)

In the US, an increasingly popular local food movement is propelled along by structural arguments that highlight the inequity and unsustainablity of the current agri-food system and by individually based arguments that highlight personal health and well-being. Despite clear differences in their foci, the deeper values contained in each argument tend to be neglected or lost, while local innovations assume instrumental and largely market-based forms. By narrowing their focus to the rational and the economic, movement activists tend to (...) overlook (or marginalize) the role of the sensual, the emotional, the expressive for maintaining layered sets of embodied relationships to food and to place. This paper seeks to show that cultural and nonrational elements are fundamental to local food discussions. It proceeds from the assumption that, without them as full partners, the movement cannot be sustained in any felt, practiced, or committed way. To this end, it discusses the concept of place and bodies in place, as well as the connections between the ecological and the cultural, the sensual and the scientific. It offers a new set of questions and conceptual tools with which advocates and activists may “ground,” and thereby revalue and restore, the promise and practice of local food. (shrink)

Food safety, ultimately, is a human-centred work. No matter how regulations are coercively released and implemented, the free will and behaviors of human actors (e.g., employees) leads to a real result in food safety. A real motivator of such free will and behaviors is organizational culture that stimulates meaningful organizational actions. Based on such rationale, this conceptual paper with Walmart as an example case sets to discuss the relationships between green organizational culture, corporate social responsibility, and (...) food safety. As organizational culture has been largely discussed in Management and Business literature, green organizational culture and its impacts on socially and environmentally friendly organizational behaviors, as well as public health outcomes like food safety, is wanted. With the clarification of the relationships between these three important constructs, theoretical implications for future research and practical implications for governance and policy-making are well generated. (shrink)

Food irradiation has been acommercially viable postharvest technology fornearly 50 years (the actual idea of usingionizing radiation to extend the shelf-life offoods is over a century old), yet it has beenused only occasionally and sporadically.Interviews with reporters and the sources theyused at a Louisiana newspaper and a Floridanewspaper uncovered three cultural spherespresent in the debate over this post harvesttechnology – food, science/technology, andjournalism. Each of these spheres were pointsof contention for reporters and sources, andthis has had an affect (...) on the adoption of thetechnology among those involved in the foodindustry. Interviews with both reporters andthe individuals they relied on as sourceselucidate how different issues encompassedwithin different cultural spheres have beenlinked to this post harvest technology, andhave been used to help shape this debate. Thesecultural spheres offer various groups power tocontrol relations with reporters, though thatpower can be usurped by others, including thereporters themselves. Interviews with reportersand their sourses may help us understand howthe values attached to cultural spheres aremobilized by various groups to make sense of acontroversial topic, and how those groups gainentrance to public arenas and are then able tomaintain their presence. (shrink)

Despite the promise of new gene editing technologies (GETs) (e.g., CRISPR) in accelerating sustainable agri-food production, the social acceptability of these technologies remains unclear. Prior literature has primarily addressed the regulatory and economic issues impacting GETs ongoing acceptability, while little work has examined socio-cultural impacts despite evolving food policies and product commercialisation demanding input from various actors in the food system. Our systematic review across four databases addresses this gap by synthesising recent research on food system (...) actors’ perspectives to identify the key socio-cultural factors influencing GET acceptability. This review extends prior literature by including views from a more diverse range of actors (e.g., farmers and NGOs) and provides a better understanding of their perceived social benefits and concerns. We find food system actors perceive positive and negative impacts of using GETs in agriculture. These perspectives are often entangled in broader debates regarding sustainability and food systems issues (e.g., social justice). We discuss practical recommendations for policymakers, agri-food industry managers, and scientists to better align gene edited foods (GEFs) with food system actors’ values. GEF policy, development, and commercialisation must reflect social values such as collective wellbeing and transparency to improve actors’ acceptability. More research is required among marginalised food actors such as Indigenous and smallholder farmers. (shrink)

It is estimated that over 800 million people are hungry each day and two billion are suffering from the consequences of vitamin and mineral deficiencies. While a paradigm shift towards a multi-dimensional and multi-sectoral approach to food and nutrition insecurity is emerging, technical approaches largely prevail to tackle the causes of hunger and malnutrition. Founded in original in-depth field research among smallholder farmers in southwest Kenya, we argue that incorporating cultural or social dimensions in this technical debate is imperative (...) and that by systematically overlooking these dimensions, food insecurity cannot be accurately captured nor properly addressed. Based on a sub-location in rural southwest Kenya where the food plate is rapidly narrowing towards a high-calorie low nutrient diet and where over 80 % of households experience food shortages at least once a year, conclusions suggest that preferences, the local function of food, and the practices that emerge therefrom can affect the regularity of meals and their composition. The findings allow us to complement emerging research and program development with a more comprehensive and locally adapted approach to tackle food and nutrition insecurity. (shrink)

Food policy increasingly attempts to accommodate a wider and more diverse range of stakeholder interests. However, the emerging influence of different communities and networks of actors with localized concerns and interests around how food should be produced and traded, can challenge attempts to achieving more open, sustainable and globally-integrated food chains. This article analyses how cultural factors internal to a developed country can disrupt the export of food to a developing country. A framing analysis is applied (...) to examine how activists using social media to interact with the traditional news media in Australia were able to inflame public opinion and provoke outrage to disrupt the policy agenda. The paper contains a case study analysis of the media controversy in 2011 around the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesian abattoirs and the subsequent banning of live cattle exports to Indonesia by Australia. The analysis draws on the theory of binary cultural oppositions to examine how practices in relation to the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesia were reframed, through extensive media coverage of moral outrage into a critique of the values and cultural practices of Indonesian society. (shrink)

The shift from the conventional agri-food system to alternative practices is a challenging transition for agricultural producers, yet surprisingly under-studied. Little research has examined the social and cultural processes in rural communities that mobilize producers and construct and sustain producer-driven alternative food networks (AFNs). For AFNs to go beyond just offering “alternative foods” or “alternative networks” and to be constructed as “alternative economies”, this transformation in the producer community is indispensable. This paper presents a case study of a (...) rural cooperative in Shanxi, China. The discontent with both productivist agriculture and the social decay in communities motivated a group of women to engage in a decade-long process of social mobilization, cultural reconstruction, and learning by experimentation. Through this, they developed an alternative vision and successfully created a localized alternative socio-economic model, which I call “anti-productivism”. It prioritizes ecological sustainability, self-reliance, reciprocity, and cultural values over output maximization, productivity growth, commodity exchange, and monetary gains. This case contrasts sharply with the urban-initiated, consumer-driven AFNs studied in the China literature, which mostly just offered alternative foods but brought little change to the producer community. It shows that the alternative economy must be embedded in an alternative community united by strong social bonds and shared cultural values. (shrink)

This paper seeks to clarify and strengthen the ways that cultural economy is used as an analytical tool and methodological approach to studying agro-food systems. The theoretical concept of cultural economy has received much attention in economic and cultural geography over the past decade. However, use of the term remains arguably vague and ambiguous. This paper argues that cultural economy is most constructive when regarded as a new epistemological approach to society and the economy. A focus on the ways (...) that food is known as “quality” represents the material and symbolic practices that contribute to a new way of thinking about the economy. This point is illustrated in a case study of japonica rice grown in northeast China. A unique combination of social, economic, political, historical, and geographical factors come together in this region to produce rice that is generally identified within China today as “quality” rice. Situating northeast japonica rice in a greater context of a “politics of quality” in Chinese society, this case emphasizes the value of cultural economy to understand agro-food systems. (shrink)

The meaning of matter is determined by our interpretations. Even food has its own frequencies, which can be aligned with the specific notes of a musical scale. When presented with a dish we might ask not only “how does it taste?” but also “how does it sound?.” Gastrofonia is defined not as the musical accompaniment to a cooking demonstration, but the actual sound of it: music is made by food. Built upon an experiment initiated by John Cage to (...) try to make music with objects, gastrofonia examines sound as a possible connection among the visual and material arts. Combining music with taste, musician Roy Paci identified a biosonic perception of food. This chapter aims to analyze the case of gastrofonia in light of the increased scientific and artistic interest in food characterizing our contemporary society, that is, an orthorexic society where food has become a specific form of language, a communicative vehicle through which we express our identity, interests, social-ethical choices, and new concepts of art. From a sociosemiotic perspective, the gastrofonic dish is an example of a textual polyphonic discourse combining different languages, related to the five senses in a performance that becomes a form of shared communication. (shrink)

There is increasing recognition that sustainable diets need to be ‘culturally appropriate’. In relation to food consumption, however, it is often unclear what cultural appropriateness–or related terms, such as cultural or social acceptability–actually means. Often these terms go undefined, and where definitions are present, they vary widely. Based on a systematic literature review this paper explores how cultural appropriateness of food consumption is conceptualised across different research literatures, identifying six main themes in how cultural appropriateness is understood and (...) applied. The paper then critically analyses these themes in relation to sustainable food system transformation. We explore how the themes conceptualise change, finding that cultural appropriateness is viewed in two main ways: either as a relatively static obstacle to be overcome, or as a dynamic and negotiated process. Both perspectives, we argue, entail different scientific, practical and political effects. Each perspective offers particular affordances for understanding and governing sustainable food system transition, although between perspectives there is likely to be a trade-off between theoretical sophistication and practical operationalizability. Based on this analysis we argue that researchers, policymakers and practitioners should be explicit about their commitment to a particular understanding of cultural appropriateness, as this will have implications for scientific and societal applications of their work. This is particularly the case, we suggest, in relation to the transdisciplinary collaborations necessary to effectively address the ‘wicked problem’ of food system sustainability. We conclude by offering a tentative general definition of cultural appropriateness as it relates to food consumption. (shrink)

The agro-food domain in Europe is characterized by the appearance of recurrent unwanted surprises. These events, although causing obvious physical consequences, in essence depart from the expectations of the society. We argue that this unstable situation is best understood as an identity crisis of agriculture rather than as a contingent crisis of a specific economic sector. Thus the present agro-food crisis is in fact a crisis of identity. This is clearly reflected by the cohabitation within the agro-food (...) policy domain of different, often contradictory, policy discourses, namely: free tradism, multifunctionality, and agroecology. All of them try to impose their particular visions. All of them struggle to issue the policy measures they conceive as appropriate. (shrink)

Australia’s monopoly grain exporter, AWB, was the largest provider of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime under the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.The full extent of AWB’s complicity and the failure of its corporate culture became apparent as a result of two inquiries, commissioned by the United Nations and the Australian Government, both of which operated with almost complete transparency. The paper examines the nature of transparency – as virtue, duty, technique and outcome – and uses the Oil-for-Food inquiries (...) as a case study to show how transparency has exposed unethical behavior and brought about organizational change. Some potentially damaging effects of transparency and the implications for business and society are also discussed. (shrink)

The significance of enset for thefood and livelihood security of ruralhouseholds in Southwestern Ethiopia, where thiscrop is the main staple, raises two majorquestions. The first concerns the relatedissues of household food security andlivelihood security and the contribution of theenset farming and food system in achievingthese. The second deals with the issue ofbiodiversity in enset cultivation. What roledoes biodiversity play in food and livelihoodsecurity and how is it perceived and measured?To answer the latter question, it is necessaryto look (...) at the issue of classification of ensetvarieties, comparing indigenous and scientificclassifications. In answering the questions, aninterdisciplinary approach is used, and bothetic and emic perspectives are applied. Agender perspective is applied as well becauseof the gendered division of labor in ensetcultivation and the gendered nature ofindigenous knowledge. The analysis draws mainlyon the findings of a recent study on ensetcultivation in Ethiopia [Negash PhD thesis,Wageningen University, The Netherlands]. Thefindings show that enset farming guaranteeshousehold food security to a large extent, butthat household livelihood security depends onthe cultivation of additional crops andhousehold ownership of livestock and otherassets. It was also found that maximizingdiversity in enset is of importance to farmers,and that the farmers' classification of ensetvarieties yields a finer grid than theclassification of enset clones on the basis ofmolecular analysis. (shrink)

Given the food challenges that society is facing, we draw upon recent developments in the study of how food reputation affects food preferences and food choices, providing here a starting standard point for measuring every aspect of food reputation in different cultural contexts across the world. Specifically, while previous attempts focused either on specific aspects of food or on measures of food features validated in one language only, the present research validates the (...) class='Hi'>Food Reputation Map (FRM) in Italian, English and Chinese over 2250 participants worldwide. Here we successfully measure food reputation across twenty-three specific indicators, further grouped into six synthetic indicators of food reputation. Critically, results show that: a) the specific measurement tool of food reputation can vary across cultural contexts, and that b) people’s reputation of food products or categories changes significantly across different cultural contexts. Therefore, in order to understand people’s food preferences and consumption, it is important to take into account the repertoire of cultural differences that underlies the contexts of analysis: the three context-specific versions of the FRM presented here effectively deal with this issue and provide reliable context-specific insights on stakeholders’ interests, perspectives, attitudes and behaviors related to food perceptions, assessment and consumption, which can be effectively leveraged to foster food sustainability. (shrink)

The handbook is a partial survey of multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption ethics; food justice; food workers; food politics and policy; gender, body image, and healthy eating; and, food, culture and identity. -/- Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast, incorporating work from philosophy as well as anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. This Handbook provides a sample of (...) recent philosophical work in food ethics. This philosophical work addresses ethical issues with agricultural production, the structure of the global food system, the ethics of personal food consumption, the ethics of food policy, and cultural understandings of food and eating, among other issues. The work in this Handbook draws on multiple literatures within philosophy, including practical ethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy, as well as drawing on non-philosophical work. Part I considers ethical issues concerning the industrial model of farming that dominates in developed countries, looking most closely at industrial crop farming and its environmental effects. Part II concerns the ethics of animal agriculture. Part III concerns the ethics of consumption: is it morally permissible to consume various products? Part IV concerns justice—including racial, social, and economic justice—in the food system. Part V discusses some ethical and legal issues with specific kinds of food policies, including healthy eating policies, food labeling, and agricultural guest worker programs. Part VI includes four essays taking a critical eye to our public discourse about, and personal experiences of, dieting, healthy eating, and obesity prevention. Lastly, the essays in Part VII concern the personal, social, and moral significance of food. (shrink)

We add a political culture dimension to the debate over the politics of food. Central to food politics is the cultural granting of authenticity, experienced through the conjuring of relational presences of authorship. These presences derive from the faces and the places of relationality, what we term the ghosts of taste, by which food narratives articulate claims of the authorship of food by people and environments, and thus claim of authenticity. In this paper, we trace (...) the often-conflicting presences of authenticating ghosts in food along a prominent axis of current debate: the local versus the global. The three cases outlined here—Greek food, Thousand Island dressing, and wild rice—illustrate the recovery and suppression of the lingering spirits of both local and global faces and places in what we taste, and show the mutually interdependent consequence of culture and economics in food politics. (shrink)