Social Research articles from March 1999

Social Research archives from March 1999

Introduction: Everyday Life.
March 22, 1999... Anthropology teaches us that there is nothing ordinary about the ordinary, that is, if by ordinary we mean "usual" or "normal." Still, members of every culture believe that their way of doing things is normal. If we look at the world from the...

Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching(*).
March 22, 1999... The theme of this paper is that food is fundamental, fun, frightening, and far-reaching. By far-reaching, I mean that food is foundational, that is, the system evolved to deal with problems of food selection is the source of many general...

Culture and Obesity.
March 22, 1999... In every society known to me, there has always been a conflict over defining the good diet. Ancient Rome had sumptuary laws and an inherited predisposition against what it saw as excess at table. But Latin literature is nonetheless full of...

Introduction: Case Histories.
March 22, 1999... Paris may be a moveable feast, as Ernest Hemingway observed, but feasts in a less metaphorical sense are also eminently moveable. Elements of the remote and exotic have probably always been vital ingredients in making feasts individually...

Translating Maize into Corn: The Transformation of America's Native Grain.
March 22, 1999... With our first infant wail, we establish that intimate link between food and language on which our lives depend. You could say that ingesting food is our primary act of translation, in which the mouth is a portal for both eating and speaking,...

How the Potato Changed the World's History.
March 22, 1999... My title is not as absurd at it sounds, even though historians have only recently begun to take notice of how the spread of potatoes and other American food crops to the Old World--potatoes and maize in particular, but also tomatoes, peanuts...

Sweet Polychrest.(sugar)
March 22, 1999... Unlike our personal inclinations toward salt, sour, bitter, pungent ("hot") and all the other tastes, among human beings the near-universal liking for the taste of sweetness is probably tied to a built-in biological predisposition. A wide...

Sustainable Agriculture for a Food Secure Third World.
March 22, 1999... The centrality of the rural is often forgotten, particularly by policy makers in industrialized countries, where most people live in urban centers. Their developing country counterparts frequently follow this lead, exhibiting an urban bias in...

Food and Culture: Interconnections.
March 22, 1999... The Spanish love naughty children. An advertising ploy that must sell products in Spain--since you see it so often on Spanish television and elsewhere--is the small drama where children trick their parents into giving them the objects in...

Commensality and Poisoning.
March 22, 1999... In all societies, sharing food is a way of establishing closeness, while, conversely, the refusal to share is one of the clearest marks of distance and enmity. These points have been repeatedly made by both anthropologists and psychologists...

Eating Karma in Classical South Asian Texts.
March 22, 1999... Food and eating function in South Asia to define the person more than anything else, even sex. Yet the precise nature of that definition has been debated, often to the death, for over two millennia. In this essay, I will outline the main...

Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question.
March 22, 1999... I hope it won't seem impolite, or as people say these days, inappropriate, in a conference on "Food: Nature and Culture," to address the question of cannibalism. This is hardly the first thing that most of us think of as food, even if we don't...

Writing of Food.
March 22, 1999... Bertolt Brecht's famous insistence that "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral"--"Chow first, then moralizing" might be an epigraph to the matter of our discussion on this panel of a conference with such a broad and deep range of concerns. But...

Appetite Appeal.
March 22, 1999... How many of you have really thought about food packaging? Probably, few if any. Food packaging is as common as food itself and, therefore, is usually accepted without question or controversy. With the exception of the current concern about...

Feasts for the Eyes, Foods for Thought.
March 22, 1999... When viewed in the shadow of world hunger, the bio-chemistry of nutrition, and the eating habits that identify distinct immigrant populations, the conjunction of food and art runs the risk of seeming both vague and frivolous: vague because it...

Introduction: Abundance and Scarcity.
March 22, 1999... This section contains a very interesting and diverse set of papers. The previous papers have covered a wide range of cultural, artistic, and historical aspects of food. Now we switch to a slightly different approach to the subject. The...

Hunger in America: A Matter of Policy.
March 22, 1999... For centuries, advocates for the poor, social reformers, and policymakers have debated ways to address inequalities in access to food and other resources. Debates have centered on the conflict between sympathy for the plight of poor people and...

Food and Food Poverty: Perspectives on Distribution.
March 22, 1999... Introduction The lack of food is more closely associated with human poverty and deprivation, at least symbolically if not in fact, than all other basic needs. The occasion of famines and endemic under-nutrition, until recent decades,...

Scarcity in Abundance: Food and Non-Food(*).
March 22, 1999... Introduction The title of this essay puts the words "scarcity" and "abundance" together in a deliberate effort to make them grate against one another. "Scarcity in abundance" is designed to provoke recollecting the maldistribution of...

Introduction: The Future.
March 22, 1999... This is the wind-up section of the volume, in which we will try to take a look at the future. Food is a central component of man's history--indeed, one of the most important human inventions was the discovery that food could be produced from...

Food for All in the 21st Century.
March 22, 1999... To die of hunger is the bitterest of fates Homer, The Odyssey In his epic poem the Odyssey,(1) Homer recounts how Odysseus and his companions have resisted the lure of the Sirens, sailed safely between Scylla and Charabdis, and have come to...

Food Security and Conflict(*).
March 22, 1999... Armed conflicts lead to hunger and reduced food production and economic growth in developing and transition countries. Reciprocally, food and economic insecurity and natural resource scarcities--real and perceived--often precipitate violence....

Population Growth, Environmental Resources, and the Global Availability of Food.
March 22, 1999... Agricultural shortages exist because the human population is increasing faster than the food production capability of the agricultural system. Uneven distribution of food, inability to afford food, and political unrest also threaten world food...