How Does Food Intersect with Identity - Research Paper Example

HOW DOES FOOD INTERSECT WITH IDENTITY Name Institution Professor Course Date Introduction Identity entails the fact or state of being same under different conditions or aspects. Identity suggests people’s distinctiveness and their differences from others. Food, on the other hand, refers to any nutritious substance that animals or people drink or eat. While the principal role of food is nutrition, it also holds cultural dimensions where individuals eat what they eat not only based on nutritional value, or flavour, but also based on social status, class, gender and national identity. Food touches on everything and it forms the basis for every economy besides shaping identities. Food acts as a lens by which the society may be observed and interpreted. The contemporary world holds increasing complexity and mobility of food and food production. In this regard, learning where one fits through one’s food habits is essential. Food habits offer main organising trope for many factors of group identities. While much has been said on how food habits function to demarcate self from others besides structuring communities, food habits can anchor a collective identity to specificities of place, gender and class. Food and Gender Across cultures and history, women hold a special connection between appetite and food. Women via their daily routines of family means spread cultural codes relating to eating and food. The sense of self of women is founded on their capacity to feed their families. As a fundamental portion of their self identity, this right becomes more essential to females in situations of swift social shifts and food insecurity (Koc 1999, p.158). The source of identity and power for women may be lost if women lack access to food. This can occur when men take over the right to feed their families or when effectiveness is viewed as more valuable compared to empowerment. Koc (1999, p.158) asserts that when culture inscribes bodies, it is food that leaves the most apparent mark, and the mark is usually read on the bodies of women. In industrial nations, women’s relationship to food is problematic given the connection amid body image and food in diet-conscious women. For instance, eating disorders such as anorexia that occur in Western societies are linked to women. Men seek pleasure via food while women suppress their desire and obtain pleasure through serving others. A study carried out in Northern England indicated that women consider food as a perfidious friend; they like it for pleasure but they deny themselves food because of deplorable weight gain. With respect to psychological studies, women who eat smaller meals are perceived as being more feminine, more concerned about their body image and better looking compared to women who eat larger meals (Koc 1999, p.158). For women, food is a symbol of connection and friendship, but for men, food helps in experiencing competition and dominance. However, feminists have refused to make a too close connection amid food and women. Some feminists view food as pertinent only to the social reproduction domestic sphere. In present societies, selective food use is common among the two genders, but this calls for economic and cultural prerequisites that can only be provided through privilege and class. People place expectations on females in food production to conduct activities such as cooking. Modernity has turned this to be a barrier for middle class women. The classed femininity falls short in the food activity that is crucial to one’s distinctiveness as a mother. This aspect demonstrates how the link amid femininity and food is closely connected to class. Bad eating habits in a family are linked to women implying that even if both women and men are free to search for enjoyment in food, women hold the burden to consider the health of her family and not her wishes only (Fine, Heasman & Wright, 2002, p.25) . In men, there is reduced accountability in the family’s nutrition. Bother men and women find enjoyment in preparing and cooking foods for their family, but women find themselves in conflict amid the pursuit of enjoyment and the hopes that her family places on her. Women demonstrate cooking for their families via concepts of concern that prioritize the family’s daily nourishment. On the other hand, men take cooking as leisure action and they consider food as a hobby as opposed to an obligation. According to Fine, Heasman and Wright (2002, p.25), food is utilised as a way of demonstrating an underlying theory. For instance, a good meal with meat and vegetable and a man at the table demonstrates intra-household power in food preparation and consumption. Food and Class Food quality follows a socioeconomic incline. While higher-quality foods are linked to greater prosperity, foods with high contents of energy are consumed by people of lower social class. According to Kedia and Willigan (2005, p.159), the political economy of health centres on the link between health and class. With the commencement of industrialism during the mid-nineteenth century, there was a developing interest in how physical settings and social settings of the working class were linked to early mortality and illness. For instance, even if the United States of America is a food-rich country, there are portions of the country’s populace that experience food insecurity. To these segments, accessibility of nutritionally safe and sufficient food is uncertain or limited. When this problem becomes chronic, it results to under nutrition and hunger. Food insecurity leads to an unbalanced diet that is high in refined sugar or fat that consequently leads to obesity which a predominant epidemic in the U.S, and a developing health problem across the world. According to Mclntosh (1996, p.98), Max Weber differentiated two kinds of stratifying principles with respect to life prospects and lifestyles. People who obtain considerable status and wealth hold greater life prospects given their linked augments in the healthfulness of their diet. Different social classes display unique differences in food behaviour. How, when, what and where food is consumed form unique blueprints of social class (Mclntosh 1996, p.98). What is consumed is apparently unique concerning some foods. The lower class is generally unfamiliar with upper class foods such as truffles or caviar while upper class people would disregard TV dinners. Dinning rooms are more probably a feature in upper class families compared to a kitchenette. Fewer members of upper class find it modish to eat at a lunch counter (Mclntosh 1996, p.98). The entire concept of ‘Taste’ comes from class distinctions. While some claim that taste is strangely modern, the hieratic societies of the past did not bother about the advanced points of discernment. Even in the middle Ages, the concept of taste never existed but only developed when the middle class sought to differentiate themselves from the members of the lower class during relative prosperity. Taste was linked to refined sensibilities instead of the instinctive properties of an object. Weberian perspectives to social class can therefore be insightful in over nutrition and under nutrition studies and on food choices, choice of restaurant, kitchen equipment and cooking styles. Class disparities in consumption of food are still major cultural, social and economic differences. For instance, evaluation of historical shifts in the British diet between 1860 and 1980 implies that class disparities persist in consumption of foods (Ashley 2004, p.64). Different food practices and tastes of diverse classes are meaningful given that they are embedded within the sense of unique class cultures as they are engrossed in the struggles for cultural power amid classes. Class position is an illustration of how much money one possesses. The experiences of diverse social classes predispose them to eat differently and this is created within a class culture through a system of dispositions that differentiate different types of eating behaviours among members of different social class. For instance, in the United Kingdom, chips and fish eaten with fingers out of a newspaper is a centre feature in working class culinary habit (Ashley 2004, p.65). Just like an economical capital is invested to produce profit, possession of cultural capital yields a gain in difference, and a profit in authority that includes a feeling defensible in being. Working class food habits emphasize the sensual and immediate pleasures of food besides sharing and eating foods in a setting that stress the familiar and generous hospitality that sweeps away restraints and reticence. On the contrary, an individual brought up with abstractions of capital and who is assured of getting daily necessities affects a taste founded on desire, respect for certain foods (Ashley 2004, p.65). Upper class people are concerned with quality of food over quantity. They are more concerned with presentation, style and aesthetic qualities of foods. Working-class women experiment less with food, their practices founded more on habit and custom. Working-class women stresses on the familiar, both conventional foods and the significance of family. While working class women reproduce a more restrained cookery code because they hold little prospect to utilise their capital to attain any kind of profit, middle-class women take a ,more abstract perspective to cooking using a more generalised set of codes and styles obtained from cookery magazines and books (Ashley 2004, p.65). Middle class women also use food to enhance sociability among the family and to form unions with friends of their class. As a result, food consumption is a site of class struggle where middle and upper classes hold the better prospect to capitalize on their assets. The major disparities amid the food that diverse classes consume are extensively a product of the unequal distribution of material as opposed to symbolic, resources. Food and National/Cultural Identity Food and national identity are intimately connected. For instance, since the 16th century, the English people have viewed beef as the food that helps them express their perceived national qualities of love, marital prowess, liberty, commonsense and manliness. Even in the modern society beef is a popular emblem of nationhood. According to Wilson (2006, p.32), national identity is expressed through symbols, attributes or personifications demonstrating the supposed typical national characteristics. While ‘bonnet phrygien’ and the cockerel represent the national identity of French, the bowler and the bulldog are symbols of Englishness. Food, apparently also operates as a characteristic or symbol of national identity. The French people are associated with frogs and snails, Germans with sausages and beer. According to Wilson (2006, p.32), food is the most crucial national identity bearer. Food eating rituals are a major mechanism for creating and recreating ethnic identities. National identities are affirmed via what is eaten and via rituals. For instance, the British Sunday lunch where persons feel linked to a wider national community via participating in a collection action demonstrate the national identity of the British people (Ashley 2004, p.71) Similarly, Diaspora communities may get a sense of association to a wider community via consumption of meals that are tied to a religious calendar. For instance, the Jewish Seder brings together a spread community via food rituals. Eating practices are not merely a means of recreating identity, but it is a means of constructing identities. Conclusion It is commonly acceptable that statements concerning identity cannot be detached from the inclinations of the observer. There are great disparities amid self-perception of an identity and perception of the identity by other people. Personal food choices are influenced by different aspects such as convenience, price, mood, personal ideas such as food ethics and weight control. All these factors are linked to gender, class, national or cultural identities. However, the manner in which food tastes are shaped by gender, class and ethnic identities is not constant over time. As a result, it is important to understand how tastes for particular foods are formed within certain historical creations. This is because; food habits can anchor a collective identity to specificities of place, gender and class Reference List Ashley, B 2004, Food and cultural studies. London: Psychology Press. Fine, B, Heasman, M., Wright, J 2002, Consumption in the age of affluence: The world of food. London: Routledge. Kedia, S, Willigen, J 2005, Applied anthropology: Domains of Application. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group. Koc, M 1999, For hunger-proof cities: Sustainable urban food systems. New York: IDRC Mclntosh, W 1996, Sociologies of food and nutrition. New York: Springer. Wilson, T 2006, Food, drink and identity in Europe. London: Rodopi. Read More