‘Doing Food Differently’: Reconnecting Biological and Social Relationships through Care for Food (original) (raw)

2009, The Sociological Review

Food' is essentially a biological entity, consumed by living creatures: plants, fungi, fish, animals or their products, are processed by various means at domestic or factory sites to produce the cornucopia of dishes, cuisines and ways of eating which have long characterized food systems (Tansey and Worsley, 1995; Beardsworth and Keil, 1997). A marked feature of the modern global food system is its divorcing of foodstuffs from the biological: increasingly, food is an industrialized product of global capitalism. Thus the drive is to make it uniform (remove as much natural variation as possible-carrots are always orange, and largely taste the same), safe (containing as few pathogens or contaminants as possible, and as good for consumer health as possible with minimum effort on the consumers' part) and predictable in processing, appearance, cost, preparation and taste. These attributes apply to raw ingredients (such as vegetables, fruit, meat) as much as to processed foodstuffs (whether longstanding and familiar such as bread, or newer, ready prepared dishes) (see for example Tansey and Worsley, 1995; Lawrence, 2004; Steel, 2008). Furthermore, this separation contributes to the emotional, intellectual and cultural distancing which people experience in their understanding of and relationship to food, a circumstance lamented by primary producers and policy makers and subject to growing academic attention (eg Cook