Monkey Monday: readings in review. 28 September 2009 11:56 pm
Posted by Tracy in : anthropology,eating,geekery,nutrition,random,reading,school , trackbackOkay, party people, I was going to write a top ten list awesome food-related things I’ve read in the past week, but I am coming up against my self-imposed midnight deadline and I’m suddenly stupid tired, so here’s the bits of the list I managed to write up before my brain shut down:
From the readings for my food sociology class last Monday:
Not all harmful conditions are considered social problems. Consider nutrition. Medical authorities argue that the typical American diet contains undesirable levels of fats and cholesterol…. This diet endangers the well-being of individuals, who face greater risks of heart disease; and it also threatens societal well-being by forcing Americans to devote a growing share of their national income to health care. Yet the nutritional inadequacies of the American diet rarely appear on lists of social problems even though the condition fits most objectivist definitions.
—Joel Best, “Introduction: Typification and social problems construction,” Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989
Look at the date on that! Twenty years ago, in my lifetime, at a time in my life I can clearly remember, food clearly defined as not a social problem. Fascinating!
In class today, we continued our discussion about whether or not there’s a food-centered social movement going on all around us, and I was in the lucky group assigned to start the class discussion by presenting our reactions to the readings. Considering that both the pieces I had to work with were so boring I literally had to resort to drawing diagrams to make sense of things, things actually went fantastically well. Most laugh-out-loud sentence in my reading: “The definition can be defunctionalized by removing the word ‘function’ from it; the definition remains useful.” That’s on page 76 of “Food and Social Change,” a chapter of Sociologies of Food and Nutrition by W. A. McIntosh (Plenum, 1996) in case you’re having trouble sleeping.
My other really strong reaction came in response to this anecdote:
One large retailer in Dallas… while recognizing the community value and even potential profitability of a local van service that could increase access as well as the store’s customer base and sales volume in nearby low-income neighborhoods, decided not to enlist community feedback for such a service. “We can’t make decisions on the basis of community interest,” the store executive declared. (254)
My exact response to this in my notes was:
WHAT now? Then how the ever-loving hell can you make decisions? I’m guessing that statement is code for “I don’t want brown people shopping at my store,” because otherwise it’s completely fucking ass-backwards. Not that racism (or concern about losing racist customers by being more accommodating [to a more diverse group of customers]) isn’t asinine, but at least there’s a little rhyme and reason there.
Gah. That was in “The politics of food: agendas and movements for change,” from Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change by Robert Gottlieb (MIT Press, 2001). I’m having plenty more reactions along those lines as I make my way through Closing the Food Gap for my Policy class on Wednesday, but I’m done with them for tonight. It’s bedtime.
