Blog Five: #foodstagram

#foodstagram By Nicole Clinkaberry 

When someone says the word food we automatically associate it with hunger, eating, restaurants, shopping and health. In this weeks’ lecture, Dr Victoria Kuttainen (2013) made us think about food as a symbol in relation to cultural heritage and the power of wealth and poverty. In the reading Stuffed and Starved, Patel (2007) discusses how human diets are driven by the power of food corporations and the influence they have in decision making. This is evident in that obesity is no longer associated with the rich alone but that a person living in poverty is more likely to become obese due to the availability and variety of cheap and processed foods when compared with the limitations and apparent expensiveness of natural fruits and vegetables (Patel, 2007) 

Food transcends time and space in the way a family recipe is passed down displaying a foreign heritage, or that common supermarket items once came from traditional recipes of far-away continents and even that foods we associate with a particular culture can in fact have nothing to do with that culture at all (Atkins & Bowler, 2001). In The Origins of Taste (2001) the authors discuss further the symbol of poor and rich foods with the example of Cajuns eating crawfish and being ashamed of doing so due to the crawfish being associated with poverty. However with further embraces of cultural diversity these once ‘poor foods’ are being revived within communities. 

Now how do I tie this to my social network of Instagram? #foodstagram (which at the moment has over 2million posts). 

Image Source: Instagram via nicoleclinkaberry

Many Instagram users seem to have a fascination of posting photos of their food. These pictures can symbolize a persons’ wealth if they are eating out at a fancy restaurant, their celebration of an event by representation of a cake, interpretation of another culture (the picture in the middle row on the right is a deep fried whole bird I tried while in Thailand), creativeness of having the ability to cook your own meals or an example of being prepared with meal prep. There is not a day that goes by that I do not see a photo of something that someone is about to eat and above anything else this most likely shows our gluttonous attitudes to food and our ignorance of the fact that more 800million people go without eating (Patel, 2007).

References

Atkins, P., & Bowler, I. (2001). The origins of taste. In Food in society: Economy, culture, geography (pp. 272-293). London, England: Arnold.

Kuttainen, V. (2013). BA1002: Networks, narratives and the making of place, week 7 notes. [Power Point]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

Patel, R. (2007). Introduction. In Stuffed and starved: The hidden battle for the world’s food system (pp. 1-19). Toronto, Canada: Harper Perennial.