Week 7: The social life of food

The social life of food

By Tasman Murch

 

Within most cultures food is seen as a social time with meals happening at special events, in your lunch hour at school and at family dinners. Atkins & Bowler (2001) also believes that "Taste has social meaning" (pg. 273).

 

On many social networks such as Facebook, we are constantly seeing pictures of our friends food that they have either had for dinner or a cake that they had baked and decided to share a photo with the 'world'. Facebook is known to be a way of expressing our identity and getting our ideas and thoughts out to the world and to share with our friends and as annoying as it is, this is what this 'photo taking' is achieving. As Atkins & Bowler (2001) said " One factor in origin and persistence of foodways is they often represent an important expression in our identity" (pg. 273).

In our Monday lecture, Dr Victoria Kuttainen (2013) talked about Rum as a network. At the end of this class she showed us a picture from Facebook with a guy holding and drinking a bottle of rum. This got me thinking. Since grade 9 when girls thought they were 'cool' putting up pictures of them holding alcohol we have been open to this concept that food is all around us and is a network even through technology. The idea of pictures of food and drinks, such as alcohol being on Facebook is a way that food is made social, as Facebook is a social
network and a way to communicate with everyone.  

 

This culture that we live in, where we can eat and afford any food we like, waste food that we have made and the fact that we are able to take photos of food like it means nothing relates back to the reading, 'Stuffed and starved' (2007). I speak for all of us when I say  that we take these aspects of food for granted. There are 800 million people in the world starving (Patel (2007) and we are lucky enough to be able to take photos of our food and share our food identity to the social network world.

 

 

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. Stuffed and starved: The hidden battle for the world's food systems (pp. 1-19). Toronto, Canada: Harper Perennial

 

Image credits:

 

Jew/- Poor people [Image]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=https://7chan.org/jew/src