Term paper:
Is food simply the uploading of calories into a body, a way of meeting basic caloric and nutritional needs? Is it nothing more than chemistry? Does it only symbolize the groups and bodies that are present? No. Surely we can claim that food one of the most elemental cultural substances with which we produce selves and societies. Food, the saying goes, “is good to think with.”
Topics (choose one, and then narrowly focus it).
a.) Food as a key device for kinship. With whom does one eat or not eat? What foods mark distance or closeness? How is food shared, gifted, or withheld? It can be a stuff with which to produce intimacy or distance, kinship or estrangement. With food one can produce locality or the household, debts and allegiances. Food may be used to produce mutually dependent relationships—relationships based on exchange, reciprocity, and gift-giving. With food, in other words, one can produce social worlds; and locate self and family.
b.) The ways that language is a medium for food. Do names, categories, and classifications from language change the way that food tastes, feels, and acts in the body? For example, can food be “warming” or “cooling” or “nourishing” or “aphrodisiacal”? (Note too: many observers have suggested that a cuisine has a kind of “grammar” and “lexicon,” with various kinds of rules that render the food sensible. E.g., desert in some cuisines must come after the entrée…). For this topic, consider how and why language “cooks” food before it is eaten.
c.) Purity and pollution in food: food is regularly marked with categories of edible, inedible, taboo, masculine, holy, sinful, and more. Some foods might be avoided during pregnancy or while menstruating, other foods might be forbidden based on religion, caste, or class. Rules about food purity and pollution do not simply mark—but produce—boundaries such as gender, kinship, age, and time.
d) Food as a way to comprehend and produce “power” in human relationships, including debt, inequality, hierarchy, role, duty, ideologies, and
VERY IMPORTANT: Do not attempt to use all of these sources, but do use at least 3 sources, at least 1 of which is not on the course syllabus. Do not use any sources not listed on this handout. You might, for example, use 1 reading from the syllabus and use 2 of the following. Try to find texts that compliment one another and help you form a compact and interesting argument.
Cavanaugh, Jillian R., Kathleen C. Riley, Alexandra Jaffe, Christine Jourdan, Martha Karrebæk, and Amy Paugh. 2014. “What Words Bring to the Table: The Linguistic Anthropological Toolkit as Applied to the Study of Food.”
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24 (1): 84-97. https://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/10551360/v24i0001/84_wwbtttattsof.
Gvion, Liora. 2011. “Cooking, Food, and Masculinity: Palestinian Men in Israeli Society.” Men and Masculinities 14 (4): 408-429. https://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/1097184x/v14i0004/408_cfampmiis
Lewis, George H. 2000. “From Minnesota Fat to Seoul Food: Spam in America and the Pacific Rim.” Journal of Popular Culture34 (2): 83-105. https://search.proquest.com/docview/195363842?accountid=14771
Matejowsky, Ty. 2007. “SPAM and fast-food ‘glocalization’ in the Philippines.” Food, Culture & Society, 10(1), 23+. https://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA174820175&v=2.1&u=utoronto_main&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=207802793a38f2dda2ac09c5f3e7611b