Synopses & Reviews
Food, Morals and Meaning traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, it explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This second edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about the obesity epidemic.
Focussing on how our food anxieties have stemmed from social, political and religious problems in Western history, Food Morals and Meaning looks at:
- the ancient Greeks' preoccupation with eating
- early Christianity and the conflict between the pleasures of the flesh and spirituality
- scientific developments in 18th and 19th Century Europe and our current knowledge of food
- the social organization of food in the modern home, based on real interviews
- the obesity epidemic and its association with moral degeneration
Based on the work of Michel Foucault, this original book explains how a rationalization food choice - so apparent in current programmes on nutrition and health - can be traced through a genealogy of historical social imperatives and moral panics. Food, Morals and Meaning is essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.
Synopsis
First published in 2006. Food, Morals and Meaning examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. However, instead of seeing this discipline as dominant or oppressive it argues that a rationalisation of pleasure plays a positive role in our lives, allowing us to better understand who we are. The book begins by exploring the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of 'natural' appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.
Synopsis
First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.