The Anthropology of Food and Body

Counihan, Carole

doi:10.4324/9781315656540

Cited by 40 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…The preferences of partners can also influence the labor of food provisioning and limit scaling up AFNs in the sphere of consumption (DeVault, 1991; Counihan, 1999; Avakian and Haber, 2005). Women's housework increases when they get married (Andersen, 2011), and the presence of a spouse can influence time and financial demands (Devine et al, 2006).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars have noted that having children increases household labor (Sayer, 2005). Having additional bodies to nourish influences the time and financial demands associated with food provisioning, and children often have specific food needs and preferences, which can further add to the labor of food provisioning (DeVault, 1991; Counihan, 1999; Avakian and Haber, 2005; Devine et al, 2006; Wedge, 2008). This suggests that having children might be a barrier to increasing AFN engagement in the sphere of consumption given the ways in which they can add to the labor of food provisioning.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Labor and alternative food networks: challenges for farmers and consumers

Bruce

Castellano

2016

Renew. Agric. Food Syst.

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Although alternative food networks (AFNs) have made strides in modeling socially just and environmentally sound agrifood system practices, the next step is to make these innovations available to more people, or to increase participation in AFNs. However, there are several barriers to expanding the impact of AFNs. The labor intensity of producing and consuming foods in AFNs is sometimes overlooked but poses a significant challenge to alternative agrifood systems’ long-term viability. This paper brings together two independently conducted empirical research studies, one focused on sustainable food production and one focused on food provisioning in the sphere of consumption. Farmers engaged in small-scale alternative food production are investing significantly more time in maintaining the health of their soils by practicing crop rotation, growing a greater diversity of crops and building organic matter with cover crops and compost. Because much of this work is unpaid, the added labor requirements pose an obstacle to the financial viability and social sustainability of alternative production methods. On the consumption side, the labor intensity of food provisioning for women engaged in AFNs, combined with other socio-demographic factors, at times, constrains AFN participation. By identifying the ways in which labor may limit the ability of AFNs to expand to a larger portion of the population, this paper helps shed light on ways of increasing the environmental, social and health benefits of AFNs.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor and alternative food networks: challenges for farmers and consumers

Bruce

Castellano

2016

Renew. Agric. Food Syst.

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“…This chapter is in keeping with Cairns and Johnston (2015, 25) in their sociological approach to food femininities, which establishes the link between individual food and body performances at interpersonal and emotional levels and the social structures and institutions these are embedded in. In general, the regulation of food, food-related entitlements, and responsibilities are structured along gendered lines, strongly associating foodwork with feminine identity (Charles and Kerr 1988;DeVault 1991;Counihan 1999). To this end, however, it is by no means to say here that women 4 are considered as 'naturally' caring, nor that something like a general motherhood experience exists.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Obesity, Biopower, and Embodiment of Caring: Foodwork and Maternal Ambivalences in Ho Chi Minh City

Ehlert

2018

Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam

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Child obesity is increasingly addressed as a public health problem in Vietnam and framed as one of the most severe food-related risks globally. By drawing on theories of the body and from the perspective of mothers feeding their children, this chapter stresses the ambivalences women face in their capacity of caring through food. It puts eating and feeding as subjective embodied experience in context by retracing how different authorities of biopower such as the public health sector, the food industry, and the family work on the bodies of mothers and children, admonishing and regulating food in concert with conflicting body ideals in children. Rather than obesity as supposed food-related risk number one, it is the complex struggle of ‘good motherhood’ that essentially drives women’s food-related anxiety.

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“…Food and eating-related discourses are instrumental in replicating feminine ideals and fuelling women’s ambivalent relationship with food and their bodies (Jovanovski, 2017). Furthermore, research on ‘food femininities’ examines the gendered performance of women’s role in nourishing bodies and providing food to others (Cairns & Johnston, 2015; see also Counihan, 1999; DeVault, 1991; Murcott, 1983b). Other feminist scholarship criticises Western nutritional science for decontextualising the eating body, reducing it to universal metrics, like calorie counts and the Body Mass Index.…”

Section: Food Body and Social Distinctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The gender dimension of feeding and cooking for others has been widely acknowledged (see Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Counihan, 1999; DeVault, 1991; Murcott, 1983b). The food sphere has been (critically) discussed as the domain in which she is ‘conducting herself [as] recognisably womanly’ (DeVault, 1991, p. 118).…”

Section: Beauty Ideals: From Fattening-up To Slimming Downmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: Making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

Ehlert

2021

The Sociological Review

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This article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food–body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

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The Anthropology of Food and Body

Cited by 40 publications

References 0 publications

Labor and alternative food networks: challenges for farmers and consumers

Labor and alternative food networks: challenges for farmers and consumers

Obesity, Biopower, and Embodiment of Caring: Foodwork and Maternal Ambivalences in Ho Chi Minh City

Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: Making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

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