‘You are what you eat’: historical changes in ideas about food and identity

Abstract

There is deep historicity to the adage ‘You are what you eat’. For a very long time, the relations between aliment and identity − personal and national − were understood in terms of Galenical dietetics and modes of analogical reasoning from the qualities of food to the qualities of people. ‘Hot’ foods, for example, made for a ‘hot’ temperament, and the stolidity of the ox might be transferred to people who ate its flesh. This article tracks the historical career and cultural significance of these relations, and, with the decline of both traditional dietetics and of analogical reasoning by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it describes the different cultural vocabulary used in modernity to talk about food and identity.

Reshaping the Traditional Pattern of Food Consumption in Romania through the Integration of Sustainable Diet Principles. A Qualitative Study

“…In respondents' opinion, to be traditional, a recipe and a custom must have a reasonable age; that is, to be passed down from generation to generation. This fact, which also operates as an expression of cultural identity, is in line with Almerico [36], Shapin [31], and Crowther [60].…”

“…Table 2 shows the most consumed Romanian traditional food products and dishes during the three main meals of the days and snacks. The dishes (especially those for lunch and dinner) are homemade, with respondents generally being home-cooking oriented, a feature of Romanian consumers stressed out in previous research [29][30][31]62]. Most female respondents of the sample are used to cooking several dishes at the end of the week in larger quantities, which are consumed alternately during the following week.…”

“…Because of all dimensions of sustainable diet "healthy" has been considered the most important one [25], much research to date has focused on it [25][26][27][28][29][30]. Whilst the issue of health is crucial for nowadays sustainable food system, food is also implicated in the cultural identity, both individual and collective and expresses cultural ways of being [6,[31][32][33][34][35][36]. This suggest that cultural dimension of sustainable diet requires further attention.…”

Beyond the ‘raw’ and the ‘cooked’: a history of fortified blended foods

“…These experiments sought to discern the minimal biochemical inputs required for human functioning, rendering the human need for food, with all its cultural, political, and social complexity, into a list of hard figures (Vernon, 2007, pp. 81-117;Cullather, 2007;Scrinis, 2013;Shapin, 2014). 7 By the start of the Second World War in 1939, relief workers were excited about the possibilities of such knowledge with regard to the management of hunger, and there was a profoundly confident attitude in the air, nicely captured in the words of one aid worker, Francesca Wilson (1945, p.13):…”

De la Historia de los Alimentos a la Historia de la Nutrición: Reflexiones sobre América Latina en la Primera Mitad del Siglo XX

“…Desde este periodo, la alimentación se consideró un elemento degenerador o regenerador, que podía hacer a los europeos indígenas o a los indígenas civilizados (Earle, 2012,pos 1,150;Earle, 2010). El efecto de las dietas "exóticas" sobre los cuerpos civilizados de los colonizadores y conquistadores fue una de las preguntas comunes que se hicieron en varios de los emprendimientos colonizadores, como también ha argumentado Steven Shapin, y se reinventaron e incorporaron nuevas explicaciones y soluciones a lo que se consideró desde muy temprano como el "problema" de la alimentación, pero siempre manteniendo la duda sobre el efecto en la "constitución" de los cuerpos de una alimentación nativa (Shapin, 2014). Este argumento explica en parte el fuerte impulso a consumir unos alimentos y no a otros, dependiendo de su origen, y cómo el intercambio de alimentos estuvo marcado por ideas asociadas con el degeneracionismo, la idea de que el ambiente podía cambiar la constitución corporal.…”