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Food, the Body and the Self
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Food, the Body and the Self

  • Deborah Lupton - University of New South Wales, Australia, UNSW Sydney, Australia

Courses:
Food & Society

April 1996 | 192 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Food and eating practices are at the center of concern in western societies about the body, self-control, health, consumption, and the construction of identity. While we enter the world with the need to eat in order to survive, from the moment of birth the ways in which individuals interact with other people and with cultural artifacts shape their responses to food and eating practices. In Food, Body, and the Self, author Deborah Lupton explores the relationship between food and embodiment and the connection between emotions and subjectivity. In so doing, she includes discussion of the intertwining of food, meaning, and culture in the context of childhood and the family, as well as the social construction of foodstuffs as gendered; food tastes; dislikes and preferences; the dining-out experience; and spirituality and the "civilized" body. She draws on a diverse range of sources, including representations of food and eating in film, literature, advertising, gourmet magazines, new reports and public health literature, and her own empirical research into people's preferences, memories, experiences, and emotional responses to food. This exciting, wide-ranging, and thought provoking volume will be essential reading for students and academics interested in the sociology of food and everyday life and consumption as well as those in the fields of medical anthropology, cultural studies, and particularly to those engaged in the study of diet and nutrition.

 
Introduction
 
Theoretical Perspectives on Food and Eating
 
Food, the Family and Childhood
 
Food, Health and Nature
 
Tastes and Distastes
 
The Asceticism/Consumption Dialectic
 
Conclusion

`This is a book about a phenomenon that is making an impact at the present day in western societies - namely, the interaction between food and eating practices and the preoccupation with the body, self-

control, health, risk, consumption, and identity, the last in particular being a currently active and even agitated subject of discussion among scholars. The author, a specialist in Cultural Studies and Cultural

Policy with an emphasis on the links between health and culture, is well fitted to analyse the subject....This is an interesting book, which shows through the subject of food and eating the wide

range of shaping forces that play upon any individual within the society of the present day' - Review of Scottish Culture 11

`As a beginner's guide to the cultural and academic discourses around food and the self this is a helpful, well-annotated volume with a bibliography that is comprehensive' - Times Higher Education Supplement

`A worthwhile and welcome addition to existing commentaries on food consumption and practices' - Sociology of Health & Illness

`Brings together the cultural forces that have insinuated themselves into our experience of food and the body. Drawing on the extensive writings that have grown up around, food, body image, nutrition theory and gender, the author draws an altogether more voluptuous picture of the state of our relationship to our bodies. Her account focuses on the many significances of food in people's lives today; the struggle to manage the contradictory exhortations of the food industry, the cultural practices associated with food, the meanings with which eating is imbued, the influences of family, gender and sexuality and how these shape the human body and its relationship to food' - Susie Orbach, Times Literary Supplement

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ISBN: 9781446231692

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