Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics

3 downloads 0 Views 61KB Size Report
and the replacement of smoked salmon with smoked eel as a prestigious h'ors d'oeuvres in more recent times. Drawing on Bourdieu's work we become aware ...
Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics The Official Journal of The British Dietetic Association

EDITORIAL

Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics

The social aspects of food and nutrition

Clearly nutritious food is a physiological requirement and prerequisite for health but we cannot ignore the social importance of food and eating. Audrey Richards (1932), in her classic anthropological study, points to the ‘nutritional system’. This is characterised by the interaction between biological and physiological needs on the one hand with those of social, emotional and cultural needs on the other. Food is incorporated through the act of eating (Fischler, 1988) both in a physiological and symbolic sense. Therefore, ‘we are what we eat’ in many different ways. Despite being omnivores all societies tend to limit the range of foods through rules about what is edible and inedible. In the UK stories about French people consuming frogs and horses continue to raise eyebrows. We are also aware about the avoidance of pork among Muslim and Jewish adherents. Further chicken is a staple meat in the UK whereas in Vietnam it is viewed as toxic for pregnant women and in Tibet as unclean as chickens eat worms. Such rules may appear as arbitrary and irrational but their effect is to solidify group membership and also to set groups apart. We can link such rules to the hierarchy of meals daily, weekly and yearly with breakfast being the least important meal symbolically, dinner the most important, Sunday lunch even more so with Christmas topping the bill (Douglas, 1975). For example, migrants to the UK have adopted the habit of eating breakfast cereal while still retaining their cultural preferences for dinner (Bradby, 1997). The French sociologist Bourdieu (1984) has explored how upper and lower class tastes are generated and reproduced by looking at, amongst other things, food preferences. From this he has developed an understanding of social class differences in food choice, a food choice that is by no means static. He argues that there is a competitive dimension to taste that is used to sustain an elevated status of the higher classes. Hence as lower classes are adopting the eating preferences of the higher classes the elite need to change their consumption in order to differentiate themselves from the masses. We can therefore use Bourdieu’s insights when examining the fall from grace of the prawn cocktail, the epitome of elegance in the 1970s, and the replacement of smoked salmon with smoked eel as a prestigious h’ors d’oeuvres in more recent times. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work we become aware that judging one social group’s eating habits from the vantage point of another therefore includes value judgements related to hierarchy. Our individual identity and choice as consumers is then located in a complex social system.

So why should we both bother looking at these social aspects of food and nutrition? Is it a case of it’s all jolly interesting, but let’s get down the real stuff? Two papers in this edition of Human Nutrition and Dietetics provide us with illustrations of these social aspects of nutrition and food use and why they matter. The study of Brough et al. (2009) shows how the use of folate supplements during preconception and early pregnancy amongst women in East London shows clear social patterning by both social class and ethnicity and that this correlated with folate status. Use was also low among many women during the crucial preconception period. These findings have clear practical implications, namely the need for more targeted advice about the importance of using folate supplements and also that such advice needs to be customised for different groups of women. The study also suggests that addressing this issue effectively probably needs to go beyond conventional approaches of just providing information as it shows that although use was low, awareness was high. This suggests that other factors, including social factors, are at play here and which could be explored in more depth using qualitative methods. The study of Scarpello et al. (2009) used qualitative methods to explore the food choice strategies and the attitudes behind these among rural customers in a typical English locale. As they note, such methods can access the complex meanings and symbolism that we attribute to foods and also the food supply system. Their study identifies four main themes that underpinned the rural participants’ shopping and eating patterns some of which were highly symbolic in nature. For instance, the theme of the village store as icon carried meanings of community identity and its use demonstrated a commitment to these meanings and values. Shopping there was also important in maintaining social relationships with neighbours. Although the supermarkets were seen as offering more economic and wider ranges of healthy foods, these important social meanings and functions of shopping were clearly lacking in supermarket shopping. Noninstrumental or non-nutritional concerns, i.e. social aspects of food and eating, were thus revealed as key drivers of consumption. Taken together these papers illustrate how quantitative methods can be used to document social patterning in food use and nutritional status, and how qualitative methods can uncover the beliefs, norms and values associated with food and eating and their social functions. There is now a large and growing sociology of food

ª 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation. ª 2009 The British Dietetic Association Ltd 2009 J Hum Nutr Diet, 22, pp. 87–88

87

Editorial

literature. This is a rich literature that is theoretically and methodologically diverse, but from which we can draw some broad insights meaningful to nutritionists and dietitians. At one level we can read this literature as a form of lay epidemiology that shows that our consumption choices, including those deemed ‘unhealthy’ or undesirable from a public health perspective, are not simply the product of irrational prejudices or of ignorance. Rather our choices are inevitably structured by a series of influences many of which are social in nature. To ignore these is to ‘atomise’ individuals rather than considering peoples’ lives and behaviours in the social contexts in which they are embedded and which influence them. We should not forget Douglas’ famous statement that ‘food is not feed’ (Douglas, 1982). U. Gustafsson* & A. Draper  *School of Business and Social Sciences, Roehampton University, London, UK;  Centre for Public Health Nutrition, Westminster University, London, UK E-mail: [email protected]

88

References Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bradby, H. (1997) Health, eating and heart attacks: Glaswegian Punjabi women’s thinking about everyday food. In Food, Health and Identity. ed. P. Caplan, pp. 213–233. London: Routledge. Brough, L., Rees, G.A., Crawford, M.A. & Dorman, E.K. (2009) Social and ethnic differences in folic acid use during preconception and early pregnancy in the UK: effect on maternal folate status. J. Hum. Nutr. Diet. 22, 100–107. Douglas, M. (1975) Deciphering a meal. Daedalus 101, 61–81. Douglas, M. (1982) In the Active Voice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fischler, C. (1988) Food, self and identity. Soc. Sci. Inf. 27, 275–292. Richards, A. (1932) Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe: A Functional Study of Nutrition among the Southern Bantu. London: Routledge. Scarpello, T., Poland, F., Lambert, N. & Wakeman, T. (2009) A qualitative study of the food-related experiences of rural village shop customers. J. Hum. Nutr. Diet. 22, 108–116.

ª 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation. ª 2009 The British Dietetic Association Ltd 2009 J Hum Nutr Diet, 22, pp. 87–88