A Mess of Links
If you think McDonaldisation means homogenized eating, think again.
In whose hands is bioengineering dangerous?
Who were these people?
How to, plus informed commentary on puddings English-style from Joe Pastry, a favorite blogger.
A great post on Food Inc by Grumpy Glutton, and pretty sympathetic too.
And, although most of my readers know these blogs, don’t miss Cindy Bertelson (Gherkins and Tomatoes) on hunger and starvation.
And Diana Buja on responses to glut and scarcity in Africa.
Great links, Rachel – and thanks for including mine. Question/observation abut the McDonald’s link: what, then, are the underlying links (or, as Levi-strauss would have it – ‘deep sturcture’) that unites McDonald products – other than 1. being fast 2. being high-tech based… a few others… ?
Democratized high end cuisine–white bread (or rice), beef (imitation steak) or other hallowed protein, fancy drink (fizzy, flavored), fats, green stuff, french fries pronounced at the beginning of the 20th c as the greatest acheivement of Parisian cooking, fancy surroundings all at a low price, at least for rich countries though still a luxury in much of the rest of the world. An extraordinary combination.
Rachel, thanks again for including a link to my blog post on the biology of starvation and its impacts on history. It’s a subject that fascinated me when I got my degree in human nutrition and it still fascinates me. I’d like to see a little more work done on the cooking/gender role, etc. One telling thing I came across once had to do with the US Civil War — a woman from the South basically starved herself so that the rest of her family could eat, and the reason we know this is that family pictures before, during, and after the Civil War pretty much showed that to be the case; in addition, I believe she wrote a diary or someone else did, I can’t recall the details. Anyway, i doubt she was the only who did this.
Has to be huge gender selection for hunger. And then there is all the work social historians have done on European women having babies in February/March when anemia was likely to be at its worst and then having to breast feed. I need to dig up some references for that.
I look forward to seeing what you’ve got on the gender thing. Here are some references I ran into recently, but I have not yet had a chance to look at any of them:
Christie, Maria Elisa Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico. (2008)
Counihan, Carole M., The Anthropology of Food and Body:Gender, Meaning, and Power. (1999)
Kahn, Miriam, Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. (1986)
Mary J. Weismantel, Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. (1988)