Anthropology Newsletter Columns: 2006
January 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
The Value of the Four-Field Approach
to Food and Nutrition Studies
Janet Chrzan (U Penn) and Andrea Wiley (James Madison U)
During the last decade there has been much discussion in Anthropology concerning the viability of the traditional four-field approach. Many departments have decided that an emphasis on one or two fields is more attractive. In contradiction to that perspective, we in SAFN believe it is time to make a renewed commitment to the four-field approach. This perspective, championed by Franz Boas, includes training in socio-cultural, linguistic, biological and archaeological anthropology. It seems that those attempting to following in Boas's footsteps are now viewed with intellectual suspicion if their areas of interest encompass more than one of the fields; if overlaps occur, they must be contained within easily understood linkages, such as those naturally occurring between socio-cultural and linguistic fields. The biological, for many anthropologists, is but discourse and practice-based social metaphor tied to axes of power and privilege. For those of us whose areas of research include biological processes and outcomes (as in food and nutrition) these shifts in focus are problematic. Should we sever our links to anthropology and share our work only with biological audiences? Is the biological focus somehow suspect and itself in need of abandonment? Where and how can we situate ourselves in an environment that increasingly labels us as either empiricist-positivist biological or humanistic-interpretive cultural?
The four-field approach is alive and well in SAFN, which welcomes anthropologists from across the subdisciplines. Indeed, we see this broad synthesis as essential to reliable, reputable, and meaningful research in food and nutrition. We work with the body as a symbol-carrying yet physically embedded entity, and ask questions about food use and health across time, space, culture and metaphor. It is notable that American anthropology's founding father, Boas himself, considered research on food to be central to the anthropological enterprise. In Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, Volume 1, there are on the order of 400 pages of recipes and information on the preservation of food. These are complemented by information on who eats what, how the particular food preparation is to be served, and what rituals were necessary to accompany ingestion.
Boas's holistic approach to understanding human behavior is unique in the academy. It enables examination of our biological, socio-cultural and linguistic evolution, variability, adaptation, and every day lived experiences; it recognizes that there is no single unifying lens and no singular means of "knowing". What does this mean to anthropological studies of food and nutrition? We would answer that the study of food use and nutrition sits at the unique intersection of biology and culture and thus allows us to bridge this bio-cultural split.
The four field anthropological approach to food and nutrition accomplishes much the same goals as the early Boasian premise. Though these statements may seem tired in the 21st century, it remains that case that people experience food use and health not only in a purely biological realm; they are cultural experiences, made meaningful through language and represented symbolically in material culture and the lived body experience. By taking a four fields approach we can flesh out what it means to produce and consume food, how people organize eating experiences, and the ways in which people and societies grapple with food issues. From this point of view, food systems have cultural subsystems (beliefs, traditions and representations), technological subsystems (production, distribution, preparation), and social subsystems (relations between producers and consumers). From a 'critical' point of view, we can ask who controls access to food, and whether this is differentially allocated, and if differential access affects morbidity and mortality. We can explore the degree to which food policy decisions are political and economic decisions, locally and globally. A critical viewpoint also lets us ask questions about how decisions are negotiated at the micro-level, in the intimate interactions between eaters. And finally, we can focus on the semiotics of eating. We can forge the links between the creation of meaning in food use and the experience of eating, with the mediating pathways of bodily sensation, emotion, neurotransmitters, and the immune system. We can examine the links between the experienced physical self and the symbolically-mediated cultural and psychological self, and in so doing provide new avenues for food studies. In nutrition and food studies we are forced to understand the value of the four-field approach; it is not optional.
February 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
Report on the 2005 AAA Meeting
The 2005 meeting was a resounding success for SAFN. We had an unprecedented number of well-attended sessions, we celebrated our 30th year and threw a really good birthday party! Our sessions provided a cogent overview of food and nutrition anthropology, ranging from the experiential and semiotic to the biological. The Distinguished Lecture by Solomon H. Katz (U of Pennsylvania) was very well attended and provided an opportunity to examine 30 years of scholarly development of Nutritional Anthropology.
Executive Board and Business Meetings
Much of the decision making in the board and business meetings was directed toward maintaining the economic viability and increasing the visibility of SAFN. Upon careful analysis by Treasurer Dan Sellen (U of Toronto) it became apparent that the financial ramifications of participation in AnthroSource threaten to bankrupt the organization, and the long-term viability of our publication Nutritional Anthropology is in question. As a consequence of this transition, we determined that we have to revisit the ways in which we do business, and the nature of our publications.
Two steps are underway to reinvent SAFN; the first is the recent establishment of a list-serve that will allow free subscriptions for interested members. This will permit regular communication and can provide a more agile means of sharing information about meetings, collaboration, publications, and professional activities. To join the listserve, contact Miriam Chaiken (chaiken@iup.edu).
The second strategy will be implemented in spring 2006 and will involve a significant redesign of our web site to serve as a new means to recruit members, share information and resources, and provide visibility to the work of nutritional anthropologists. Our current website (http://www.aaanet.org/cna/index.htm) is simply not receiving enough attention, and could function more effectively to meet members' needs if re-designed. We will most likely move the website to a different host which could accommodate a much larger site as well as support password logins to allow the viewing of articles; in this capacity it is hoped that the website may take on some of the features of the journal Nutritional Anthropology. Additional features will include links to members' websites so that the site may function as a source for consulting expertise; we hope to develop a list of all members' specialties so that the site may promote effective outreach to members, the public, and academic/NGO organizations. We will be working with a web designer and consultant for this effort so that our Google rankings improve, potentially allowing us to attract new members through web links. If there are particular features you would like to see included in the 'new and improved' website, please contact Miriam Chaiken directly (chaiken@iup.edu).
SNAC III
Part of these outreach efforts involve the publication (on-line) of the SNAC III Syllabi Database. Leslie Sue Lieberman (U of Central Florida) has been collecting and organizing the food and nutrition syllabi of members in preparation for the release of the (eagerly awaited) SNAC III. Please send all of your related syllabi to her for inclusion; she welcomes all course outlines relating to food and nutrition, from the purely cultural (history, sociology, political economy and all social sciences and humanities) to the biological, medical and public-health related (child growth and development, nutrition science, community health nursing and farming/development studies); please send to: llieberm@mail.ucf.edu.
Christine Wilson Award
We were pleased to present the annual Christine Wilson Award to Sarah Szurek of the University of Alabama. Sarah's paper, entitled "Social Identify and Food Choice in the Southeastern United States" combines some of the best traditions within our holistic discipline of nutritional anthropology. She examined the continuity of southern culinary traditions in several populations in Alabama, and compared food choices of three populations. She identified competing influences, such as advertising about healthy dietary patterns, and investigated the ways that these new influences are altering choices of southerners who increasingly do not follow the traditions of the past. In the spirit of Christine Wilson's own work, Sarah's paper combined qualitative examination of traditional cultural food practices and perceptions with a more quantitative analysis of actual food patterns. We think Christine would have been pleased to see the continuity from her own work, and the quality of research underway by the generation of emerging scholars.
March 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
What to Eat After the Storm
Restaurants and Culture in Post Katrina New Orleans, Part One
David Beriss, University of New Orleans
Before hurricane Katrina sent us into exile, we thought a lot about food in New Orleans. Pre-Katrina, we talked about our plans for dinner while we ate lunch. The position a person took on serving muffulettas (hot or cold), on drinking coffee (with or without chicory) or on where to find the best beignets (Café du Monde or Morning Call) were matters of some importance. When a waiter was fired at Galatoire's a few summers ago, it became the scandal of the year. New Orleans was the kind of place where obituary writers reported on where the recently departed regularly dined. Our world was marked by favorite grocery stores, our social geography defined by the restaurants we preferred. It was said, perhaps mostly by restaurateurs, that tourists came to hear music, but left talking about dinner. Food connected rich and poor here and it connected black and white as well, although not everyone was always ready to acknowledge those connections. Instead of the melting pot metaphor used elsewhere in the United States, we preferred to define New Orleans as a gumbo.
Before the storm, I had been studying the role of restaurants and chefs in creating and perpetuating the idea of New Orleans as a distinct place. In the face of the homogenizing forces of American commercialism, it seemed to me that here people had maintained connections between farmers, fishers, grocery stores, home kitchens and restaurants of all sorts. More significantly, people in New Orleans were interestingly self-conscious about their distinctive culture. After the destruction of our city and the scattering of our population, that distinctiveness seems more threatened than ever. How can a culture be revived? The food metaphor is still apt: will the city return as a gumbo or will the city be remade as only a thin soup, resembling its old self only on the surface?
Rumors, Death, and Despair
In the wake of Katrina, we looked for signs of life and we found them in stories about food. Dispersed around the country, we spoke on cell phones and flooded the internet with rumors and news about the chefs and restaurants that defined where we lived. Our early sense that the city was doomed was confirmed by the rumor that Frank Brigtsen, owner of a wildly popular restaurant in an uptown Creole cottage, might stay in Shreveport rather than reopen his restaurant. The rumor proved unfounded and the chef himself intervened on-line to put an end to it. Our spirits were further buoyed when chefs'John Besh, Paul Prudhomme, and many others'returned early on to cook for rescue workers. There was local humor: without gas or electricity, Scott Boswell, unable to open his French Quarter bistro 'Stella!' managed instead to open a new restaurant he named 'Stanley,' cooking in the courtyard on a grill.
Despite these heroic efforts, much of the news was bad. Austin Leslie, famous Creole soul chef, owner of Chez Helene in the 1980s and, more recently, the genius behind the fryer at Jacques-Imo's and the executive chef at Pampy's died in Atlanta, after spending days trapped in his attic and at the New Orleans convention center. Clifton Lachney, maitre d' at Antoine's (he had worked there since 1962), drowned along with his son in his house. Joseph Casamento, born in 1925 above his family's oyster bar in the apartment where he still lived, died in exile, in Mississippi.
Many restaurants suffered severe physical damage. Dooky Chase, Pampy's, Mandina's, Dunbar's and many other icons of neighborhood dining were flooded and will require complete gutting and rebuilding if they are to ever reopen. Founded in 1905 and freshly renovated for its centennial, Angelo Brocato's ice cream parlor stewed in several feet of fetid water for weeks. Restaurants in neighborhoods near Lake Ponchartrain were wiped off the map by the storm surge. All that remains of Sid Mar's seafood restaurant is a concrete slab. Restaurants that escaped flooding found their roofs ripped open, water and mold ruining their interior. Commander's Palace and Antoine's are among the more famous of our central institutions to suffer this fate. The corporate owners of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, founded in New Orleans by Ruth Fertel, announced that their original location in flooded Mid-City would not reopen and that the corporate headquarters would move to Florida. Galatoire's and then Mandina's opened branches in Baton Rouge before they reopened in New Orleans.
April 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
What to Eat After the Storm
Restaurants and Hope, Part Two
David Beriss, University of New Orleans
The reopening of restaurants has become one of the central measures of New Orleans' recovery. There are several on-line lists that track the openings. As of mid-January 2006, four and a half months after the storm, one of the most reliable of these lists claimed 440 reopened restaurants out of about 1,200 before the storm, while the Louisiana Restaurant Association reported that 34% of the retail food establishments in the metropolitan area had been recertified to open by state health authorities. Each new opening brings stories of survival and resilience in the local media and helps those of us who have been able to return home believe the region will recover.
But the difficulties faced by returned restaurants'and by the food industry in general, also indicate the magnitude of the challenges faced by the city. Long before it was trendy elsewhere to serve seasonal food made from local ingredients, local restaurateurs based their menus on seafood from the Gulf and local produce. After Katrina and Rita, finding purveyors amid devastated local farms and fisheries has not been easy. Restaurants also struggle to find employees. Cooks, dishwashers, waiters, and busboys have, like everyone else, lost their homes and been dispersed around the region. Even if they can be persuaded to return, with 80% of the housing stock in the city unlivable, where will they stay? For those restaurants that do open, there are concerns about whether or not their customers will return.
In the non-flooded neighborhoods'mostly the sections of the city that run along the Mississippi, now known as the 'sliver by the river,' and in the suburbs to the west'restaurants are currently packed with customers from the moment they open their doors. People seem desperate to seek out their friends and to re-experience the tastes that they missed in their exile. Curiously, it seems as if fast food restaurants and other national chains have had the most difficulty opening, even though many are offering significantly increased wages and bonuses. In my neighborhood, all three local coffee shops have reopened, but Starbucks remains dark. In the areas that depended on tourists'the French Quarter, for instance'fewer restaurants have opened and those that are open seem to be far from full, although some are thriving.
Recovery and Brisket
Can a smaller city'right now the best estimates suggest that less than half the former population has returned'sustain the restaurant industry? Can the restaurant industry sustain the city? Before Katrina, New Orleans' culinary culture linked home cooking, markets, neighborhood restaurants and high end establishments. What kind of local culture will revive with many of these elements missing? Neighborhood po-boy shops and grocery stores were already vanishing before the storm. Who will revive them now? Before we had star chefs, the local cuisine was built on the mostly unacknowledged contributions of African American cooks, working anonymously in the kitchens of every kind of restaurant. African Americans represent a disproportionate part of the population that has been unable to return. What kind of culinary culture will redevelop without the Creole cooks who sustained it in the past?
Upperline Restaurant, one of the city's most creative Creole bistros, has captured the challenges faced by the city in a dish added to the menu since reopening. 'Remembrance of Maylies', brisket with ravigote sauce and braised celery root, is named for an old Creole restaurant that closed in 1986. Joanne Clevenger, the owner of Upperline, said that the dish was meant to act like Proust's madeleine, reminding us of our past and inspiring joy and courage for the future. This dish carries a heavy load of ambiguity. Rumors have long suggested that Maylie's closed after a decades-long struggle against desegregation in its dining room, even as the restaurant's kitchen was run by Creole cooks. Upperline'itself well-integrated in all respects'has created a dish that challenges the city to remember its past while recreating itself without the evils of that past. Is this too much to ask of dinner?
May 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
An interview with Ellen Messer, Nutritional Anthropologist of the Year, 2006
Ellen Messer is visiting faculty in the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts and in the Sustainable International Development Program in the Heller School at Brandeis
How did you become involved in Nutritional Anthropology?
I encountered the formative Council on Nutritional Anthropology core group at the 1974 AAA meetings. I was in my final year of graduate school (at the U. of Michigan), teaching my first two formal courses (one on food, another on "stress") and finishing my dissertation on the evolution of plant knowledge, diet, food systems, and medicinal ideas and practices in a Mexican town. Within anthropology, biocultural approaches were encouraging biological and sociocultural anthropologists to make connections, to study the evolution of diet, energetics and nutrient cycles in food systems, and dietary habits and foodways. In the world beyond the university, the World Food Conference, global responses to the Sahelian famine, the Green Revolution with its upcoming challenges of sustainable agriculture, and food and social-justice organizing (Diet for a Small Planet, Food First), farmers' markets and food co-ops were all part of the context.
Although I had always been interested in the evolution of food systems and diet, I had intended to concentrate in Near Eastern archaeology. During my first year of graduate study, however, Dick Ford drew me into ethnobotany, John Robson, who was starting the journal Ecology, Food, and Nutrition, stimulated my interest in the nutritional adequacy of plant-based diets, and Kent Flannery encouraged me to put these various food pieces together by studying food plants in the archaeological, historic, and ethnographic record in Oaxaca. My other major influence was Roy Rappaport, whose combined studies of ecology and the sacred provided a kind of scholar-activist model, and later an engaged anthropology context, for my career path into action-oriented research and teaching, and especially anthropological studies of food and human rights.
In 1977, I was very fortunate to win an NSF post-doctoral training award for Research Applied to National Needs. I took it to Boston, where I moved among the Harvard Institute for International Development and Nutrition, MIT Food and Nutrition Science, and Tufts nutrition programs for a year, making what proved to be life-long connections with nutritionists, who subsequently invited me to contribute anthropological approaches to cross-disciplinary studies of food systems, food habits, intra-household resource allocation, nutrition and "function," and rapid-assessment methodologies.
The other major venue for my professional life was the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program [WHP] at Brown University. Over the ten years (1987-1997) of that project's existence, I was part of a team that advanced "hunger" research, policy outreach, curriculum development, and public service, while mentoring terrific students and also helping to write our bi-annual Hunger Report and shape our annual Hunger Research Briefing and Exchange.
Since that time, I have explored the provocative question of what makes a particular social-concern, such as hunger, move up or down the public agenda. "What happened to hunger?" as a policy and public objective is the theme of my current research and writing. It involves both a careful historical review of nutrition science and policy (including nutritional anthropology), and also analyzing how NGOs operate in the food, environment, and human-rights arenas; e.g., what external and internal factors enhance or block their impacts, and make them sustainable?
I also have another book in progress, which explores "Hunger and Human Rights: Religious Promise and Practice".
2. What have been your primary research questions?
I find my overall research theme is evolution of diet (adaptive and maladaptive food ways). This describes a wide range of "food system" research interests, which include "the ongoing origins of agriculture", "women and food", "culinary history" and more recently, "food, globalization, and conflict". My ethnobotanical training has influenced the kinds of species- and cuisine-based research questions asked, as well as my general inclination to use the "food" aspect of culture as a window onto the ways people relate to their natural and social-political environments.
My other area of concern is the connection between hunger and human rights. My approach goes well beyond "the right to food" or "nutrition rights". It considers all the ways different types of human rights violations interfere with adequate nutritional access; also, more positively, how a human-rights education approach, including rights-based development initiatives, provide the most promising approach for framing and addressing hunger problems in theory, policy, and practice. As an anthropologist, I've been fortunate to find teaching positions that enable me to engage students and professionals from many different backgrounds, not only on the legal instruments, but also the political-economic and sociocultural dimensions.
October 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
What can psychological anthropology contribute to nutrition policy?
Joylin Namie, Utah Valley State College
Why do we eat what we eat? This simple question elicits a complex reply among those of us who study food, because eating is about a great many things. Factors as divergent as ethnicity, religion, body image, and economics influence what completes the journey from market to mouth. In societies like ours, however, where overabundance and its attendant health problems is increasingly the norm, the most compelling issue is how to influence people to eat healthier food. Psychological anthropology can contribute to this effort.
Although the need for structural change in the food supply has been recognized, nutrition policy in the U.S. remains focused primarily on encouraging individual behavior change, often through improving nutritional knowledge. This assumes individual autonomy in food choice when such choices reflect group values and often play out in a group setting, at home and in public. There is also the issue of whom (family members, peers, and community participants) and what entities (corporations, schools, regional distribution systems, etc.) determine food choice and availability. Finally, there is the disjunction between improved knowledge and behavior change, demonstrated in health promotion efforts of various types. Psychological anthropology can offer insight into this gap between knowledge and action.
Psychological anthropologists employ many different methods and theories to develop models of what happens in people's minds to cause particular eating-related actions. A number of cultural frameworks are available to inform human action in a given society and each of us holds 'awareness' knowledge of many, although most will have little to do with our eventual course of action in a particular situation. This proved to be the case in my own research into how American women make choices about food and how much of their behavior (if any) is driven by nutritional knowledge. Of the nearly 70 women I worked with over a two year period, nearly all possessed an accurate model of healthy eating, but few applied it to their own behavior. Nutrition policy often assumes that people lack the knowledge of how to eat properly and that they will alter their behavior should they be provided with appropriate nutritional information. Instead, women in my research group divided food into two schemas or culturally shared mental constructs: things they thought they should be eating versus what they actually ate. Nutritional knowledge had much to do with the former and almost nothing to do with the latter. A chasm of cognitive dissonance existed between the two, causing considerable stress, guilt and anxiety, although these often intense feelings did little to alter eating patterns.
Analysis of interactions over food revealed themes of control (or lack thereof) and risk, rather than nutrition. Many women's narratives centered on elements (like time, traffic and the vicissitudes of toddler eating preferences) they believed to be outside of their control that interfered with preferred eating habits. These issues took precedence over nutrition even though all of the mothers in my sample possessed knowledge of proper childhood nutrition. An unspoken analysis of risk also went on below the surface, especially with regard to mothers and regulation of children's eating behavior. Women rationalized giving in to children's preferences by emphasizing children's need to become independent decision makers. This defense mechanism relieved the pressure mothers felt to feed their families healthy foods in the face of obstacles such as working full-time. Ironically, many mothers couched their strategy in terms of doing what was best for their children. The risk of displeasing children (by forcing them to eat things they did not like or denying them things they did) superseded the risk of an overweight child or one eventually afflicted with a life-threatening condition. It was more important to be a well liked mother.
Such data suggests that content knowledge alone is insufficient to motivate behavior change in the case of food and eating. Instead, food choice appears governed by cognitive schemas connected to other areas of life, such as being a "good" mother and the importance of having a career. Given this, nutrition policy targeting the food environment, rather than the individual, may be more successful in facilitating healthier eating, especially in the case of mothers and children.
November 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
SAFN @ the AAAs
Miriam Chaiken, President
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
This year the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition will have a strong and vital presence in the program of the upcoming AAA meetings. There are diverse sessions and events that should provide a fascinating array of activities for all of our participants.
As President, the highlight for me will be the special event that will follow our annual business meeting. The business meeting will be on Friday evening (6:15 p.m. in Ballroom A7 at the Convention Center) will be followed immediately by our traditional distinguished lecture. This year we are fortunate to have as our distinguished speaker Dr. Thomas Marchione, who has just retired from a key position with the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance in the US Agency for International Development. Tom brings the perspective of a career in managing international development and emergency humanitarian response for USAID to his topic 'Anthropological Issues in International Food and Nutrition Assistance.' He will examine USAID's role in the political, economic, and cultural context of the development enterprise, specifically addressing why anthropology is not as well integrated into these programs as we might like.
Tom's address will draw on his vast experience in human rights advocacy, economic development policy and practice, and nutrition. He holds a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from University of Connecticut and has published in The Journal of Nutrition, Food and Nutrition Bulletin, Journal of Food Policy, and Medical Anthropology and is the editor of an important volume on strategies to improve child nutrition in developing countries entitled Scaling Up, Scaling Down: Overcoming Malnutrition in Developing Countries (Gordon and Breach Publishers). Tom Marchione's talk promises to be one of the memorable events of this year's meetings, and will be followed by a reception to which all are welcome.
SAFN is also pleased to sponsor several invited sessions at this year's meetings. Our able Program Chair, John Brett, selected the following sessions to be included in the program:
• Changing Dynamics of European Open-Air Markets at 1:45pm on Thursday
• Social Support, Social Networks, and Dietary Intake at 8:00am on Friday
• A Tribute to Christine Wilson: Nutritional Anthropology, A Biocultural Approach to the Study of Human Foodways, Diet, and Nutrition at 1:45pm on Friday
• Finding Food Security In Unlikely Places at 8:00am on Saturday
Other organizations, especially Culture and Agriculture, are also sponsoring food themed sessions, so check the program carefully.
Other SAFN Business
Many, but not all of our members are included in our email listserve, which permits us to keep each other apprised of news in a more flexible and timely fashion than our more formal publication of this column. The listserve is currently hosted by my institution and any member can send material to be posted to me at chaiken@iup.edu and I will share it with the list. Please feel free to let us know about publications you have forthcoming, meetings that may be of interest, share thoughts on current issues, or other items of general news. Some members may not be receiving these emails, so if you wish to be added to the list, just drop me an email and I'll add your subscription. If you think you should be included and aren't receiving emails it may be that your ISP is reading our emails as 'spam' and deleting them before you see them. The technical folks at my institution say this is common when there is a hyphen in the listserve address, as is the case for 'safn-list mailing list owner,' but you should be able to instruct your software to accept messages from that address to enable receipt of the emails. Once you have completed that, let me know and I'll re-subscribe you to the email list.
On a related note, please note that our AN column editor, Janet Chrzan, has a new email address. Janet can be reached at jchrzan@sas.upenn.edu.
See you at the meetings.
December 2006
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Janet Chrzan, Contributing Editor
Building the Framework: Social Networks and
Diet Change among New Americans
(Part One)
Craig Hadley, Emory University/University of Michigan
Crystal Patil, University of Toronto and South Florida
Food choice, dietary change, diet-related disease, and migration are currently in the research spotlight. This is partly because migration (i.e. immigration) is a hot political issue, but also because of the recent flurry of epidemiological studies linking time in the United States to increases in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among foreign-born individuals. Most researchers attribute this weight gain to dietary change fueled by acculturation; however, the process of acculturation in relation to food-use change is surprisingly under-theorized. One particularly under-explored area is how social networks (the ties between an individual and an unspecified set of other people through which information and resources are exchanged) operate across different organizational levels to affect acculturation and dietary change. As such, networks include not only other individuals, but also institutions or groups. We are currently investigating how institutions (e.g., Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) or Food Stamps Program (FSP)), family dynamics, peers, and communities interact to effect documented changes in the diets and food habits of new Americans. Our present study relies on unstructured interview data from our ongoing NSF-sponsored research project with low income, food-insecure refugees to explore how individuals and institutions interact to produce new dietary practices. There are several reasons to think that the size and composition of a social network can affect the type, amount, and frequency of foods consumed, all of which are components of dietary change. We are particularly interested in (a) how networks shape people's conceptions of what foods they should eat, (b) where they get those foods, and (c) who they call upon during periods when there is not enough food in the household.
The USA resettles tens of thousands of refugees each year. For these individuals, networks may strongly influence perceptions of what foods are available, socially acceptable, and prestigious. This is especially relevant when language difficulties interfere with transmission of information about new food-related environments. The influence of social networks on food choice indeed varies along socioeconomic gradients, but will certainly vary for other reasons. For example, there is an abundance of literature suggesting that the social contexts in which foods are presented, how others react, and who provides the foods influences acceptance/rejection of foods by young children. A similar model may be important for understanding food choice when individuals are integrated in an institutional system such as a refugee resettlement center. At the other end of the spectrum, a critical component of many immigrants' social network is their children, who through links with other children greatly expand a parent's ties to others and act as information conduits about the food-related environment. The unidirectional focus of the literature dismisses children as agents of change, although this is being challenged by anthropologists. We would argue that, among immigrant families, the role that children play in food choice needs to be assessed in greater detail as the speed of dietary acculturation for children appears to be much faster than that of adults.
Moreover, a social support network also plays a role in staving off periods of food deprivation in urban populations with relatively high levels of food insecurity; Winterhalder and others have made similar arguments about the role of social networks and risk reduction in subsistence economies. During times of need, others can help buffer people through difficult times when there is not enough money in the household. This is certainly the case for some of the urban populations we are working with and true among other populations where food insecurity is a public health problem. Drawing on the resources of network members during critical periods helps to ensure that all individuals consume sufficient food until the next paycheck or until Food Stamps are available. This particular function of a social network is likely to be most important among communities with some variation in resource holdings and asymmetry in when paychecks are received. Relying on others during times of need may also shift the social setting where food is consumed and, in turn, influence dietary acculturation.
In the next issue we will present some preliminary evidence to suggest that this underlying framework appears to capture some of the key elements of dietary acculturation among newly arrived refugees.
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