Browsing by Subject "Food studies"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Compost and consumption : organic farming, food, and fashion in American culture
(2010-05) O'Sullivan, Robin; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Hoelscher, Steven; Davis, Janet; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Davis, Diana
This research analyzes the history and cultural significance of organic agriculture as a social movement. It illuminates how organic production and consumption are polyvalent and socially embedded. Organic farming has been classified as a hobby and as a constituent of agribusiness; organic food has been dubbed as a hollow preference and as an exploited industry. At its core, though, organics is a social movement. From agricultural pioneers in the 1940s to contemporary consumer activists, the organic movement has preserved connections to environmentalism, agrarianism, health food dogma, and other ideological alignments. Organic farming has been a method of agriculture, social philosophy, way of life, and subversive effort. Organic consumption has been a practical decision, lifestyle choice, communicative performance, status marker, and political act. The dissertation embraces this multiplicity and expounds on the nuances of what the organic zeitgeist has meant in American culture. The study entails collection and analysis of historical and contemporary data, including archival, legislative, and regulatory documents. It applies discourse analysis, semiotics, iconographic study, and cultural analysis to texts and additional sorts of media. Observations of organic sites of consumption also enhance the historical and theoretical evaluations. This project includes scrutiny of rhetorical strategies used by organic farmers, business leaders, chefs, consumers, writers, and organizations that engage with the “organic lifestyle.” Despite the fluid intertextuality of these expressions, there are common themes. Unraveling the multivocality and interconnectedness of prevailing discourses provides insight into the movement’s epicenter.
From secret luncheons to microwave ovens : representations of women eating alone in twentieth-century American popular culture
(2010-05) Oman, Marian Elizabeth; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. (Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche), 1969-; Kearney, Mary C.
In this report, I examine representations of women eating alone in various sites of American popular culture, including 1980s women’s magazines, mid twentieth-century lifestyle guides, and early twentieth-century popular literature. Exploring the resonances between these various moments and sites of culture through which the meaning of eating alone has been produced reveals a complex pattern of signification, one that demonstrates the centrality of this mundane and often overlooked element of our daily lives to some of the most fundamental narratives about the place of women, food, and family in American culture and society. Taking as a starting point the existing scholarship on the food practices of women in the United States that demonstrates the existence of strong historical and ideological correlations between food, family and femininity, I argue that, for women, eating alone is necessarily marked as a non-normative and potentially subversive behavior. A woman eating alone in effect upends the family dinner table through which an entire system of economic, social and personal relationships based around heteronormative domesticity is imagined to be constituted. The figure of the woman eating alone, then, is a powerfully charged – even dangerous – symbol, a condensed site of meaning through which dominant ideologies may be reified, reproduced and resisted.
In search of a good drink : punches, cocktails, and imperial consumption
(2016-01-11) Knerr, Kerry Marjorie; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Thompson, Shirley
This report examines the relationship between forms of domestic alcohol consumption and the histories of global capitalism—specifically, the shift from punches to cocktails as the most popular form of hard alcohol consumption. It argues that punches served to direct the products of the periphery into the metropole and that cocktails exist only as a direct result of American engagement with global markets. The availability of new, exotic ingredients from colonial holdings allowed particular kinds of consumption clusters to form in European societies; these newfound tastes then fueled further expansion, as in Sidney Mintz’s analysis of sugar and capitalism. The growing institution of the bar encouraged individual forms of drinking, leading to the downfall of punch and the ascendance of cocktails.
Jsme plne koblih : food and politics in the Czech Republic
(2020-09-11) Heim, Tracy Lynn; Neuburger, Mary, 1966-; Patel, Raj
This report contributes to studies of food and politics in the Czech Republic by examining the context surrounding a single food product: a filled doughnut, or kobliha. Kobliha (plural koblihy) became a symbol of both Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s political campaign and a motif on signs used at protests against him. As a lens to examine modern politics in the Czech Republic, the koblihy reveal tensions around power, democracy, and the modern food system. Using anti-establishment political theories and a cultural hegemonic lens, the paper displays the importance of doughnuts in both the ANO political party and the Million Moments for Democracy (MMD) protest movement (2018-present) against its leader, Babiš.
Taco truck urban topographies and the spatiality of orderly disorder
(2015-06-10) Lemon, Robert, 1979-; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Adams, Paul; Torres, Rebecca; Doolittle, William; Engelhardt, Elizabeth
This dissertation examines Mexican immigrant socio-spatial practices around taco trucks in four cities across the United States: Oakland, California; Sacramento, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas. The dissertation is an empirically grounded analysis of the trucks’ social performances. Taco truck space is a representational practice that takes on a myriad of meanings to divergent community groups. Taco truck owners traverse the city to find spaces where they are most appreciated and least harassed. As they navigate these often invisible and uneven topographies, their methodical movements produce atypical rhythms in municipalities across the nation. These idiosyncratic patterns denote various American ideologies toward taco trucks in particular, and Mexican immigrants in general. Moreover, because the trucks are mobile and cannot be completely eradicated, the taco trucks become symbolic spaces of empowerment. They come to represent Mexican cultural perseverance, as well as resistance to the existing community hegemony that may try to erase them from the landscape. The dissertation elucidates the obscure social processes that sculpt a city’s cultural contours across the United States. For instance, taco truck space in some cities is often manipulated by discriminatory planning initiatives that dictate where Mexican food practices can take place; while in other more affluent neighborhoods, new artisanal food trucks plagiarize proletariat Mexican street food practices, which are primarily celebrated by non-Latino middle-class patrons. It is not uncommon for many of a city’s restaurateurs to perceive taco truck space as blight. This notion rings especially true in cases where a city adopts the new urban mantra, “Farm-to-Fork,” where the urban environment continues to be upgraded by the hands of developers. These improvements lead to the proliferation of urban landscapes with sidewalk cafes and new restaurants that ultimately push Mexican food practices to the city’s periphery. In contrast, some city planners capitalize on Mexican cuisine culture and promote taco truck space as a way to market a city’s open-mindedness and ethnic diversity to attract the creative class to further economic development. The dissertation argues that eating at taco trucks is more than just a simple act that reinforces identity to the Mexican immigrant—it is also a spatial representational practice that performs one’s right to inhabit public space and the city at large.