Foodways

In social science, foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history. In social science, foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Foodways as 'the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period'. The term ′foodways′ appears to have been coined in 1942 by three University of Chicago graduate students, John W. Bennett, Harvey L. Smith and Herbert Passim. In the 1920s and 1930s, agricultural scientists and rural sociologists, usually under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture, had undertaken various studies of food habits of the rural poor, with the aim of improving them. With the advent of World War II, these efforts increased. Those with information to share about different food habits were encouraged to contact the anthropologist Margaret Mead at the National Research Council. It was in these circumstances that John W. Bennett and his companions went to study Anglo-Americans, German-Americans and African-Americans in the fertile but frequently flooded bottomlands of southern Illinois along the banks of the Mississippi. All depended on white bread, pork, and potatoes. To the investigators these habits, particularly the spurning of plentiful, nutritious foods such as fish, seemed irrational. They argued 'The illusion of an 'economic man,' searching out the most obscure foodstuffs from an unwilling Nature in the reasoned pursuit of complete fulfillment of his needs, must give way to the concept of a man conditioned by the preferences and prejudices of his neighbors, selecting only those foods sanctioned by the 'culture.'' Presumably they chose the term 'foodways' by analogy with the term 'folkways.' This had gained currency in the United States following its adoption by Yale professor and pioneering social scientist William Graham Sumnner. Since folkways were established by use, not reason, they were resistant to change and not easily altered by government intervention. Similarly, Bennett et al. concluded, foodways were not likely to change simply because bureaucrats suggested that new ways had economic or nutritional benefits. The term 'foodways' was little used until late 1960s and early 1970s and the surge in folklife research, including the establishment of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1967. As the field of Foodways develops, scholars offer their own definitions: 'Contemporary scholarship defines foodways as the study of what we eat, as well as how and why and under what circumstances we eat it. As folklorist Jay Anderson argued in a pioneering 1971 essay, foodways encompasses “the whole interrelated system of food conceptualization and evaluation, procurement, preservation, preparation, consumption and nutrition shared by all the members of a particular society. This broad definition embraces both historical and regional differences while simultaneously pointing to the importance of food events (barbecues, Brunswick stew suppers, oyster roasts), food processes (ham curing, snap-bean canning, friend apple pie making), and even the aesthetic realms that touch upon the world of food (country songs about food, quilts raffled at community fish fries, literary references to eating).' - John T. Edge Anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, historians, and food scholars often use the term foodways to describe the study of why we eat what we eat and what it means. The term, therefore, looks at food consumption on a deeper than concrete level and includes, yet goes, beyond sustenance, recipes, and/or taste. Thus, according to Harris, Lyon and McLaughlin: “…everything about eating including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it and who’s at the table – is a form of communication rich with meaning. Our attitudes, practices and rituals around food are a window onto our most basic beliefs about the world and ourselves.” Topics like social inclusion and exclusion, power, and sense making are explored under the umbrella term foodways. Furthermore, the ways in which food shapes and is shaped by social organization are essential to examination of foodways. Since consumption of food is socially constructed, cultural study is also incorporated in the term. Anthropologist Mary Douglas, explains: “A very modest life of subsistence contrasts with our own use of goods, in for example, the use of food. How would we be able to say all of the things we want to say, even just to the members of our families, about different kinds of events and occasions and possibilities if we did not make any difference between breakfast and lunch and dinner and if we made no difference between Sunday and weekends, and never had a different kind of meal when friends came in, and if Christmas Day had also to be celebrated with the same kind of food?” While in fields like anthropology, the production, procurement, preparation, presentation, and consumption of foods have always been regarded as central in the study of cultures the use of the term foodways in popular culture is used as an oriented way of looking at food practices. In this sense, the term is a consumer culture expression that encompasses, in popularly understandable and debatable formats, contemporaneous social practices related to foods as well as nutritional and culinary aspects of foods.