How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food - Softcover

Rappoport, Leon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550225634 ISBN 13: 9781550225631

Verlag: ECW PR, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Rappoport treats the dinner table like a Freudian couch, asking us to lie back and spill our guts. Tracing our culinary customs from the Stone Age to the stovetop range, he illuminates our complex and often contradictory eating habits, and suggests that perhaps we are what we eat.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Leon Rappoport, is a professor specializing in personality and social psychology at Kansas State University. His research studies on food cognition have appeared in numerous journals, including "The American Behavioral Scientist" and "Appetite." He is the author of "The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior," "Personality Development," and "Zen Running." He lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

Leon Rappoport, is a professor specializing in personality and social psychology at Kansas State University. His research studies on food cognition have appeared in numerous journals, including "The American Behavioral Scientist" and "Appetite." He is the author of "The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior," "Personality Development," and "Zen Running." He lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

Leon Rappoport, Ph.D., was a social psychology professor at Kansas State University, where there is a memorial in his name for his devotion to the Department of Psychological Sciences and its students. How We Eat is the fourth book by Dr. Rappoport.

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How We Eat

Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food

By LEON RAPPOPORT

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Leon Rappoport
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55022-563-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION A Half-Baked Notion, 
CHAPTER 1 From Myths to MacAttacks, 
CHAPTER 2 You Are What You Eat, 
CHAPTER 3 Feeding Frenzies, 
CHAPTER 4 The McDonaldization of Taste, 
CHAPTER 5 From the Raw to the Cooked to the Haute Cuisine, 
CHAPTER 6 Champagne Slippers, the Twinkie Defense, and He-Man Diets, 
CHAPTER 7 The Road to Wellville, 
CHAPTER 8 Concluding Reflections, 
Sources, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

From Myths to MacAttacks

There is an embarrassing emperor's-new-clothes question about food behaviors that sooner or later imposes itself on anyone who takes this subject seriously: what is food? The question comes up partly from both research and common experiences showing that items considered to be good food, or even special delicacies in one group, culture, or subculture, are considered by others to be unfit for human consumption. It is often found more dramatically in the memoirs of world travelers and explorers. In The Oregon Trail, for example, Frances Parkman describes in striking detail the first time he ate a puppy dog. He was a guest in an Indian lodge at Fort Laramie when his host's oldest wife entered, carrying a tomahawk: "I had observed sometime before a litter of well grown black puppies, comfortably nestled among some buffalo-robes at one side; but this newcomer speedily disturbed their enjoyment; for seizing one of them by the hind paw, she dragged him out, and carrying him to the entrance of the lodge, hammered him on the head till she killed him. Conscious to what this preparation tended, I looked through a hole in the back of the lodge to see the next step of the process. The squaw, holding the puppy by the legs, was swinging him to and fro through the blaze of a fire, until the hair was singed off. This done, she unsheathed her knife and cut him into small pieces, which she dropped into a kettle to boil. In a few moments a large wooden dish was set before us, filled with this delicate preparation. A dog feast is the greatest compliment a Dacotah can offer to his guest; and knowing that to refuse eating would be an affront, we attacked the little dog and devoured him before the eyes of his unconscious parent."

There is no mistaking Parkman's studied sense of repulsion at this scene. It was all the more impressive, therefore, to discover in Undaunted Courage, Steven Ambrose's account of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition from St. Louis to the Columbia River, quotations from the journal of Meriwether Lewis indicating that he and his men had acquired a taste for dog meat and preferred it to the game and horse meat they often lived on.

My own experiences with the cultural relativism of cuisine have been relatively trivial. While I was stationed in Germany in 1955, my wife bought some corn on the cob at the army commissary. When our German landlady happened to see it, she made a face, calling it "pig food." Several years later, the shoe was on the other foot: while we were on a research fellowship in Oslo, a Norwegian colleague invited us to a traditional holiday meal of ludefisk (boiled dried cod), which we were just barely able to get down. My wife threw it all up when we got home. The moral of the story is that the body does not swallow cultural relativism as easily as the mind.

For their part, nutrition experts and other authorities never seem to bother much with the question of just what is food; they are apparently content with the commonsense notion that food is simply the stuff that people eat, while pointing out that the stuff most of us are eating is not very healthy. There's nothing terribly wrong with this, except that, when you look in the dictionary, the definitions of food turn out to be a bit problematic. According to the 1981 edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, food is "material consisting of carbohydrates, fats, proteins and supplementary substances (as minerals, vitamins) that is taken or absorbed into the body of an animal in order to sustain growth, repair, and all vital processes and to furnish energy for all activity of the organism." This is pretty straightforward and properly scientistic, but the abstract language has slightly sinister overtones. There is nothing in it, after all, that would preclude having the juicier parts of Aunt Sophie or Felix the cat for lunch. And the subordinate dictionary description tends to confirm this implication: "... esp., parts of the bodies of animals and plants consumed by animals."

This line of thought about food was taken to its ultimate extreme by Ernest Becker. In The Denial of Death, he discusses the human condition as being a function of "appetite and ingenuity." And he refers to all animal life on our planet as a "gory spectacle" in which organisms are constantly struggling to feed on each other, on the one hand chewing up any flesh they can get hold of, and on the other hand leaving behind a trail of "fuming waste excrement." A similar but less embellished view was offered by Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary. He defined "edible" as "Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm."

The point at issue here is simply that a good case can be made for the argument that, where human eating habits are concerned, "anything goes." But, of course, in practice it doesn't; we may be omnivorous, but we do draw the line here and there. Just where we draw the line varies between societies, as well as between cultural groups and individuals within any society; the diverse meanings of food can be appreciated simply by scanning regional, social class, and ethnic differences in cuisine. But it becomes painfully clear in hardship situations when food is in short supply. In his book on the sociology of cooking, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Jack Goody describes an incident that occurred while he was a prisoner of war during World War II. The prisoners were always hungry, and although they lived on limited rations and Red Cross parcels, they would nevertheless scrounge and save up food items so they could celebrate special occasions with a hearty meal. One Christmas, Goody and a friend were invited to a meal prepared by other prisoners. It consisted of an anonymous but tasty meat stew. Goody thought the prisoners had bribed one of the guards to bring in a rabbit but, after the meal was over, was told by his proud host that the stew was made of cat meat. Instead of feeling disturbed at the news that he had just been guilty of what he called "quasi cannibalism," Goody congratulated his host for having found a new way to supplement their diet. He then returned to his own quarters and suggested to those he lived with that they try to get a cat for their Christmas dinner. They were appalled at the idea and refused to have anything to do with it.

Another prisoner of war, Bernard Clavell (who would become the best-selling author of Shogun and other novels) was held by the Japanese during World War II. His roman à clef about life in the camp, King Rat, describes a systematic trade in the rats that prisoners killed and ate. By an odd coincidence—what Jungian theorists might call a "synchronicity"—I recently found that there is at least one place in the world where cooked rats are a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECW PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1550225634
• ISBN 13: 9781550225631
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 175
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar