Unequal Access: Conclusions

Trump tapped into and fueled the revulsion toward the ACA-already the political divisions as a backlash against Obama.

• beliefs
• resentment of the law rather than the technocrats who fought to implement it
• belief that others are benefitting but not themselves
• deductibles were too high
• bureaucratic hurdles to enrollment
• doctors not accepting coverage
• disagreed with tax implications
• website too difficult to navigate
• took country in wrong direction
• increased health costs
• too big a role for government

-Law became a flashpoint for battles over inequality, fairness, and the role of government

-Became a vehicle for generating hostility against women, immigrants, the poor, and racialized minorities

-politicians used public resentment against the implementation of the law

• The truth?
• some people argue that we are in a post truth culture where facts dont matter, but the authors conclude that facts do matter, and that people are just relying on facts that people they trut tell them. It is more about a rejection of the educated elite rather than facts. They will believ science when it is convenient. -the eclipse will happen at this time- but not when it is associated with the educated "elites" they resent.
• Discourses of truthiness are widespread
• Lessons
• people need and want affordable healthcare
• people need comprehensive, integrated health systems, but we have yet to define what these are
• Oral health (dentisty) is not ever included...why?
• Every other economically advanced country provides universal healthcare
• stratification leads to POOR healthcare
• Stratified approaches to expanding Access generate resentment
• seems unfair
• dont understand how decisions are made
• some fall through cracks
• geography matters
• Enrollment should not be so hard
• poor already have so much surveillance and barriers that constant need to reenroll becomes burdensome
• proposals to add work requirements etc. would increase this burden
• costs more to AUDIT than deliver healthcare
• Anti immigrant polices are anti health
• emergency room cost skyrocket
• Conclusion
• too modest
• did not change for profit structure
• lacked shared social purpose (like Article 54)

Final ethnography template (optional)

 

Title 

• Opening Vignette setting the mood and introducing your audience to an iconic scene in your food culture 
• make sure at least one of your themes is illustrated in the vignette
• quotations should be minimal in a vignette if at all

• First theme
• begin with a short evocative quote (single sentence) --name (heading)
• Introduce the theme through the action of your characters
• Illustrate the theme with quotations and interspersed thick description
• analyze each illustration (this can be enmass for some) and support your analysis with citation from text or your research if appropriate. Cite this in Chicago style.

• Second theme (repeat)

• Third theme (repeat)

• Concluding analysis
• summarize your themes
• summarize your analysis
• conclude with a powerful quote that sums up the meaning/importance of food/cuisine/cooking in your culture

==========

Further options:

if you have a number of quotes that illustrate a particular theme, try to arrange them so that each adds an element that is used to further develop the theme in your analysis. If you do this, you must also point this out to your readers.

General principles for writing ethnography to remember:

1. We are not writing ABOUT our fieldwork or OUR experiences or what WE learned. We are using our fieldwork and what we learned to craft a description of the culture through their foodways.
2. Any important aspect of culture will be seen in every institution of culture (including food). You are simply revealing the values, beliefs, and practices through this one institution.
3. DESCRIBE things so that your reader can EXPERIENCE the cultural scene as you did. The idea is to have your audience have an EXPERIENCE not that you tell them what is going on. (Show me don't tell me)
4. Remember to use the paralinguistic information in your quotations (not in transcription form but in description). This is a way to keep your thick description throughout the text and not just in vignettes. Make the writing flow
5. Develop you CHARACTERS. Use thick description to do this and introduce them in action.
6. Tell a story from the perspective of your informants, not your. You are simply the tour guide.
7. Cite your supporting research.

Resources:

https://libguides.eastern.edu/c.php?g=115991&p=755822

https://www.pbs.org/food/shows/the-meaning-of-food/

https://www.pbs.org/food/shows/no-passport-required/

https://www.americananthropologist.org/online-content/culinary-cultures

https://arts.duke.edu/news/our-culinary-cultures-food-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

Movies

 

Food and Culture

Food as Diplomacy

Food Soveriegnty

Food and Storytelling

Food, Stories, and Connection

Food and Culture

Chinese Cuisine and Culture

Food and Human Evolution

Leftovers To Take Away: Summary and Conclusions

Food is an artifact, like amny others employed by humans, that created with thought and skill, and shaped through aesthetic principles, and that references existing knowledge to serve current expectations.

• The eating of new foods does not extinguish culture- people will eat their own home cuisines and sample others that are available
• Food will be organized and classified, given values and meanings that reference tradition, nutrition, and personal preferences.
• Ingredients and flavors are made sense of in the place of consumptionby members of different ethnic groups 
• women tend to cook at home and men in public
• Cuisine is a guide to identify the similarities in eating across cultures, and to explore the settlement and mobility of ingredients, flavors , and dishes, combined with the movement of people carrying culinary and gastronomic knowledge across the world
• Cuisine is everything we have, think, and do with food.

TAKE AWAY CUISINE

• cuisine is learned
• food tastes and individual preferences are the first site of enculturation and socialization
• Feeding children transforms a culture's complex classification of food, its values and meanings, into sensations and memories of food, embodying a cuisine within a physical person
• once codified in cookbooks and recipes, it takes on a more fixed form than in oral traditions
• written form has a life of its own and can travel and be learned by people in other cultures in other parts of the world
• creates disputes about the authenticity of the LIVED CUISINE versus the WRITTEN CUISINE
• Shared
• allows people to inhabit shared shared cultural and social existence
• a way to communicate commen experience
• embodies nationalist sentiments
• Symbolic
• a cuisine materializes the social order and people's place within it
• communicates complex meanings
• the choice of ingredients is packed with meaning
• the communicative quality of cuisine is divorced from its other wider interrelationships with all other aspects of people's lives. 
• production, exchange, kinship, politics, religion, social organization, and ideology
• The processes of culture change shape food traditions
• diffusion
• enculturation
• invention
• innovation
• creolization
• emulation
• assimilation
• globalization has increaed the rate and degree of change

TAKEAWAY LEFTOVERS

• Four themes about food and public discourse
• nutritional discourse
• fostered a greater awareness of the fundamental composition of food and its effect on the body
• new discourse trying to combat NCDs
• does not address the social meaning of food
• medical specialists have replaced traditional religious authorites in classifying foods
• sustainability of production (environmentally and socially)discourse
• shift in our relationship with food -greater distance between consumers and producers
• compromised the environment
• initiated a global discourse on climate change
• has us look at our basic relationship with the natural world
• led to a return to local, sustainable, and ethical food provision within the global system
• looks to workers rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions
• state of culinary knowledge discourse
• concerns cooking techniques, equipment, and the transmission of knowledge from home cooks across generations, to specialist chefs with apprentices, all learning how to make edible, healthy dishes.
• shapes the cuisine of home cooking
• sees cooking as rehabilitated as a pleasurable activity
• the Food Network, etc. popularity
• gastronomic talk of taste and distinction discourse
• shaped by ideas of culinary taste as a marker of social distinction and status
• the food we eat defines us-it is about our sense of identity
• talking about eating crosses all cultures
• provokes awareness of food as a vehicle for the practice of social and cultural life.

IN SHORT- CULTURALLY SPEAKING: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Local Digestion: Making the Global Home

 Foodscapes:

• ways of thinking about how global food systems are materialized in specific places and acquire meaning in those new locations through incorporation into people's everyday lives
• illustrates the global interconnections
• how people adopt and make sense of foods with global origins to make them meaningful LOCALLY
• when a new food is introduced it may either be acce[ted, rejected, or re-evaluation
• LOCAVOURISM (the conscious desire to eat locally produced food to support the local community)
• would appear to be at odds with globalized food systems, but in fact Our local foods are a hybrid of local and global
• Accomplished through "de-commodification"
• begins with how successfully the food satisfies eating needs
• Meanings are constructed based on what the food communicates about our place in the world, our relationships with others, and our self of self in terms of our social status.
• may include gastro-activism -- appeal to our ethical responsibilities

Local Shopping and the Meaning of Food

• How supermarket products are presented to consumers - identity making potential
• references prevailing social and cultural ideas
• appealing to people who want to try something new
• fulfilling their needs for health
• marking them with distinction (status)
• helping them with budgeting
• marketing has ushered in anew aesthetic which demands uniformity of shape, color, and quality to accommodate the physical space for sale (store) and for home use.
• the POWER of industrial cuisine and its meaning making lies in these retail displays
• STORY about the products identity
• gives food local value
• brands give the "personality" behind the food- relationship with consumer that can easily be personalized and localized
• BRANDS often become associated with an ethnic group or a nation
• GOYA and the MAGA dilemma
• The meanings of food are disseminated through:
• product placement
• sponsoring community events
• advertising
• supermarket flyers
• culinary documents charting the engagement of the food industry with mainstream national cuisine
• retail helps to shape national cuisine
• ETHNIC GROCERIES: smaller stores become and important part of the retail foodscape of urban centers in multicultural states. 
• act as an economic niche for many immigrants (like ethnic resturaunts)
• speak to the food's ability to maintain a connection to family and home
• project cultural identity
• ex: local bodegas, BOOM, and the Asian Market (Pleasantville)
• exaggeration of the ethnic identity
• evoke powerful emotional connections to the homeland
• offer opportunities for experimental home cooks to learn a new cuisine through the purchase of "authentic" ingredients, flavors, and cooking equipment.
• feel local while being global
• SHOWS THE POWER OF FOOD TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL AT HOME AND CONNECTS THEM TO OTHER TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE

FAST AND TASTY: LOCALIZING GLOBAL DISHES

• How fast food becomes localized
• Examples
• Sushi
• originally a fast street food in japan. A Tokyo style snack (Sushiya)
• re-branded as an expensive delicacy
• 1950s on... kaiten-zhushi ...conveyor belt sushi revolutionized and popularized sushi, returning it to its popular roots.
• Began in the West in immigrant communities, where resturaunts initially only served their own community
• valued for its ability to communicate social distinction - a taste for exotic food - a meaning-maker of class and cosmopolitain identity.
• 1990s took off as people began eating less meat for health reasons (marketed as a healthy fast food)
• started as yuppie food and ended up ta grocery store delis
• PORTABILITY: small and pleasing aesthetic, easily portable meals for workers
• creolization techniques:
• blending, submerging, and wrapping the local ingredients into new bite-sized tastes of places
• New York Roll (cream cheese and lox)
• California roll (fake crab and avocado)
• Hamburgers
• rose to fame worldwide through the spread of the McDonalds corporation which adapted both its menu and its meaning to local contexts
• seen as "modern" and "cosmopolotan"
• China: little emperors and empresses- 
• single children are spoiled at McDonalds- get toys and exotic foods
• expensive for Chinese-special for parties, communicating status and progressive modernity
• demonstrates parent's dedication to their children
• slowed to encourage you to hang out and meet needs of local families
• Japan: made eating standing up chic
• Soviet Union: novelty value since at the time everything was under soviet rule. 
• slogan Nash McDonalds (our McDonalds) signifying the "local" nature of the food at McDonald's in Moscow
• food sourced from a Russian company
• France: Called affectionately "McDo" loved by the younger generation (serve wine and crepes)
• McDonalds always has local dishes and customs incorporated into their menus wherever they are in the world.

LOCAVORISM: EATING LOCALLY

• In France, McDonalds was seen by many, especially in the older generations as a threat to French cuisine and their way of life. 
• produced a gastro-anomie 
• this led to the promotion of "authentic" french foods like Roquefort cheese, produced on a small-scale in one small town in France.
• carries deep cultural and national meanings, is emotionally satisfying- consumers sense of ethical, cultural, national and gastronomic identity.
• locavorism has taste "terroir" which is made evident in the traditional wines, cheeses, chocolates, and other gourmet foods of france which have strong providence ---associated with a very specific place. 
• part of the nations patrimoine -citizens are expected to acquaint their taste buds with the local sensory experience of terroir -cultural significance of foods.
• 2001- McDonalds localized its french menus advertising "Une touche de region dans votre Hamburger" (a regional touch in your hamburger)- adding French sourced ingredients, bringing terrois into its burgers, just as they had done in Russia. 
• Revitalization Movement - born from rapid change, which looks to the past as as source for creating a more satisfying present day existence.
• a reaction to reclaim cultural control from the problems associated with industrialized agricultural production and the environmental damage which accompanies it
• consumer mistrust of food and fears for food safety
• In Italy-  McDonalds also spurred locavorism with e SLOW FOOD MOVEMENT. (Petrini)
• emphasis on the deep seated connection to foods of the family, home, and nation, to awaken to the new sensibility and willingness to try local foods while remaining cosmopolitan.
• manifesto directed against the "fast life" that fractures Italian customs even within their own homes- forcing us to ingest fast foods
• three principles of SFM
• GOOD
•  quality
• flavorsome
• healthy
• CLEAN
• production that does not harm the environment
• FAIR
• accessible prices for consumers
• fair conditions and pay for workers/producers
• Aspects of SFM for Revitalization
• CONVIVIA
• local membership
• TERRA MADRE and PRESIDIA
• global food communities and projects
• ARK OF TASTE
• ledger of endangered foods

ALL THESE EFFORTS FOCUS ON GASTROECOLOGY- the pleasurable eating of heritage foods to ensure their continuity

• reasserted the importance of rural communities 
• asserted food sovereignty
• develop unique products that identify local foodscape
• establish the value of connection between place, people, their knowledge and skills, products, and cultural identity.

FAIR TRADE movement in the USA is similar, ut emphisiszes imported rather than locally produced products. Also in the US- 100 Mile Diet.

FARMERS MARKETS: LOCAL FOODS AND FACES

• a site for performance of locavorism with local and seasonal produce
• third place (livingroom) for informal social gatherings
• opposite of supermarket experience 
• puts names and faces on farmers
• expensive- food as cultural capital
• often co-opted by agrobusiness and supermarkets
• supermarkets and brands now tell their sustainability stories and feature farmer's faces and names.
• Waitrose in London

• resturaunts as well PORTLANDIA

BREW AND SERVE: localizing a global beverage

• How do we make ingredients that cannot be grown in our part of the world ours?
• Coffee
• coffee shops and coffee have become ubiquitous all over the West although coffee and tea are products that cannot be grown in Western nations
• coffee shops as third spaces and potentially subversive spaces
• gained reputation as places where artists and creators hang out (more positive meaning)
• Growers have different meanings associated with coffee
• In Guatemala and Tanzania growers see coffee as a status crop served to guests, gifted, or the money used selling it gains them high status
• Coffee is no longer exotic or luxurious, but ordinary, and a necessary stimulant for some
• ethical dimensions
• virtuous globalization
• fair trade
• looking to support a distant "local" through consumption in the near local foodscape

HYBRID CONSUMPTION: LOCAL AND GLOBAL REALITIES

• Locavorism articulates a new vision for food production and consumption.
• based upon seasonal, local, sustainable foods which provide for people's livelihoods and communities without compromising the environment, and support animal welfare.
• "green issues"
• the environment and biodiversity
• "red issues"
• lives of producers and workers who produce for glogal retailers
• both green and red speak to the ethical dimensions of food choices, and the transformation of society through the actions of consumers
• brings global food issues into the choices of individual consumers, devolving responsibility downwards but potentially empowering them to bring about real change.
• this in itself is important meaning making
• ethical shopping and eating become an expression of moral principles in an increasingly secular society
• value is assigned through certification and labeling

• coopted by corporations again (like Starbucks) so that they can do "righteous signaling"- as socially responsible.
• Fair Trade makes consumer FEEL PART OF another local community half way around the world.
• distant producers are no longer anonymous partners, but compatriots in the moral battle for food soveriegnty and a healthy planet.

Glogal Indigestion: Food Insecurity

 Global Indigestion, the Rise of NCDs and Food Insecurity

• Indigestion, Malnutrition and Global Gastro-Politics
• Triple Burden:
• undernutrition
• a condition of not having enough to eat causes wasting
• makes people susceptible to contagious disease 
• stunting height
• impair mental development
• micronutrient deficiency
• lack of specific vitamins
• Vitamin A- blindness
• low iron-anemia
• overweight and obesity
• caused by an unbalanced diet or low nutricion high caloric foods
• susceptible to NCDs
• UN Declaration of Human Rights 1948
• vowed to stop hunger in the word and end it-emergency aid
• Food Insecurity
• the lack of food (from chronic to acute)
• congruent with social inequality and crises
• Causes of food insecurity lie outside of local contexts and within the interconnectedness of global food production
• UN agencies directly involved in food production and distribution, dietary and health issues, emergency aid
• grassroots responses
• from ground up movements of local farmers 
• Top-Down: Gastro-politics of Food Insecurity
• FAO (food and agriculture organization)
• have directly influenced the quantities of food available and their impact on people's health
• 
  
• WHO (World Health Organization)
• tasked with looking after the health facing the world and alleviating malnutrition by feeding the world with food with food that meets people's nutritional needs.
• Four Pillars of Food Security
• Availability
• Access
• Stability
• Utilization
• Food Insecurity
• When people do not have significant access to food
• The inadequate physical, social, or economic access to food
• arises from issues concerning governance, the environment, the economy, and production, and the dynamics of demography and society.
• The impact of industrial agriculture "GREEN REVOLUTION"
• environments were transformed, species were augmented or protected, all to accommodate increased production
• food insecurity: decline in food quality, more processing, less crop variety, and longer distances traveled through commodity change, 
• environmental degradation from chemical intensive agriculture.
• compromised future productivity, local biodiversity, and ocean health, and contributed to climate change
• agricultural development in the global south consolidated power of global food industry's transnational corporations- industrial cuisine
• quantity achieved without quality
• Access to land and self-sufficient food production were altered through agricultural industrialization- jeopardizing food security.
• Food Quantity
• Challenge One: Market Instability
• Guatemala (ex) 
• the growing of coffee for export has contributed to food insecurity 
• impacted by fluctuating consumer tastes, large harvests, planatation devistations from fungus, and slow maturation of coffee plants 
• market volitility is a problem
• Generally instability is caused by
• the rise of oil prices increased cost of agrochemicals
• agricultural production shifted away from food into biofeuls and animal feed
• financial speculation on food commodities pushed the cost of food even higher
• increased demand for Westernized processed foods and meat by status-seeking middle classes in countries like Guatemala drove prices higher
• Environmental problems such as droughts , soil erosion, and shrinking aquifers all acted to further escalate food costs.
• Farming subsidies encourage overproduction and tank prices severely impacting small farmers
• Challenge Two: famine
• Shift of analysis and solutions away from natural disasters and toward the social, political, and economic circumstances that disrupt peoples livelihoods.
• famine does not affect people equally- some will starve and some will have plenty
• famine represents the extreme failure of food security requirements; successful food production and distribution-to ensure availability-of food, and societal security to guarantee access to and consequently consumption of, nutrients and safe food. 
• Challenge Three: Climate Change
• 2013- climate change was acknowledged as being the result of human activity
• the promise to feed the world through increased yields had been successful, the cost to the environment, and the social inequality of its access had compromised this success.
• Resettling the FAO Agenda- Sustainable Agriculture
• first sought to address poverty-zero poverty
• then to address hunger-zero hunger
• Food Quality: WHO Agenda
• Challenge One: Overweight and Obesity
• particularly pronounced among indigenous people and the poor
• encourage consumption of alcohol and nutrition poor cheap food
• once "accepted' these industrial foods get integrated into the cultural cuisines and are difficult to eliminate or even change.
• In the past, fatness symbolized food security (had enough) but now the trend toward weight loss has had the opposite effect, and fatening foods prevent the poor from meeting BMI standards
• weight gain became attributed to lack of effort, laziness, and poor education
• consequences lie beyong the control of individuals
• Challenge Two: NCD's
• hear attacks, strolkes, cancers, chronic respiratory illness (asthma and diabetes)
• long duration illnesses often with slow progression of symptoms- raised blood presure, increased blood glucose, elevated lipids (may not even know that you have it)
• suffered MORE in more affluent countries
• due to processed food diet with high levels of salt, sugar and saturated and trans fats -- high meat and dairy and low fruit and vegitables
• Industrial cuisines: processed, packaged and sold in convenience stores and supermarkets, particularly in urban centers
• have the cache of cosmopolitanism
• Resetting the WHO agenda
• to translate the nutritional principles into meaningful dietary advice that crosses cultural boundaries
• How to bridge social inequities that prevent many from accessing healthy foods
• Gastro-politics-- balances the states responsibilities to its citizens againt the interest of multinational food corporations
• From The Ground Up: Grassroots Activism
• Indigenous Rights: Decolonizing Diets
• What appears to have a positive effect is changing the quality of the food rather than the quantity.
• Indigenous people are fighting for a return to their traditional diet in a culturally specific manner
• Angry Farmers: Food Sovereignty and Agroecology
• focus is on protecting local food sources, knowledge, livlihoods, culinary traditions, and the environment.
• An assertion of the control and ownership over territorial production of food, and independent action to bring local food security
• Argued that the UNs policy to "feed the world" acts against local interests-  focus on producing COMMODITY CROPS for sale in the volatile global market.
• Food sovereignty, in contrast, emphisizes control over local, sustainable growing of culturally defined foods to bring food security, rebuild local markets, and only then look to more distant, global markets. 
• The publics expectation of CHEAP FOOD works against the calls for sustainable agroecolgical agenda, encouraging instead, MEGAFARMS to intensify production.
• France (example)
• grassroots activism has made the greatest inroads- fast foods and GMOs have undermined French cuisine and jeopardized the food security of the nation.
• Fast Food: 
• social qualities: fast, individualized, portable, accessible
• fits into the modern work schedule and lifestyle- TIME POVERTY
• Meanings: tasty, quick, predictable
• France: José Bové
• led a battle against McDonalds in France, led the government's fight to get the French gastronomic meal recognized as a tangible piece of cultural heritage by UNESCO
• GMOs and small scale farming:
• GMOs represent agricultural corporations such as MONSANTO, which have monopolized seeds, chemical products, and production- boosting corporate profits and degrading the environment while destroying people's health
• Agroecology: 
• model is diversified - reducing chemical imput, drawing on local knowledge and biodiversity of plants and animal species genetically adapted to the local environment to create healthy , varied foods, and support the livelihoods of local people
• supports small scale, family farming, which is more labor intensive and noe deemed to be capable of creating yields that positively affect food security.
• strategies provide water conservation, reforestation, and agroecological farming- adapting to climate change
• La Vie Campesino (started in Guatemala)
• Resetting The Menu: Food Security and Healthy Food
• WHO Action Plan
• Food Environment- 
• targeting labels
• providing healthier food choices in as many venues as possible
• facilitating cash subsidies
• restricting advertising of processed foods
• Food System-
• strengthening alternative provisioning, and local rural-urban links
• works with the FAO agenda
• supplement traditional subsistence crops with purchased foods made available through (but not exclusively) the sale of an locally grown export crop (like coffee) 
• Consumer Behavior-
• providing education, counseling, and healthcare support
• focus on quality of food not quantity as well as diversity of food available 
• seek help of the media to encourage shift away from industrial cuisine- celebrities
• Cuba and Agroecology
• Cuba has become a leader in agroecology which requires a larger work force and descent wages to attract workers
• long term commitment by the government
• Use traditional and alternative provisioning systems
• farmers markets
• food box distribution
• local cooperatives (communal support)
• enable urban residents to claim vacant land in cities for community gardens
• alleviate income inequality which hampers food security
• Food Security
• aspires toward stable, equitable production, distribution and sustainability-environmentally and socially
• resiliency rests upon diversified, rather than globally uniform, activities to grow food, combined with alternative livelihoods to buy food.
• Food is not only about satisfying hunger but is also about the feeling of emotional and cultural security
• enhance positive social and cultural meanings of healthy food need to be emphasized, local culinary traditions need to be referenced, and opportunities to acquire, cook, and eat healthy food need to be expanded.

Eating Out and Gastronomy

Restaurants are a site of cuisine shaping and an economic niche catering to people who travel away from home for work, for pleasure, or in search of a new life - ETHNOSITES

Eating Away From Home

• Meals eaten at home are relatively safe, familiar, and cooked by trusted people and the company is socially safe, with predictable gastro-politics. 
• industrialization and urbanization have increased the numbers of people who must eat away from home
• There are health but also social risks to eating away. 
• early coffee houses were places of public discourse which often fueled social dissent. 
• different classes can co mingle in restaurants, possibly violating the social order
• imperial Russia- controlled the clientele to maintain social stratification
• gentrification can bring in elite restaurants to poor neighborhoods and upset the social and economic landscape
• Shared characteristics
• food for a price
• food for those who cant or don't want to cook
• acceptance of public eating culture in some form

Street Food: Eating Standing Up

• started to serve the needs of a diversified workforce who had moved into urban centers, lacked access to kitchens
• humble beginnings but can lead to a national cuisine
• led to more fixed locations for slower food and later fast food franchises
• Low cost food and low cost for business owner
• Plays out class relations
• many rely on the food while others, like the middle class, will choose to venture across class lines for a new foodie opportunity
• Mexican Street Food
• some of the earliest
• catered to new rural workers who migrated en masse to cities - 18th century
• based on Mestizo identity, mixing indigenous and European ingredients
• Has gone global

Restaurants: Eating Sitting Down

• Eating in public was not always an accepted social activity
• this is especially true for women, whose lives occur away from public view in many cultures
• India as an example, but Sicily is another if you are a widow
• Western style cities were constructed with plazas which made great sites for hotels and restaurants that served "continental cuisine"
• suit a variety of tastes
• conspicuously patronized by the wealthy
• normalized the culture of public eating
• origins in France
• Eating out is about making important social and cultural statement
• pursuit of status by dining in public- anyone could dine as long as they could pay regardless of social class or caste
• History
• earliest served light foods like restorative broths (restaurant) and later developed much more substantial fare
• by the 1820s, the restaurant was well established and catered to travelers and those who wanted to dine out
• became a space for urban sociability- but following a new model of service and choice

Characteristics of Restaurants

• Six characteristics
• Commercial Business Setting
• restaurants are market transactions but are "de-commodified" by attributing them social and cultural meaning
• decor is an important part of meaning making
• shaping the ambiance- sounds, images, colors, furniture, temperature
• everything is carefully managed to give you a home away from home experience or an exotic location
• ethnicity may be expressed -menu, decor, theatrical quality where culture is exaggerated
• there is a gastro-politics 
• host/guest relationship
• internal- front/back of house
• waiters police social ettiquette
• Time
• May be open 24/7 (fast food) or during restricted hours
• manage when people eat certain meals and what they eat
• Tables
• sitting down to eat a meal is an important part of the restaurant experience
• public and at the same time private (you have your own table and you are not expected to interact with others
• Restaurants have become a third space-- not home, not work, but a space inhabited to do things in public
• Commercial Kitchen
• professional spaces where public cooking has become systematized for the commercial production of large quantities of food
• lead to new cooking styles and highly organized kitchens
• Kitchens used to be "obscure" now they may be visible to the public and part of the "show" especially if there is a celebrity chef
• precarious living for those who work in them
• fraught labor relations
• low pay
• unsafe working conditions
• little job security
• tip deductions for mistakes
• exploitation of minorities and sometimes family members
• Menu Selections
• fixed pricing- prevented haggling and encouraged patrons to eat within their means (early restaurants were very expensive)
• separate dishes- restaurant innovation
• choices- personal options puts pressure on home cooks to meet individual preferences
• Menus are about "choice" for diners abut also are the DEFINING DOCUMENT for the restaurant's identity as a purveyor of particular dishes and cuisines
• make the geography of a nation taste familiar-standardization of dishes
• Performance
• gastro-politics of meals assumed a new level of intensity in public
• eating out is special and requires more attention to norms of behavior appropriate to ones social identity
• social identity is negotiation in aprt in this public space through ones choices and behaviors

Gastronomy: Cultivating Culinary Taste

• the culture of gastronomy is crucial to the rise of restaurants as social spaces, rather than just providers of food
• Concepts in French gastronomy (Brillat-Savarin)
• Taste was something everyone had- not restricted to privilege and could be cultivated by experience
• taste could facilitate social mobility
• gastronomy is the pleasure and art of good eating
• restaurants were temples  to the culture
• "taste" becomes an expression of social distinction even beyond food
• Gastronomy is about shaping local, regional and national cuisines and about sampling and becoming familiar with other people's cuisines.
• It has transformed eating beyond necessity and into a practice of pleasure and social differentiation, and a medium for negotiating identity politics
• it has enabled public eating to flourish and be a socially meaningful activity
• Urban Mass gastronomy-- adopted by many cultures
• example Japan
• yoshoku -- western style food
• washoku -- Japanese cuisine
• example Mexico
• focus of upper classes was eating french haute cuisine with mexican ingredients

Types of Restaurants

• Indigenous Restaurants
• In many places, like the US and Canada, indigenous people have little access to the restaurant business or consideration for the national cuisine
• generally they are absent from the restaurant culture- economically marginalized and so untenable
• In places like Mexico and Guatemala, local restaurants will serve indigenous cuisine of a region
• Is as contemporary as any cuisine
• becoming more popular but generally cater to a non-indigenous clientele
• The access to the traditional ingredients and flavors are important, part of food sovereignty issues, and it is the home of community cooking, not commercial ventures, that are for eating their own cuisine
• Mainstream Restaurants
• Nations that were founded by the greatest influxes of immigrants have grappled with the challenge of creating culinary unity from culinary diversity.
• from the point of view of the state, associated with citizenship needs to be constructed in order for people to have a sense of belonging.
• The national identity is usually constructed using the culture of the dominant ethnic group(s) and they will be the societal image-makers and constitute the "mainstream".
• "Ethnic" is contrasted with "mainstream"
• the cuisines of plural societies will reflect the power of the social order; the dominant ethnic group will form the culinary vocabulary, and the accent will include references to all other contextual influences-
• history
• place
• ethnic groups
• availability of foods (ingredients)
• Ethnic cuisines can be mainstreamed - adopted into the national cuisine so that their ethnic origin, though known, is disregarded
• pizza and pasta in the USA (almost everywhere)
• made with creative adaptations 
• Examples of mainstreaming
• Japanese kaiseki -highly refined Japanese cuisine restaurants
• Japanese Kaitenzhushi - conveyor belt sushi restaurants
• Immigrants and Ethnic Restaurants
• The nostalgic desires for foods from home has created an economic niche for many immigrants:
• opening shops that import specialty foods
• opening restaurants that can equally serve their own community and interested others
• Starting point for the study of mainstream attitudes toward ethnic minorities
• acceptance of an ethnic group by mainstream society, often AFTER immigration of that ethnic group has lessened
• the willingness to eat their cuisine
• there may be an inverse relationship between immigration intensity and the status of a group's cuisine
• Many marginalized immigrant groups will operate restaurants serving the prestige food of another ethnic group
• Chinese owned sushi restaurants
• Mexican owned pizza shops
• Bangladeshi owned Indian shops
• Italian owned French Restaurants
• Serve the needs of their own community first, and after adventurous mainstream diners popularize the cuisine, and provide a place for immigrants to find employment
• Needs:
• There must be a well-established culture of dining out
• also, the restaurant business needs to be attractive to the new immigrant
• Urban Mass Gastronomy
• the exercise of cultural omnivourousness by the wealthy have made ethnic restaurants an attractive option
• four factors for viable employment
• low capitol cost
• presumed cultural capitol of "authentic knowledge" of the immigrant
• social capital available- borrow money, draw upon workers willing to work long hours for little pay
• loyal kin 
• friends
• the ethnic community
• the serial pattern of migrants moving into this employment niche

Ethnic Cuisine: Diaspora Dining

• Indian Cuisine in Britain
• created an anglo-Indian cuisine through cookbooks
• appropriated Indian spices and dishes during colonial rule
• Hindustanee Coffee House
• 1811 opened in London as the first Indian ethnic restaurant by Bangladeshis for the Sylhet region.
• Sylhet began buying bombed out fish and chips shops - opening them and selling pies, peas, fish and chips, curry and rice, curry and chips
• moved Indian food into the heart of working class life and established its place in the minds of the British population as "British cuisine"
• Two types of Indian restaurants
• small family run- standardized Indian cuisine
• Newer restaurants serving regional cuisines of India
• Gujarati
• Goan
• Kashmiri
• Diversification allows foodies to claim their preference for one local tradition over another and increase their status as foodies
• The popularity of Indian cuisine has led to increased immigration as second generation wants to be in white collar professions rather than work at resturaunts
• Also need chefs from India to refine cuisine
• Chinese Cuisine in North America
• Chinese restaurants first opened in many ghettoized Chinatowns to serve the needs of kitchen-less men, and slowly adventurous non-Chinese cultural omnivores
• Chop Suey, Chow Mein and lemon chicken are all derivatives of Chinese cuisine shaped to new circumstances 
• Change in meal format
• traditional: tea, appetizer, main course, soup, tea (again)
• modern adaptation: soup, meal, dessert
• Fortune cookie: derived from lucky dumplings (New Years tradition)
• only one dumpling traditionally had money in it but Because Americans believe everyone should have an equal chance at good fortune, there is a fortune in every cookie.

RESTAURANTS AS "ETHNOSITES": CROSS CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

• Ethnocites
• places where mainstream sociaty can eat the food of other ethnic groups
• places where immigrants can eat their own food and reaffirm their identity
• Authenticity
• in these spaces, the complex gastro-politics of identity work , at the level of the individual and ethnic groups in plural states are performed through "authentic food" served as a commercial transaction.
• It is about the power to claim and reclaim authenticity and to constantly rework identity through the public consumption of food.
• How is it determined?
• depend upon a contrast between our food and other peoples food (both constructed- staged authenticity)
• Creolization; adapt to changes in the tastes of their new environment (creolization adaptation)
• There is a dialectical relationship between authenticity, rooted in tradtion, and in creolization, rooted in in the new context.
• can be projected by: 
• assumptions about the owners ancestry and ethnicity
• the exotic -sounding name of the restaurant
• decor depicting cultural artifacts
• evocative music
• ultimately judged by the EXPERIENCE of the diner- it is relational
• Role of ethnic restaurants
• conserver of tradition
• innovator for forging new identities
• vehicle for diners to maintain a connection to their homeland
• offers diners a strategy to undermine the dominant stereotypes
• archive of culinary memories
• living rooms for the homesick
• Eating in ethnic restaurants correlates with higher income levels, class, education and value for money
• positive way to bridge cultural barriers while appearing cosmopolitan for non-ethnics sampling other's cuisines
• places where one can experience the other safely
• where the foreign is made familiar
• where the global is miniaturized
• Restaurants foster cross cultural encounters
• Ethnic Restaurants Become Tourist Sites
• staged, exaggerated and essentialized reduction of culture
• diners become culinary tourists, willing to experience the cuisine, and sometimes taking postcard-like photographs to document their visit
• Culinary Colonialism?
• The eating of ethnic food by individuals of the mainstream dominant culture can be seen as a kind of culinary colonialism or imperialism.
• reinforces inequality in society
• dishes are a resource that can be appropriated without any regard for the people whose cuisine it is, or the social, economic, and political circumstances in which they find themselves, as immigrants or members of distant states
• commercial food commodifies culturethrough ethnically marked ingredients, flavor, and dishes that hide the reality of the lives of the people who produce the restaurant meal , and those who produce the ingredients and flavors along the food chain.
• the "cheapnes" of ethnic food is exploited-demanding low wages, cheapens the originating people, their lives, and their culture
• provide culturally branded food through which dominant ethnic group defines itself
• BUT supports the local economy and provides livelihoods
• "Anti-Colonial Eating Manifesto"
• Ethnic groups have the right to define their own authentic culinary traditions, which have been creatively adapted to a new locality
• Diners should respectful, gain knowledge of the cuisine, reflect on the complexities of race, gender, class, privilege, and power
• there should be empathy between the consumer and the producer

Eating Out: Indigenous restaurant -Swika San Jose Costa Rica

Eating Out: celebrity Chef - Sebastian Agnes