When thinking
of sharing food and culture one often thinks of all senses (sight, smell,
touch, sound and taste) coming together in a face to face experience with
others. However food and culture can also be expressed in a non-face to face
way. Cook books and social networking sites come to mind and both are, usually
highly selective in content and discursive in intent (ATKINS and BOWLER, 2001, p.
274-275).
In this week’s lecture Victoria Kuttainen (2015) talks about how food is an
expression of our identity. This is an interesting idea when considering social
networks. Take Instagram for example, a place to not only post pictures of what
you’re eating but what you’re doing, wearing and who your with. One does not
simply post pictures of their bacon and egg roll with no bacon, egg or roll (just
organic avocado and field mushrooms on a plate) on Instagram without also
posting pictures of their berd with flowers in it (hipster
Instagram culture). Thus your identity is not solely passed on the food
posted but on a variety of different posts. A Tumblr blog on the other hand can
have no connection to the posters true identity.
Thus the idea
that food is an expression of our identity is more relatable to Tumblr blogs. I
place where you can post nothing but pictures of Japanese food and you will receive
messages from followers in Japanese. You are judged on nothing but what you
post so it’s understandable that people will jump to conclusions when making
the connection of who you are and what you like. This can be both an empowering
and disempowering experience.
REFFERENCES:
REFERENCES:
Atkins, P and Bowler.I (2001). Food in Society:
Economy, culture, geography. London, United Kingdom: Hodder Headline Group.
Kuttainen, V. (2015). BA1002: Food Networks [PowerPoint
slides]. Retrieved from learnjcu.jcu.edu.au
IMAGE CREDITS:
Isaiah Webb (2014)
Horn of plenty: Retrieved from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2878840/Artist-Incredibeard-takes-hipster-beard-art-trend-outrageous-new-lengths-amazing-facial-hair-sculptures.html
Your statement regarding the highly selective nature of cookbooks is an interesting thought which genereated a lot of thought from me. I guess I had never realised that cookbooks position their audience so much. For example, a chinese cookbook could have non-traditional recipes that the chinese do not consider to belong to them but because they are included in the cookbook, readers are lead to believe this misinformation. This thought somewhat took me aback as I didn't realise the power of something that seems so common and unimportant. I got to thinking about the power structures and wanted to do some research, however my searches returned more of an uplifting view as I found that there were more inclusive cookbooks than there were exclusive. Many aimed to teach about food as well as culture, such as the ones in this list [http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/best-cookbooks-of-2010-that-double-as-cultural-history-studies-cook-learn-2382743], which I found was quite happily surprising.
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