Food & Society Discussion

Need help with my Writing question – I’m studying for my class.

Readings:
Food & Society chs. 1 “Study of Food” & 3 “Food as Spectacle”

Film clips:
Tampopo, Big Night, Pretty Woman
Prompt:

As your textbook and our film clips demonstrate, enjoying food in a restaurant requires and
reveals different levels of “cultural capital” (a term you should be familiar with form your
reading to date). Having food delivered also requires and reveals a certain status as a consumer
in a food system like ours. Building off of the “multiple identities” addressed by the slides on
“Men Nurturing Through Food,” our different identities within the Food System still equate us
in one important way as Consumers within that system who have to negotiate our various
identity work and personal foodways accordingly. Think here, for example, of the case of
keeping Kosher in such a system, of maintaining an ethically vegan diet, of numerous health &
nutrition practices or allergy care efforts in one’s day-to-day consumption practices. Still, we
are all buyers and eaters (one has to buy seeds to plant them, in all but a few marginal cases).
So, focus on your current identity work as a Pandemic/Quarantined Consumer in the Food
System: what forms of cultural capital do you recognize in your various food access or any
Culinary Tourism capabilities you still engage? Reflect a bit on the ‘hidden’ labor now relied
upon in new or unexpected ways, such as the delivery driver or grocery clerk, and how one
might expect one’s future food agency (see the final slide from the Week 1-2 deck) to have
changed one year from now.