You are What You Eat
When I was an undergraduate sociology major, a senior professor in the department spoke to us about the sociological imagination, it's utility in everyday life, and what it meant to use 'sociological theory' for our senior papers. His advice, distilled, was to pick a topic which most believe is entirely natural, psychological, individualistic, or biologically driven and to then demonstrate its relationship to significant social forces. He asked for examples, and we confidently threw out an array of topics such as death, dreams, illness, sleep, and eating. Some of these, surely, would be hard to analyze from a sociological point of view. How naive we were. All of our suggestions relate, quite directly, to the sociological enterprise. When keen sociological analysis comes to bear on topics thought absent of social dynamics, their fresh presentation reveals much more than what was previously known. Consider Emile Durkheim's study of the social causes of suicide or Jane Addams's illumination of the social causes of disease among poor immigrant communities. While quality food satisfies a biological imperative and is on the whole insufficiently available to people in need, how we produce, prepare, and consume food, relate to one another through these modes and means of production and consumption, make collective meaning of food, and create vast food industries that resist and reproduce inequality, are pertinent sociological questions. And these are just a few small morsels of a larger portion of the social significance of sustenance. Sociology has been historically skilled at delivering studies of single food commodities and the industrialization of food systems. In recent years, the offerings from the sociology of food, as a subfield, have become more diverse. Since the 1990s, there has been a rise of food ethnographies; the role that food plays in social change;