The paper of Devault is different in the sense that it concentrates on the implications of gender for the sharing of food preparation and that of other activities and routines within households. She explores how the "pleasure" that many women derive from feeding their families, is deeply inscribed into dominance and subordination in daily life, based on a sense of "natural" gender roles. Even when men participate in household activities, still the woman is seen as the one "who has everything under control", and the one who gives directions. The study is based on participant observation in different h ouseholds. The third section "Food, body, and culture" examines how people in diverse cultures think about fat. Hortense Powdermaker, reviewing anthropological literature, shows that obesity is mainly a "western" problem, explaining fatness and indulgence in eating with compensations of frustrations or neurotic disorders. To the contrary, fat in many cultures symbolizes beauty, power, well being, and fertility. Hilde Bruch shows how body image is connected to self-awareness. She found out that self-awareness differentiates across genders, classes, and ages. She gives an example men who are dissatisfied with their girth when they are young, but in Germany old and upper class men consider their obesity to be a sign of status and power. Elisa J. Sobo examines how in Jamaica fatness is associated with kindness, altruism, and a sociable and giving nature, while skinny people are perceived as being mean and stingy, and how these categories are inscribed into language, for example when pleasant things are called "sweet". The forth section "The political economy of food: commodification and scarcity" links food not only to unequal gender relations, but also to overall social hierarchies and power structures. Most people would define the access to food as the most basic human right. Yet, the authors point out that with capitalism, colonialism, and food commodification, access to food and control over it has become an international key measure of power and the lack of power. Food scarcity,
hunger and malnutrition are often a marker of economic and cultural marginality. The international hierarchy of the "Fist World" vs. the "Third World" is clearly expressed through differential access to food resources. Besides providing a cultural context, a central goal of the book is to highlight the economic realities that underlie food habits. It aims at supporting responsible policies by integrating indigenous knowledge into nutritional understandings. The authors of the papers suggest that nutritionists need to pay attention to sociocultural factors surrounding food in order to respond successfully to hunger issues. Gender in this is context an important factor, since women are more likely to be malnourished than men are. In her paper on Japanese mothers and obentos, lunch boxes that children carry with them to school, Anne Allison shows how one single food item is invested with a meaning of cultural order, gender roles, and ideological symbols. The schoolteacher judges both the mother and the child whether the lunch box is prepared properly, whether the child has eaten all of it, and whether both are able to conform to the rules that the obento embodies. It thus becomes a metaphor of social order and disorder, and a tool of discipline for the state, which intervenes into interfamilial relations and structures gender roles. In his paper, Stephen Mennell differentiates between hunger and appetite, hunger being a body drives which occurs in cycles, and appetite being rather a psychological state of mind. He studies the history how appetite became civilized in European culture through external constraints such as the church, the state, and doctors, and which role famines played throughout history. Janet M. Fitchen talks about malnutrition in the United States, a country, which most people expect that it feeds its citizens well. She elaborates the cultural values and meanings that are attached to the opposition rich-poor on the image of a poor person buying a steak with a food stamp. She shows that domestic hunger often goes unnoticed, because those people who are poor enough to qualify for government food stamps, may be seen in grocery stores, purchasing not only basic food stuffs, but also popular items, such as potato chips, desserts, and beef steaks. With such purchases, low-income people may seek to affirm that they can
live like other Americans, and thus attempt to hide their hunger from the public. At the same time, these foods contribute to their malnutrition, and the public concludes that if poor people can eat steak, they must be neither poor nor very hungry. She argues that the poor, despite their limited economic resources, try to follow dominant American cultural practices, in order to express their membership in society, and food is seen as a tool to "eat oneself into the middle class". On he other hand, there are strong cultural beliefs that the poor "should eat differently because they are different." She shows how the poor try to overcome deprivation by buying popular and heavily advertized junk food, which however damages them more than the affluent who are able to afford both junk food and nutritious food and thus balance its negative effects. Similarly, the poor families she has studied regard food and drink as important to social interaction, as others do. Thus, visits are always accompanied by gestures of offering food, and additionally many families depend on informal reciprocal networks of food sharing. Fitchen explains attitudes toward poor in the context of the American ideology that the individual shapes its destiny, and that poverty hence is the condition of individuals, not of society. Thus, a common myth, which also impacts government policy, is that hunger is the fault of the poor, who are regarded being lazy and feeding themselves wrongly. Being poor and eating a steak is considered culturally "inappropriate" behavior, because it violates the statement of how things ought to be,
it transgresses the definition of being poor, and is interpreted as the proof that the poor are living in luxury. Fitchens study reveals how a poor buying a steak with a food stamp mocks our sense of social order that demands separation of rich and poor. Since this book comprises 28 papers, covering a range of regions and periods, it is a remarkable collection of different approaches to food. If one might find some of them less appealing, they can be skipped by the reader since there are still enough left. Even one who is not particularly interested in food could find the book useful, since it deals in general with cultural meaning, symbolism, political economy, gender, and consumption. I liked especially the papers that dealt with the roots of thinness, since it is such a prevailing paradigm today in many parts of the world, and so heavily promoted by the media as an almost ahistorical and essential ideal. The book shows how bodily dysfunctions can be approached with cultural terms and further examines how access to food is a marker of power and how food can be used as a tool for manipulation and social control. It also provides a broad range of methodology: from fieldwork to historical approaches. Most grocery stores now sell food products labeled organic due to the increase of demand. Organic food became popular in the 1990s and has since remained a trend.
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