A133: Study Guide

• Sweetness and Power

  5 Themes: Capitalism; Markets; Tastes; Trade; Class Relations

  5 uses of sugar: Preservative, Taste/Spice, Sweetener, Decoration, Medicine

  Extensification/intensification
• Capitalism

  Rise of the West - due to internal issues in Europe

  Led to technological, industrial, and scientific growth

  Mintz ---> trade led to rise, beginning of factory system, establishment of colonies and slave production

  Marx ---> surplus value led to underpaid workers
• The categories that the Ochs article curate are food as a reward, food as pleasure, food as material good, and food as nutrition. These categories are then further categorized into taste of necessity (food as nutrition and food as a material good) and taste of freedom (food as reward and food as pleasure).
• Hannah Garth’s decent meal is one that not only hits the nutritional expectations of a meal but has been made with time and effort because of the state-food rationing program. A decent meal is one that not only physically satisfies a loved one but also one that culturally fulfills them. Families would say “no one dies of hunger” but although they might be being fed, these rationed meals were not satisfying them in other ways—culturally. 
• The opposite of a decent meal was a “slut meal” which was white rice and an egg. 
• Sahlin’s idea of edibility is constructed based off of the “foods’” closeness to humans. Sahlin argues that because animals (dogs) with names, what we deem as personalities, and working relationships that these animals are closer to humans than an animal that we have not named or developed a relationship with (cows). 
• Intensification is the emulation and continuity with older cultural meanings. Having a big wedding cake is an example of the broadening and deepening proliferation of having sugar as a status symbol. Whereas extensification is when new taste preferences are produced because of an item reaching a new type of consumer, like breakfast cereals being eaten  
• Sahlin challenges the Marxist view of food behavior, that believes that humans give value to things only dependent on the needs the item fulfills. Sahlin believes that utility can not be separated from meaningfulness. Only when we account for the cultural side of things, can we understand eating behaviors. 
• Garth’s politics of adequacy begs the question of who chooses what foods are and are not adequate to other humans? Merely feeding a community is not enough to satisfy them and allow them to live happy HUMANE lives. Garth pushes back on just dropping food off for communities in a food desert as it does not solve the root issue of why they do not have food security. 
• Garth used semi-structured interviews, ethnographic research, and photographic ethnographic research. While Ochs used video and audio recordings and further analyses the transcripts by marking specific intonations; Ochs primarily used discourse analysis. 
• In the article, the Rise of Yuppie Coffees and Reimagination of Class in the United States, Roseberry explores how a college student who prefers soft drinks would only be drawn into the coffee market through different marketing strategies than a dual-income couple in their mid-thirties. Coffee has shifted to offer speciality coffees through creating a sense of distinction. There is a fallacy of choice when entering any coffee shop nowadays. But there is also a distinction being made between small-scale cafes and big companies like Dunkin. 
• Globalization has not changes, it just took different forms. Gupta argues that: (1) the phenomenon in which globalization occurs will impact how it appears, (2) the geographical region in which you experience globalization will impact how it appears, and (3) the set of people will shape how globalization impacts an community, and how an individual may observe globalization. 
• Sahlin uses binary distinctions in his work. He analyzes things as being different from one another. Sahlin views the dog as inedible and the pig as edible because of how we treat a dog is NOT how we treat a pig. We treat a pig with less closeness to humans than we do with a dog. This distinction is why the dog is inedible and the pig as edible. 
• The two triangles of trade are 

  1. Europe/Britain (with finished goods) → Africa (with slaves) → Americas (with tropical commodities like sugar) → back to Europe/Britain
  2. America/New England (with rum) → Africa (with slaves) → West Indies/Caribbean (with molasses) → back to America/New England
• The main difference between the Italian children and the American ones were how the adults would treat them. Italian kids were encouraged to have food preferences as Italians view it was the child beginning to have a personality. Whereas American adults viewed children as only supposed to having certain “baby” foods. 
• Class Relations

  Sugar was essential to capitalism in the industrial revolution

  Temporist movements amongst middle class workers from alcohol to sugar

  Played role in workers productivity - filled calorie gap for working poor which kept them working longer hours

  First had exposure in the workplace, then brought home
• Class and Power

  Working class consumed sugar in mass quantities:

  Mimicking higher class

  Cheap calories

  Have meal without cooking (jam)

  Energy boost
• Tampopo

  Gender: majority of cooking by female, how we eat (business man slurping but females not allowed to), needing man's approval for food
• Tampopo

  National Identity: closely tied with how we eat (no slurping, but slurping in west), referred to French food (hobos talking about French food), Japanese - culturally complex meaning, French - complex way of cooking associated with hierarchy
• Tampopo

  Class: teen assistant ordering differently from other business colleagues (knows more about higher taste than them), old lady in shop playing with food, street people hobos pass judgement about quality of food and wine (refined talents for gourmet food), CLASS DOES NOT REPRESENT TASTE/FOOD
• Binary Distinctions

  Mintz: extensification/intensification

  Sahlin: edible/inedible

  Ochs: necessity/luxury
• Deciphering a Meal: Mary Douglass

  • Minimum structure of a meal: a+2b
  • hot/cold
  • intimacy/distance
  • Food consumption patterned
• Mary Douglass:

  Structuralism approach in examining food values and norms

  Meals more intimate than drinks - meals are for family

  Cannot eat animals that cross classifications (land/water/air)

  
  

  3 rules of meat: rejection of certain animals unfit for table, must be separated from blood, kept away from milk

  Minimum structure of a meal is a+2b, patterns are nested/dependent on a weekday/weekend/holiday

  A=a+2b weekday meal

  Sunday lunch = 2A= (a+2b)+(a+2b) French lunch different

  Meaning of meal found in system of analogy, order v. disorder, repeated multiple analogies= more meaning