The Sociology of Food - Essay Example

of due: The sociology of food Today, there is a lot of fascination on issues of food. For example, there are a number of television shows on cooking hosted by celebrity chefs and chef competition programs like ‘top chef’ among others. There is also a lot of fuss on food, cookbooks, dieting among other foods related topics. With all this fuss on food, it does not sit well that there is nothing like sociology of food. This happened because for a long time food had been associated with the home, family and women’s domestic roles thus it had been neglected as not being important. After this realization, sociologists started studying the relationship of food and society and they discovered that very many aspects of sociology address the aspect of food or eating in some way or to some benefit. These sociology fields include; modes of production, political role, rural development, social health issues, discourse and language among many others. Despite this fact, sociological research on food was scattershot as Warde and Martens (2000) say that all that existed for many decades were debates on the nature of the appropriate meal and its role in domestic organization and a few occasional essays on exceptional behavior as vegetarianism. All this changed in the 1980s when people like Anne Murcott who laid out fundamental questions that are addressed to date by food sociologists. Anne was followed by Stephen Mennell, Joanne Finkelstein among others who took an interest in this field. This sudden rapid interest in food was brought about by changes in the food system in terms of production all the way to consumption, growing public enthusiasm for novel foods, celebrity chefs, cookbooks and the opening high-end kitchens. This laid a good foundation for sociology of food to the point of having it as a course for college students. Scaff Lawrence says that the concept of rationalization refers to complex processes in which beliefs and actions become more understandable, consistent, and systematic and goal oriented. Rationalization is both a social and mental process that involves organizing beliefs and actions so as to increase the likelihood of achieving the desired end. Scaff goes on to give two types of rationalization; formal rationalization that deals with the logical consistency of rules or procedures and their application during substantive rationalization deals with providing logical clarity to the content of a norm and its meaning. Rationalization is useful when dealing with a pattern of action that is consistently goal oriented, purposeful or instrumental, therefore, requiring a precise matching of means with outcomes and calculations of intended and unintended consequences. The concept of rationalization was pioneered by Max Weber in his work on agrarian economies. He was interested in transitions from less developed to more highly developed economies. Weber talked of the rationalization process characterized by structural differentiation in social organizations, functional specialization in the division of labor, technological innovations and a tendency towards secularization of culture. Habermas says that our understanding of rationalization must be broadened to include communicative action and communicative competence. In his view, it is only with this understanding that it will be possible to envisage a rational and just society in which instrumental rationalism is controlled and directed by human reason. After the 1980s, the sociology of food took a new stand in the world and the food industry boomed within a very short time. Things took an unexpected turn towards the direction of fast food. Schlosser (2012) the author of ‘fast food nation: the dark side of all American meal’ says that, over the last thirty years, fast food has taken over the American society. The fast food industry started with a handful of modest hot dogs and hamburger stands in Southern California, spread to every corner of the nation, selling a variety of foods wherever customers may be found. Nowadays, fast food is served at restaurants and drive-through, stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, universities, cruise ships among many other places. Schlosser goes on to say that, in the year 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food and in the year 2000 they spent more than $110 billion. On any given day, in the U.S, about one-quarter of the adult population partake meals in fast food restaurants. In a very short period, the fast food industry has helped to change not only the American diet, but also our economy, landscape, workforce and culture. This has brought about the emergence of some multi-billion dollar fast food companies like the McDonalds. The McDonald’s corporation has become a powerful object of the America’s service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of county’s new jobs. In 1968, McDonald’s operated more than one thousand restaurants world-wide and opened about two thousand new ones annually. An estimated one out of every employees in the U.S have been employed by McDonalds. In the early 1970s,Jim Hightower a farm activist forewarned of the McDonaldization of America’s. He viewed the growing fast food industry as a danger to independent businesses, as a step towards a food economy controlled by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing factor on American life. Much of what Hightower predicted has come to pass. The centralized purchasing choices of the large restaurant chains and their demand for quality products have given a handful of organizations an unprecedented degree of control over the nation’s food supply. The irony of America’s fast food industry is that a company so dedicated to conformity was created by iconoclasts and self-made men and by entrepreneurs willing to defy conventional opinion. Few people who built fast food empires ever attended college let alone business school. From the Fast food Inc. video, it is evident that the current method of raw food production is largely from a result of the growth in a fast food industry since the 1950s. This kind of production has been controlled mainly by a small number of multinational organizations the global food production business, which has its own unwritten goals of production of large quantities of food that usually have very low input. They are more interested in the business side of it, so that they can get maximum profits, which in turn results to greater power of the universal supply of food sources within these few companies. The health and safety of the meals produced the animals producing the food, the workers working for these corporations and the consumers themselves are more often overlooked by the owners and the government in an effort to produce and supply cheap food regardless of these many negative consequences. This change in food production has been brought about by factors like advancement in technology and in science. These new methods of food production often have bad side effects to workers and consumers and the answer provided by the companies is only more science that bandages the problem, as opposed to solving the main cause of the issue. The global food supply is in a state of crisis with the lack of biodiversity. However, this can be changed by the demand side of the equation, i.e. the consumers themselves have the power to change this. From the video ‘the omnivore dilemma’ Michael Pollan suggests that, before modern food preservation and transportation technologies, this dilemma was largely resolved mainly through cultural influences. He argues that the technology has brought about the dilemma by making available food that was previously seasonal or regional. The harmonious relationship between food and society that was once moderated by culture is now disorganized. To further explain this, pollan studies a food chain. Corn is one of the most subsidized plants in the U.S as there are about 45,000 food items in the average supermarket and about a quarter of these items contain corn. Corn is a major diet for both people and animals in the U.S. This is evident when Pollan closely follows the development of a calf from a pasture in South of Dakota via its stay on a Kansas feedlot to its tragic outcome. The animals generally evolved to consume grass, but more than half of a feedlot cow’s meals comes from corn. The other half feedlot contains some products like meat. Feather meal and chicken litter -that are, bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed- are accepted cattle feeds, and also chicken, fish, and pig meal, Pollan explains. He goes on to utter that since the bovine meat and bone meal that cows are given to consuming is now being fed to pigs, chickens, and fish, infectious prions could find their way in the cattle when they are fed the protein from the animals that have been eating them. However, among all the terrible stuff feedlot cows eat, the most dangerous is corn, which is known to damage the cattle’s livers. Corn-fed cows become sick after some time, and this has become a fact accepted by the industry and taken as a cost of doing business. The result of this is that between 15 and 30 percent of all feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers. Pollan advocates for self-made food and in the practice of preparing a meal based on hunting and gathering, Pollan ponders on the question if he should become a vegetarian or not. His questions if morality, which is a relic of human culture used to help humans bargain human social relations, should be extended to animals. He eventually concludes, that If our concern is for the well-being of the nature – rather than, utter, the internal consistency of our ethical code or the state of our souls – than consuming animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do. Pollan supports this assertion by emphasizing that although killing an animal is obviously damaging to that organism, it may be advantageous to the survival of its species as a whole. He says that humans actually provide an important source of population control for many species, arguing that the eradication of meat from human diets will eventually cause problems with overpopulation for these animals. He also says that even though it does not often happen within the modern American meat industry, it is probable to treat an animal kindly and allow it to live a happy life before its slaughter. One of Pollans dominant arguments about the organic farming industry is that it creates a fallacy of pastoral narrative that gives people the false idea that, through definition, organic products come from picturesque open pastures that are safe for humans and animals. Pollan also likens veganism to a utopia , and he argues that this would lead to a shortage of fertilizers and an elevation in the requirement for fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers because food would need to travel even more and fertility (manures) would be in short supply. To sum this up, it is clear that, via a lack of rationalization, fast food is now so commonplace that it has developed an air of uncertainty, as though it were somehow unavoidable, or a fact of modern life. The modern methods of food production leave a lot to be longed as seen in the above discussion. Every food produced either causes harm to the animal producing it or to the human consuming it. We have not thought of the correctness of the methods we use to produce food since we have compromised our integrity and clouded our judgment with readily available food. We have neglected our responsibility as humans to protect our domestic animals that live in horrid conditions and fed foods that only fatten them and make them sick. The sociology of food has a role to play in advocating for better food production methods that are safe both the animals and the consumers and encourage better eating habits. Works cited Food Inc. retrieved from http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/food_inc/ Michael Pollan. The omnivore’s dilemma. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUxk12U9ZQ Scaff, A. Lawrence. Rationalization. 2012. Retrieved from  http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412952552.n235 Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print. Warde, Alan & Lydia Martens. Eating out: social differentiation, consumption, and pleasure. Cambridge, England: 2000. Cambridge University Press Read More