Simona Rodat

Placed at the crossroads of diverse disciplines – medical sciences, information and communication science, sociology of food, agricultural sciences – this book focuses on media, food and nutrition. Contributors to this volume come from different countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico and Romania, and consider comparatively their native cultures. The book answers several questions: How are food and nutrition made visible and publicized? What is the role of media in relation to food and nutrition? What are the strategies of discourses surrounding food and nutrition within new public spaces?

This book is the fruit of a junction of three thinking ideas/ issues/ themes, on the one hand theoretical, but on the other hand anchored in the reality we live in, in the social hic et nunc. The first pillar, the first impulse to think of such topic has been given by the invasion had in language by some compounds with the particle ‘euro’. All the new words, compounds with the particle ‘euro’, relate to something that seems to go beyond the bureaucratic abstraction stage and also they seem to become consistent. We are talking about the United Europe, perceived however as a socio-cultural reality, which integrate the political-administrative part, but also overrun it. The concept of European identity, so necessary to understand the new reality about to be built, raises at the same time other issues. It starts from a political-administrative reality but does overrun it; it changes some cognitive value-related matters from the collective mentality; it involves the constitution of a unique system, clotted with representations related to society etc. Given all such difficulties, it becomes legitimate to ask: what is this European identity?; how can it be perceived?; how do we perceive, under these circumstances, the ‘national identity’?
The second premise of our project is the national identity
problematics. On the one hand, considering a history when the nationalist idea (in its extremist version) has been disclaimed, as well as considering the evolutions of social theories from the essentialist-naturalist paradigm to the constructivist paradigm, the concept of ‘national identity’ has undergone re-assessments and re-definitions. On the other hand however, the appearance of the European identity problematics re-draws the attention on the national identity, first and foremost in order to establish the relations betweens the two: is it a dichotomist relation? Or, on the contrary, must these two concepts be thought of jointly, the European identity following and integrating the national identity? Or maybe should we reassess the idea of national identity starting with the conceptual scheme given by the operationalization of such concept as ‘European identity’?
Finally, the third pillar of this work has been to mirror Romania’s situation at the beginning of the third millennium. On the one hand, it is about to join the European Union, a process having both a technical side –
harmonisation of the legislation to the community acquis, economic and political performances to make us competitive on the unique market etc. – and one side related to the interiorization of this process at the level of collective mentality, to the ownership on this process and also related to the development of social-media representations appropriate to the new reality. On the other hand, Romania’s recent history, even though it has not had a right extreme nationalist government episode, has rendered an acute devaluation of the ‘national’ idea, seen as opposed to openness, cosmopolite vision. In fact, Romanian nationalism from the communist period meant an autarchic close regime, for which what now represents the United Europe and which partially overlaps Western Europe is the ‘enemy’ whom it was best to have nothing to do with. It is thus noticed the existence of a breaking at least at the level of the official discourse – a breaking which appeared once the political status changed in 1989 – in perceiving both the idea of nationalism and the idea of Europe. Beyond this level, the way the national and the European identities are perceived (if the latter one exists) in the day-to-day discourse by common people and mass-media are matters that have been suggested to us by these three initial issues.

There are few television programs about the part food plays in our lives. There are cooking demonstrations, where viewers can watch chefs such as Paul Bocuse or Grahame Kerr baking fish in pastry or poaching eels in red wine. In such programs cooking is shown as an accessory, as part of a lifestyle. Similar use of food and cooking is made in newspaper and magazine lifestyle supplements. But there is almost no public discussion of what we eat, how we eat it, and what effect our eating has on us.