Food, Nutrition and the Media

Studied as an economic, socio-cultural phenomenon within disciplinary boundaries but questioning “traditional disciplinary divisions,” food has been configuring a new field of research since the end of the last century, Food Studies, linked to Media Studies. Anthropology, sociology, history, psychology and other branches of human and social sciences are mobilized to work together to understand cultures and culinary practices and to question critically societal implications of food production and consumption. Beyond the classical approaches in sociology, for which food has a functional role (ensuring survival) or socio-symbolic (“Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are”), we emphasize the recent shift in Food Studies. In many respects, this displacement is nourished by a more clearly anthropological perspective: the food phenomenon as a situation in which identities, individual and collective, are defined, (re)constructed and negotiated simultaneously.