Selective Eating : The Rise, the Meaning and Sense of «Personal Dietary Requirements» , livre ebook

Odile Jacob - Claude Fischler

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177 pages

English

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In most (if not all) human societies, turning down food offered amounts to rejecting the relationship, pulling out of the circle of guests and the group. It indicates distrust and may prompt exclusion. In today’s world, however, a large and apparently growing number of people are asserting personal dietary requirements for a variety of reasons: medical (allergies and intolerance); health and weight (various diets and regimens); ethical, political and spiritual (vegetarianism, veganism, religious restrictions). Does the sudden assertion of these individual demands indicate an evolution or even a rejection of what can be considered the bedrock of sociability: the sharing of meals? The issue of selective eating is explored here from a wide interdisciplinary perspective: from a biomedical standpoint (immunology, allergies and intolerances) to social and historical analyses. The rise of personal dietary requirements poses questions as to the scope and limits to individualization in contemporary societies. This book (and the conference that gave rise to it) triggered a debate in the French media: Will the trend lead to the end of eating as a social, shared activity? Will we abandon all forms of commensal eating? Or will novel configurations emerge, flexible enough but also ritualized enough so that the experience of eating retains a sense of conviviality? Claude Fischler is Senior Investigator Emeritus with CNRS, the French national research agency. He is the author of pioneering work in the field of food studies. Véronique Pardo is an anthropologist and heads OCHA. OCHA is a research institute within the French dairy council and a resource center for sharing research with the academic community. Since 1992, it has been analyzing food habits and the relationships people (as eaters, consumers and citizens) have with their food (www. lemangeur-ocha. com).

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Santé et bien-être

Santé du quotidien

Santé au quotidien

Health

Fitness

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Publié par	Odile Jacob
Date de parution	28 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782738166548
Langue	English

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© O DILE J ACOB, 2013.
Pour la traduction anglaise : © O DILE J ACOB , MARS 2015 15, RUE S OUFFLOT, 75005 P ARIS
ISBN : 978-2-7381-6654-8
www.odilejacob.fr
Le code de la propriété intellectuelle n'autorisant, aux termes de l'article L. 122-5 et 3 a, d'une part, que les « copies ou reproductions strictement réservées à l'usage du copiste et non destinées à une utilisation collective » et, d'autre part, que les analyses et les courtes citations dans un but d'exemple et d'illustration, « toute représentation ou réproduction intégrale ou partielle faite sans le consentement de l'auteur ou de ses ayants droit ou ayants cause est illicite » (art. L. 122-4). Cette représentation ou reproduction donc une contrefaçon sanctionnée par les articles L. 335-2 et suivants du Code de la propriété intellectuelle.
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OCHA

OCHA is a research institute within the French Dairy Council and a resource center for sharing research with the academic community. Its work and publications pursue a human and social science approach to food, food systems, human-animal relations and the evolution of the relationship to food from animal sources.
Under the aegis of its academic advisory board, OCHA explores the complex relations people have with their food and where their food comes from, using an interdisciplinary approach. OCHA provides resources on food cultures and behaviors, as well as on how food is perceived with respect to identity, health and lifestyle. While one of its main goals is to study evolutions in the French food model, OCHA also focuses on other food cultures.

Academic Advisory Board:
Marian Apfelbaum, professor of medicine (Paris, France)
Maggy Bieulac-Scott, former director of OCHA (Paris, France)
Marie-Christine Clément, author (Romorantin, France)
Jesus Contreras, anthropologist, director of the Observatorio de la alimentación, University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain)
Jean-Pierre Corbeau, professor of sociology, François Rabelais University (Tours, France)
Adam Drewnowski, professor of epidemiology and medicine, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition, University of Washington (Seattle, Washington, USA)
Claude Fischler, sociologist, director of research at the CNRS (Paris, France)
Allen J. Grieco, historian, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance (Florence, Italy)
Bertrand Hervieu, inspector general of agriculture, vice-president of the Conseil Général de l’Alimentation, de l’Agriculture et des Espaces ruraux (Paris, France)
Jean-Michel Lecerf, clinical nutritionist, Pasteur Institute (Lille, France)
Véronique Pardo, anthropologist, OCHA (Paris, France)
Jean-Pierre Poulain, professor of sociology, Toulouse-Le Mirail University (Toulouse, France)
Noëlie Vialles, anthropologist, Colle`ge de France (Paris, France)
INTRODUCTION
Is Sharing Meals a Thing of the Past?

Claude Fischler 1

“Learning about an unfamiliar culture always begins with table manners,” wrote social anthropologist Philippe Descola (1991). One day or another in the course of fieldwork the situation occurs in which the anthropologist must taste or share food with the population studied. It could be eating live insects with a group of hunters in Mexico, for whom they are a delicacy (Katz, 1996); in Amazonia, one might have to accept the offering of a handful of plump white grubs or share the frugal fare of a Nambikwara family such as Claude Lévi-Strauss describes in Tristes Tropiques : “A few orange-colored buriti fruits, two fat poisonous spiders, tiny lizards’ eggs, one or two lizards, a bat, small bacaluva or uaguassu palm nuts and a handful of grasshoppers” (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, 287). No matter what disgust the visitor might feel, he/she still has to “accept the food offered, otherwise no relationship is possible”; eating what the host offers in a way amounts to “moving closer to his identity, diminishing the distance between them, removing the mistrust associated with someone who is from nowhere, who comes from somewhere else” (Bernand, 1997).
The problem of not offending one’s host by turning down his/her cooking is not one posed solely among the Nambikwara, the Bororo or any comparable group in Africa or Australia. Consider what one French respondent answers in a study: “When you fix somebody something to eat and he doesn’t want to eat it, it’s as if you wanted to kiss someone and he turns away” (Masson, 2001).
Thus in very different situations and societies, refusal of food offered amounts to a refusal to interact: it causes disappointment, an affront and even a serious offense. Not accepting food, a dish or a drink can be construed to indicate distrust. Philippe Descola thus notes, regarding manioc beer offered by his Achuar (Jivaro) host: “Turning down a drink offered by a woman is unthinkable: such a gesture would be interpreted as a sign of grave suspicion toward the host, suspected of poisoning the beverage” (Descola, 1991).
Yet, in today’s world, examples and counterexamples abound. The idea of a conference on “personal dietary requirements” may have come to me… during a conference. It was in Australia. The welcome dinner for the speakers was held in a Chinese restaurant in Canberra. From the long menu, my neighbor at the table had chosen gluten-free spring rolls. I struck up a conversation: this person was in fact an anthropologist studying a group of aborigines. Was she gluten-intolerant, suffering from celiac disease? Probably, she said, but she had no proof of it, having never been diagnosed by a medical professional. Her gluten avoidance was a “personal choice.” Since she had gone on this diet, she “felt better.” Are spring rolls generally high in gluten? She wasn’t sure, but eating “gluten free” was an additional precaution. Out in the field among the population she was studying, she admitted that she sometimes had trouble abiding by their dietary habits. Luckily, she explained, her informants were understanding and did their able best to meet her needs.
This anthropologist, in other words – and unlike Lévi-Strauss and Descola –, imposed her eating habits on her informants and got them to abide by her own dietary requirements. She thus apparently managed to develop a relationship with them despite the unusual situation of an anthropologist bringing her special dietary requirements all the way to the field, albeit, unlike the early missionaries, without any proselytizing.
I was struck by this reversal of the terms of hospitality, giving and commensality, as it seemed to raise a number of questions. Should this case be compared with other observable situations that might seem different if not unrelated? How could it be interpreted? Perhaps our anthropologists, the French and the Australian, had as much to teach us about their own culture as the one they were observing.

Demands or Compromises
Food allergies, gluten intolerance, lactose intolerance; various health regimens (blood types, living foods, instinctivorism or raw-foodism, macrobiotics, etc.); ethical or spiritual diets (vegetarianism, veganism, etc.); religious beliefs; various selective and restrictive diets: for a variety of reasons, a large swath of the population in developed countries have adopted and are asserting particular dietary requirements.
Admittedly, there is nothing new in itself about adopting a specific diet. In Ancient Greece, there were sects (Pythagorean, Orphic, Dionysian) characterized in particular by a certain dietary regimen. Historians of Antiquity for instance tell us that Pythagoreans were vegetarian: they refused the ritual sacrifices and the ensuing banquet that were part of the political religion of the Greek polis . They thus excluded themselves or withdrew from the polis by refusing to participate, quite literally, in other words to take their share ( pars capere ) of the sacrificial banquet. There were different persuasions among them: those who refused any blood sacrifice differed from those who differentiated between species in a rather casuistic manner: “While they refuse to eat meat from sheep or oxen, they readily dine on a piece of pork or a slice of goat meat,” thereby demonstrating a less radical refusal of the injunction from the polis (Detienne and Vernant, 1979). These distinctions might at first recall the modern variants in the dietary rules of certain religions that abide by more or less complex guidelines and taboos (such as Hinduism and Judaism). Actually they differ in one essential aspect: those today typically proceed from an individual choice, a personal decision, and do not necessarily imply adherence or membership in any group, organization or sect.
What first distinguishes the situation today from historical precedents is the heterogeneous and even disparate nature of these individual requirements. Some are health or medical related. They may involve serious pathologies that carry potentially fatal consequences in the case of certain allergies. They may involve self-suggested or self-proclaimed diagnoses, as in part of the population of allergy sufferers studied by Mohamed Merdji and Gervaise Debucquet (see chapter 3 in this volume). They may involve controversial diets or diets not recognized by mainstream medicine based on such and such a theory (the blood type diet, for instance). Others are ethical, political or religious in nature, such as the various forms of vegetarianism; they can take on individual forms or involve membership in an organized movement. Still others can be categorized as idiosyncratic, food likes or dislikes, cultural or social particularities claimed personally (as in the “classic” case of garlic and onion). However disparate they may be, at some point individual requirements all raise the same issue: how to eat with others and situate oneself with respect to the food offered and shared. Personal dietary requirements always imply facing “exclusion” or withdrawal, whether volun