Citings and Sightings

The Globe and Mail has published an interview with two University of Toronto sociologists who have written a new book on “foodies.” According to the article:

As the authors explain in their new book Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, for which they interviewed 30 people and analyzed hundreds of articles, today’s foodies might find classic French haute cuisine stuffy. They may be willing to try goat testicles and sheep brains. And they’ll happily visit the city’s best hole-in-the-wall eateries, no matter how dumpy the decor. But one thing foodies flat-out refuse to eat is dinner at a mundane, generic chain restaurant.

Sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue that being a foodie isn’t just about consuming good food, it’s also about garnering cultural capital. Says Johnston:

A lot of elements of foodie culture are still relatively exclusive, and part of what foodie culture is about is dabbling in all sorts of different ethnic cuisines and food traditions. What makes that a kind of privilege is to have the kind of knowledge to go to all of these kinds of places [whether it’s a fancy restaurant or hole-in-the-wall eatery], so you’re not just familiar with one type of ethnic cuisine, you’re familiar with the whole range of them. And that can end up constituting a kind of cultural capital people use to display their sophistication.

However, this may entail ignoring inequalities. Says Baumann:

…if you’re going to be a foodie and value authentic and exotic cuisine, it’s going to lead you to places of poverty, to contexts of impoverished food production and consumption. Through romanticizing those conditions of poverty, you can get the good food without having to dwell on the uncomfortable fact of poverty.

The authors also noticed gender differences among foodies:

Johnston: One thing that was surprising to me was the different ways that men and women embody their foodie culture. Men often emphasize their expertise more, and they’re often much more interested in the exoticism, especially eating things that are wildly unconventional, like goat testicles. And women didn’t do that as much. They talked more about how their interest in food was also about protecting the health of their family.

ABC News explores some possible causes of obesity that are often overlooked.

Sure, most of the nation needs to eat less and move more. But is that the only reason America is so fat?

As more scientists and sociologists look at our bulging waistlines, some unusual explanations for the nation’s weight gain in the last 30 years are popping up.

The article discusses an intestinal bacteria that may contribute to weight gain and particular genes that may influence the success or failure of dieting.

Beyond these physical explanations, social factors may also contribute to obesity. A Harvard medical sociologist weighs in:

In 2007, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine used 30 years of data on 12,000 people to show obesity and weight loss may actually be contagious — things that spread among people who know each other.

“They key idea is that people are influenced by the behavior and actions of those around them. This applied to something that people may not have thought of, which is body size,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, author of the recent book “Connected,” which looks at how various phenomena from depression to obesity spreads through society.

Over the three decades, Christakis showed how obesity in one person in a circle of friends statistically meant more people in their circle of friends would become obese. The same was true of weight loss.

“We’re not saying we found the cause of the obesity epidemic. We’re not,” said Christakis. “Social networks have a general property that they magnify what they are seated with.”

While Christakis could show an obesity epidemic spreading through friend networks, he could only make an educated guess why.

“One possibility is that you start doing things — certain behaviors that I copy,” said Christakis.

So if one friend starts serving beer and cookies all the time, perhaps another friend will pick up the habit. Or if one friend joins a running club, perhaps another friend will join it too.

Christakis said another possibility is that “What’s spreading between people is an idea, or a norm.”

For example, if most people a person associates with are overweight, then that person’s idea of “normal weight” is likely to be bigger than what is actually healthy.

Read more.

Many skinny Americans are fed up with obesity, reports the Los Angeles Times:

“Americans as a society are getting fed up with the matter of obesity. No doubt about it,” said Douglas Metz, chief of health services for American Specialty Health, a San Diego-based company that offers wellness programs to employers. “Some pockets of society are taking positive action, and unfortunately others are taking negative action. That’s what happens when a society hasn’t figured out what the fix is.”

Recent notable actions include:

* A recent and ultimately unsuccessful plan at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania sought to take the body mass index of every enrolling student and require the obese to lose weight or take a fitness class before they could graduate.
* In Mississippi, legislators tried to pass a bill to let restaurants prohibit obese people from dining.
* In an interview with the New York Times last August, Toby Cosgrove, chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s largest medical centers, provoked national outrage when he said that, if it were up to him, he would stop hiring the obese. He later apologized for his remarks.
* Last summer in Florida, animal rights activists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took aim at heavy women in a “Save the whales” billboard campaign that featured an overweight, bikini-clad woman. It read: “Lose the blubber. Go vegetarian.” Angry reactions caused the organization to remove the signs.

Statistics about obesity are being assessed in the current debates on how to reduce the nation’s health care costs:

A report by Emory University researchers projected last November that by 2018 the United States could expect to spend $344 billion on healthcare costs attributable to obesity. Obesity-related costs would account for 21% of healthcare spending, up from 9.1% today, said the report, sponsored in part by the United Health Foundation and the American Public Health Assn.

Providing a different take on the issue, it’s time to call in the sociologist:

“In our society, being heavy has become more of a stigma lately because we’re struggling with other issues of consumption,” says Abigail Saguy, associate professor of sociology at UCLA.

The economic climate, a recent history of people buying more than they can afford as well as environmental issues, including the depletion of our planet’s resources, are making people feel more angry about society’s overconsumption, she says. Obviously overweight people are an easy target.

“They’re almost a caricature of greed, overconsumption, overspending, over-leveraging and overusing resources,” says Saguy. “Though it’s not entirely rational, it’s an understandable reaction, especially in a country founded on the Puritan ethics of self-reliance, sacrifice and individual responsibility. If people feel they’re sacrificing, then see someone spilling over an airplane seat, they feel angry that that person is not making the same sacrifices they are.”

Research indicates that discrimination based on weight has been increasing in recent years:

Rebecca Puhl, a researcher at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, published [two papers] last January — one in the journal Obesity, the other in the International Journal of Obesity — Puhl reported that weight discrimination in the United States increased 66% over the prior decade.

“Weight discrimination is highly prevalent in American society and increasing,” said Puhl, who cites several possible reasons. Among them are a lack of legislation to prohibit weight discrimination and an increase in media coverage of obesity (up fivefold from 1992 to 2003). Most media framed the problem of obesity as one of personal responsibility, she reported.

New research on the social network effects of obesity was recently reported in the Guardian UK:

Children at schools where older students are obese or otherwise overweight are significantly more likely to suffer weight problems themselves, researchers report.

For each one per cent increase in the prevalence of obese students aged 16 to 18 years, the odds of a student at 14 to 16 years old attending that school also being overweight increased significantly.

“It was the one risk factor that held true across every school we looked at,” said Dr Scott Leatherdale, the chair of research at Cancer Care Ontario and lead investigator with the School Health Action, Planning and Evaluation System.

Commenting on the obesity connection between older and younger students, Leatherdale says:

It could be that younger students look up to older students, and so emulate their sedentary behaviour and bad eating habits and do not judge the older children’s body shape.  Or it could be that the school doesn’t encourage enough physical activity among its students, and the older students’ weight issues are an indication of that.

Sociologist Steve Fuller at Warwick University concurs with his assessment:

Obesity is one phenomenon that medical sociologists have nominated as an ‘epidemic’ that is transmitted by copying the behaviour of peers.  Certain connections between overeating and social activities become contagious. Young people gather together in more stationary modes than in the past: in front of computers and video games rather than sports.

The reason it’s called an ‘epidemic’ is because the pattern is reinforced by regular contact, so that if one is not in regular contact with the pattern, one doesn’t spontaneously do it The idea is that you overcome obesity by breaking up the networks where it’s transmitted.

Sociologists predict that half of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood, according to the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

In a stark and surprising finding, about half the children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood, a new study of 29 years of data shows.

One in three white children and 90 percent of all black children – ages 1 through 20 – will use the program, according to the research, published this month in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

“This means Americans’ economic distress is much higher than we had ever realized,” said Thomas A. Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University and a coauthor of the study with Mark R. Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

The survey finds that continued food-stamp usage signifies a kind of poverty that is “a threat to the overall health and well-being of American children, and, as such, represents a significant challenge to pediatricians in their daily practice.”

Although the data used in this study ends in 1997, and thus does not account for the current recession, these findings seem to correspond with a report published Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

The persistent poverty described in the survey dovetails with the findings of a U.S. Department of Agriculture study released Monday. It determined that 49 million Americans – 17 million of them children – were unable to consistently get enough food to eat in 2008. Nearly 15 percent of households were having trouble finding food, the highest number recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995.

The study’s authors note that kids are often overlooked in U.S. social programs:

“The number-one poverty program in the United States is Social Security,” Hirschl said. “There is no such system for children.”

But how trustworthy is the prediction that 50% of all U.S. kids will use food stamps at some point in their childhood?

Because there was so much data, the authors were able to use a very long window of observation, which helped them extrapolate into the future about food-stamp usage, said John Iceland, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University. Iceland, who is familiar with the methodology used in the Hirschl-Rank paper, described it as “very solid work.”

“It’s like determining the likelihood of developing heart disease from health data,” Rank said.

The Michigan study is well-known and widely used by social scientists, and it has proven to be accurate over the years, Iceland said.

The finding that 50 percent of children will be on food stamps in their lifetime is conservative, Hirschl said.

That’s because only about 60 percent of households eligible for food stamps actually get them, a finding backed up by the newly released Department of Agriculture study. Stigma and ignorance of the program hold people back, he said.

An article about heirloom tomatoes and questions about the snobbery surrounding their consumption have graced the pages of the Washington Post and the Star Tribune in recent weeks. About the rise of the heirloom tomato…

“Heirloom” has become another buzzword, like “farm to table,” complained Jeremy Fox, the chef at vegetarian restaurant Ubuntu in Napa, Calif., which serves farm-to-table heirlooms as well as hybrids invented by the restaurant’s full-time gardener. “It’s about quality,” he said. “If a tomato tastes good, it’s a good tomato. Nothing else matters.”

That wasn’t always the case. Once, only serious back-yard gardeners swooned over heirlooms. Some, undoubtedly, were concerned about flavor. But for most, growing heirlooms — which they defined as any variety that can reproduce from seed and existed before World War II — was more about preserving biodiversity. Only within the past decade did chefs and trend-crazed food writers latch on to the term: NewsBank, a database that tracks more than 2,500 sources, found 1,097 references to heirloom tomatoes in 2008, up from 77 a decade earlier.

The article draws heavily upon research by sociologist Jennifer Jordan…

Indeed, heirloom tomatoes rose to such prominence that sociologists began to study them as a cultural phenomenon. In a 2007 article in the journal Sociologia Ruralis, Jennifer Jordan examined the pressing question of why a growing number of consumers had acquired a taste for $7-a-pound “bug-eaten, calloused, mottled and splitting tomatoes that may or may not taste good.”

Jordan concluded it was because heirloom tomatoes had evolved into a “marker of distinction.” The lumpy, imperfect fruit had become a kind of mascot for the good-food movement that is against industrial agriculture’s embrace of pesticides, against the development of genetically modified foods, in favor of preserving small farms and in support of local and seasonal food.

Some people sought out heirlooms for their flavor, a reaction to the pretty but insipid industrial hybrids. (Jordan reports that university labs were instructed “to imagine the tomato as a projectile” in their efforts to develop fruit that could survive long-distance shipping and extended refrigeration.) But for many, the growing or purchase of heirloom tomatoes was about making a statement.

Read more.

Yesterday The Guardian (UK) ran a story about a new trend documented by sociologists at Oxford University. The Guardian reports:

More families are eating together at home as a result of the recession, a report by Oxford academics has found.

A quarter of parents questioned say they are trying harder to ensure that everyone in the household eats the same meal to help keep costs down, while 48% of parents say they are eating out less frequently. One in six cited more family time as a side effect of the downturn.

Changing Plates, based on research by the department of sociology at Oxford University and YouGov, and commissioned by Birds Eye, found that 67% of UK adults eat a meal with their families at least three times a week. Almost half do so every day.

The study’s author notes,

Jonathan Gershuny, from the Department of Sociology at Oxford University, said: “The findings of this report suggest that while the family meal is adapting and becoming more relaxed, the social significance of eating together remain.”

Read more.