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A Sociology of Food and Nutrition

Review by Michael Symons

John Germov and Lauren Williams, eds., A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Not quite ten years ago, a leading sociological publisher doubted the market for an introductory text on the sociology of food. Other publishers have since plainly disagreed because the string of them already includes: William C. Whit, Food and Society: A Sociological Approach, 1995; Roy Wood, The Sociology of the Meal, 1995; Wm Alex McIntosh, Sociologies of Food and Nutrition, 1996; Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil, Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society, 1997; and now this book under review.

As the thwarted author back then, I will have to be forgiven for finding lapses in the emerging texts. A general problem is that they tend to read as sociologists turning to yet another worthy topic. They provide scattered insights but little sense of wonder and coherent theory. Specialists in global inequalities look at those in terms of food; sociologists of health have something to say about nutrition; students of gender write about body shape; and so on. But they are generally not fascinated by meals as the fundamental social institution.

With that general proviso, the text edited by John Germov and Lauren Williams does as well as any of the others. Brought together by a sociologist and a dietitian who happened to have shared an office at the University of Newcastle in NSW, the collection has an emphasis on nutrition and so is correctly labelled A Sociology of Food and Nutrition. The more promising subtitle, The Social Appetite, is relatively unfulfilled. In a short section entitled 'An appetiser: How to get the most of this book', the editors feel bound to 'acknowledge' that, as well as becoming a topic for sociological study, food can also be enjoyed (p. xix).

In further accuracy in labelling, the cover carries the recently obligatory picture of an empty plate and symmetrical knife and fork, but the eye is primarily attracted to other photographs of an Aussie farmer in a wheat field (bottom) and seemingly a group of post-war immigrants dining healthily at a hostel table (top). Printed in two tones, the design might be playing with the kitsch of worthy government better eating publications, but probably not.

Before sounding too dismissive, I must acknowledge that, while the authors come two-to-one from the sociological side, this book is designed primarily for students of health and nutrition who need some social awareness. It is a training text rather than exercise in intellectual inquiry. The editors have obviously worked accurately and effectively, as befits the authors of other recent works, Get Great Marks for Your Essays (Germov) and Get Great Information Fast (Germov and Williams). And the work's undoubted strength is the handy compilation of topics - from world hunger to obesity, and from functional foods to eating out - competently introduced by appropriate contributors.

These include some international leaders, such as Anne Murcott, Alan Warde, Joanne Ikeda, Jeffrey Sobal and two authors of other introductory books listed above, William. C. Whit and Wm Alex McIntosh. Ten of the seventeen chapters come from Australian specialists in the sociology of the environment, gender, health, nursing and nutrition. Overall, the book seems to be addressed to an Australian audience.

In their introduction, Germov and Williams advocate the application of a 'sociological imagination' to any issue. They suggest a template - 'simply imagine superimposing the template over the topic you are investigating'. The knack is to conduct sociological analysis in four dimensions: historical/critical and structural/cultural (pp. 3-5). My immediate reaction was that this is a bit glib, but then I began applying the four-way frames to the book itself. Its strength is the 'critical' dimension, chapters on topics like the environment and class being sufficiently critical to have the thinktanks clamouring for more business-directed research. Against this, the structural imagination is not strong, at least in a theoretical sense, and nor is there much evidence of the burst of cultural studies of food. For those, turn to what might make an interesting introduction for sociology students as such, Bell and Valentine's survey, which delivers both less and more than its title, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (1997).

Historians and historical sociologists would be most disappointed by the weakness in the fourth arm of the template, 'historical'. As Anne Murcott says, among her several useful points, 'Even though sociology is rarely, if ever, experimentally based, sociological research nevertheless shares with the experimental sciences a studious lack of attention to time' (p. 278). As the director of a large British research project, The Nation's Diet, she sets it suggestively in the recent history of that country's science policy. As part of The Nation's Diet, Alan Warde and Lydia Martens surveyed behaviours and attitudes to eating out. They are exemplary in the systematic summary provided for this volume, but then they perhaps got less far than the reader might hope, and have to apologise for the pioneering status of their work. Another report from the British project cautions against professional advice in favour of breast-feeding merely replacing one orthodoxy with another. Women who bottle feed are often doing it morally and responsibly, perhaps so that husbands or boyfriends will not feel neglected (pp. 254-255).

Among Australian chapters, Lauren Williams firstly with John Germov and then with Jane Potter demonstrate the media construction of the 'thin ideal' of the (allegedly) sexually attractive woman, and then contrast this with the ideal of the maternal, pregnant woman. Mark Lawrence and John Germov's account of 'The politics of functional foods and health claims' gains considerable authority from Lawrence's experience in the nutrition bureaucracy. John Duff gets stuck into the real victim-blaming agenda behind 'dietary guidelines'. Salt turns out to be a good example, since 'discretionary' (sprinkled) salt is a tiny proportion of that ingested (perhaps as low as 6 per cent) (pp. 83-84). I would like Duff to have actually demonstrated corporate intervention in the Australian guidelines, although we do just seem to follow America, where his evidence derives.

John Coveney's chapter is an example of where the book does best, a clear exposition of the author's own research on some current topic. He takes different angles on the present liberalism towards children's eating, in comparison to the not so distant authoritarianism, when they had to eat what was good for them. He gives an admirable account of some Foucauldian ideas, so it is probably my lapse in not recognising exactly how they fit in. He reports his own field survey, and, as usual with such interviews, I do not see much point in learning, for example, that Hilary says, 'But we're not strict like, we're just not strict.'

I fared best with his section on published advice since The Australian Mothercraft Book of 1938 listed the correct sequence for foods to be introduced into a child's diet, along with cooking instructions to achieve the 'right' consistency. This might be a small phenomenon, until you realise how it encapsulates the great scheme of things. In fact, Coveney could have pointed to parallels with the opening up of the menu generally, the sudden proliferation of foods and recipes that in this country used to be explained in terms of immigration, but which I have suggested fits a patterned development in the food supply, leading in recent decades to a Weberian 'rationalisation of culture' (for example, Symons, 1996).

To conclude with a real beef, Deidre Wicks writes sympathetically about the rise in vegetarianism in the sense of the voluntary abstinence from meat. She runs through typical justifications on ethical, ecological, aesthetic and health grounds. And she suggests that such a concern with animals might be explained by Norbert Elias's 'civilising process', together with Anthony Giddens' 'life politics', in which late moderns exhibit a personal politics of lifestyle or life choices. But this sociologically skimpy essay fails to grapple with the really interesting questions.

One of the immediate features that demands exploration is the leap from opposition to such evils as battery production and environmental degradation to total abstinence. It certainly does not follow automatically, since battery chickens, say, can also be avoided by omnivores precisely because they like good meat. Wicks even raises the element of irrationality when observing that frequently with vegetarians 'the gut reaction comes first and is followed by further reading and exploration' (p. 103). This evidence of anxiety, which she accepts needs further study, raises fascinating sociological questions about taboos (and therefore probably concepts of 'sacred/profane'), the history of asceticism, the presumably related disease of anorexia nervosa, and much more, which can scarcely be answered by a straight-forward recital of various arguments for vegetarianism.

Another big opening, which Wicks does not admit, is the possibility that vegetarianism is, contrary to its usual self-presentation, a case of alienation from the natural world. As such, it is far from the moral stance so many practitioners project (Wicks names some famous vegetarians who were pacifists, but fails to mention Wagner and Hitler). She considers that the gut reaction against eating meat comes 'when there is a breakdown in the edifice of denial and avoidance', that is, when people finally see through the subterfuges of the industry in disguising the source (animals) as '"chops" and "sausages" and "schnitzel" and various other euphemisms' (p. 103). Again, we anti-vegetarians are dismayed that people do not know where meat comes from, but we complain that vegetarianism is a classic case of such alienation - these people are so divorced from the metabolic universe that they refuse animals!

In pointing to the evocative work of Norbert Elias, Wicks might leave an impression that the 'civilising process' is not a technical term but actually meant to imply progress. In fact, much of the other 'polite' behaviour that so interested Elias provides further examples of estrangement from natural processes. Wicks might have had said more of sociological interest if she had paid attention to my account of vegetarianism (Symons, 1991), which would also have drawn her attention to the important, structuralist insights of Julia Twigg (1983).

Michael Symons is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History, the University of Adelaide. His most recent book is The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks: The Story of Cooking in Civilisation and Daily Life, Ringwood: Viking, 1998.

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