Food in the Americas
Food Culture and NutritionSpring 2001
Food and Culture
Anthropology 105Harvard Anthropology Professor James L. Watson amiably admits he's not a Latin Americanist. As a matter of fact, at this writing, he was preparing for his very first trip to Mexico.
But as Harvard's expert on culinary anthropology, he knew a lot about what he would be looking for: traditional markets and vendors, the penetration of fast food chains such as McDonald's and, yes, Taco Bell, as well as sampling the local cuisine.
Watson, the editor of Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia (Stanford University Press, 1997), focuses on food issues, a specialized subfield of social/cultural anthropology in his course Food and Culture, Anthropology 105. The course examines food for its social and cultural implications, rather than being a survey of nutritional or dietetic sciences.
The only course of its type at Harvard, Anthropology 105 includes topics such as food in social contexts, gift giving and reciprocity, food as a marker of social boundaries, body image and the symbolism of human fat, transnationalism and global food industries, and the invention and commodification of new foods.
Students who have included a fair share of Latin Americans and Latin@s choose research topics from a wide variety of themes, many of them international, such as "Drawing Ethnic Boundaries with Food," The Structure of Italian/Hungarian/Japanese/Brazilian/Greek/Cuban/English Cuisine," "Overeating as a Cultural Expectation," "Food Fit for the Gods: Feeding and Eating in Religious Contexts," and "Is there a Global Cuisine? Fast Foods in Transnational Contexts."
Want to read more about food and culture? Watson recommends Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (Routledge, 1997); The Lord's Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), and Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (Waveland Press, 1998).
And now we're waiting for a report from Mexico!