Food and Drink, The declining importance of cultural context

Author(s):  
George Ritzer ◽  
Anya Galli

When we pop open a can of Coca Cola or reach into a bag of potato chips, we are most-likely consuming a product available to consumers in many locations across the globe and made of ingredients produced in multiple countries. While food and drink remain an integral part of cultural practices and identities today, very few of the products we purchase at the supermarket or in chain restaurants are actually local. What processes have contributed to the seemingly limitless availability of out-of-season produce, the global spread of name-brand food and drink, and the prominence of low cost ‘convenience’ foods and fast food restaurants in cities across the globe? There is no question that national and ‘local’ social structures and cultures continue to be important throughout the world. Similarly, today’s global citizens continue to have agency through which they make an array of choices and, more importantly, construct their social and cultural worlds. In other words, the dialectics between culture and agency (Archer, 1988), and structure and agency (Giddens, 1984) continue to be of great importance. This is true globally, as well as nationally and locally.

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balihar Sanghera

This article examines how individuals are reflexive beings who interpret the world in relation to things that matter to them, and how charitable acts are evaluated and embedded in their lives with different degrees of meaning and importance. Rather than framing the discussion of charitable practices in terms of an altruism/egoism binary or imputing motivations and values to social structures, the article explains how reflexivity is an important and neglected dimension of social practices, and how it interacts with sympathy, sentiments and discourses to shape giving. The study also shows that there are different modes of reflexivity, which have varied effects on charity and volunteering.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Aldrina Jashari ◽  
Panagiotis Kotsios

Fast food has become a very popular nutritional habit for consumers and a billion dollars market for businesses across the world. As in most countries, in Greece there are thousands of fast food businesses that aim at satisfying the growing demand for fast food. However, there is lack of research about the behaviour of Greek consumers regarding fast food consumption. On this context, the goal of this research was to investigatethe frequency of consumption in Greece, the most popular types of fast food, the criteria with which consumers make consumption decisions and the environmental, economical, ethical, cultural and psychological factors that influence their buying behaviours. The results of the research show wide popularity of fast food consumption among Greek consumers and a clear trend towards healthy, tasty, easily accessible and not necessarily low-cost fast food.


Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-498
Author(s):  
Ronald D. Leblanc

“The belly is the belle of his stories, the nose is their beau.“Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944)The subject of gastronomy—as it touches upon the significance of what, how, and why man eats—has begun to receive increasing attention in recent years, during which time quite a number of books on the history of food and drink have appeared. Scholars, moreover, have demonstrated a heightened interest lately in the anthropological aspects of this topic. Since eating is a human activity that by its very nature encompasses a social, a psychological, as well as a biological dimension, the depiction of fictional meals in literature allows this ritualistic event to be transformed into a narrative sign with vast semiotic possibilities—not only within the world of the literary work itself (intratextually) but also within a broader cultural context (extratextually).


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Tomas Ondrusek

 This paper investigates the interconnections between art as a cultural phenomenon and identity as a social phenomenon. Focused on the changes art and identity are going through in global era, it is divided into two sections: the cultural experience and the intercultural experience. Understanding both this forces, we investigate the challenges coming with the global era. Global era makes high-speed connection affordable at low-cost: Humans have access to information, but also access to physical move in the world through affordability of international transportation. Globalization brought incredible changes in the life of humans. It gives the possibility of first hand experience of the diversity in the world and makes intercultural experience accessed. A global citizen is a moving citizen, a person experiencing different countries and cultures. But: will these global citizens also in future have there own “global culture.” We are dealing with a big paradox: on one side we have the era of globalization which produced already the first global citizens. On the other side we have art and creativity, which cannot exist without (local) cultural identity and which can even not be recognized out of their own culture as such and often seems funny or ridiculous. Art is deeply rooted in - and connected to - the local culture or cultural circle: like a flower, art creativity is growing in the soil of local culture: it uses signs, grammar, semantics, emotions and intellectual associations understood only by members socialized in a common cultural environment.  Tulisan ini meneliti keterkaitan antara seni sebagai fenomena budaya dan identitas sebagai fenomena sosial. Berfokus pada perubahan seni dan identitas yang terjadi di era global, tulisan ini dibagi menjadi dua bagian: pengalaman budaya dan pengalaman antarbudaya. Memahami kedua kekuatan ini, kita menyelidiki tantangan yang datang dengan era global. Era global membuat koneksi berkecepatan tinggi terjangkau dengan biaya rendah: Manusia memiliki akses ke informasi, tetapi juga akses ke pergerakan fisik di dunia melalui keterjangkauan transportasi internasional. Globalisasi membawa perubahan luar biasa dalam kehidupan manusia. Ini memberikan kemungkinan pengalaman tangan pertama dari keragaman di dunia dan membuat pengalaman antarbudaya dapat diakses. Warga global adalah warga negara yang bergerak, seseorang yang memiliki pengalaman berbagai negara dan budaya. Tetapi: apakah warga global ini juga di masa depan akan memiliki "budaya global" di sana. Kita berhadapan dengan paradoks besar: di satu sisi kita memiliki era globalisasi yang telah menghasilkan warga global pertama. Di sisi lain kita memiliki seni dan kreativitas, yang tidak mungkin ada tanpa identitas budaya (lokal) dan bahkan tidak disadari oleh kebudayaan di luar kebudayaan dirinya karena sering tampak lucu atau menggelikan. Seni berakar dalam - dan terhubung dengan - budaya lokal atau lingkaran budaya: seperti bunga, kreativitas seni tumbuh di tanah budaya lokal: ia menggunakan tanda, tata bahasa, semantik, emosi, dan asosiasi intelektual yang hanya dipahami oleh anggota yang disosialisasikan di lingkungan budaya bersama. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Larrier ◽  
Monica D. Allen ◽  
Irwin M. Larrier

We live in an increasingly borderless world, in which changes in one part of the globe rapidly influence all other areas. Increased international migration, along with the accompanying movement of information, affects the political, economic and cultural spheres in distant countries. Along with benefits that include increased knowledge and greater educational and cultural opportunities come drawbacks at the systemic level, including adverse impacts to cultural practices and beliefs, family relationships and the social cohesiveness of communities. In particular, changes that occur in high-income countries are experienced in a variety of ways in low and medium income countries. One way is how people view themselves and their places in the world; individuals need to re-equip themselves with skills, particularly intra- and interpersonal skills, to be productive global citizens. Two of the many barriers to doing this in the under-resourced parts of the world are access to resources and shortage of trained individuals to deliver these scant interventions. We introduce the RUMERTIME Process™, a five-step psychosocial problem-solving strategy as a possible multisystemic cognitive behavioral therapy intervention. The results of our pilot case studies, conducted in various formats, settings, and with diverse socio-demographics, demonstrate the success of the task-sharing approach of the RUMERTIME Process™ in training laypeople to deliver these psychosocial skills using our framework.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Ágota Panyor

The primary aim of the international movement which started in the middle of the I980's in Italy, was to control the effects destroying the traditions generated by the fast-food restaurants and the globalization, and slow down the world. The members of this movement made an appointment about directing the people's attention to preserve the national culture by using traditional foods and foodstuffs, and they are trying to slow down the globalizationed world. In spite of this in our country the movement hasn't spread especially and it doesn't move enough people to participate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lifshitz ◽  
T. M. Luhrmann

Abstract Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.


2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Ruey Chang ◽  
Yueng-Hsiang Huang ◽  
Kai Way Li ◽  
Alfred Filiaggi ◽  
Theodore K. Courtney

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