Despite the imperative role which food plays in human life, it remains an understudied factor, often forgotten in favor of more ‘exciting’ parts of culture like war and religion. In Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, Sidney Mintz explores the ways in which food has been forgotten from culture, specifically from anthropological view. Touching on theories of gender, biological necessities, and social order, Mintz explains how food has been viewed as “an instrument for the study of other things” within academic tradition rather than one substantial enough to stand alone (3). Perhaps because food is “not separate from humanity but is an integral part of it” and that every human consumes food, it receives less attention (4). Just in knowing that food consumption is universal, it loses its academic intrigue, its novelty and cannot be exoticized in the same way that other aspects of culture can. Despite its universality in consumption, the way and why food is actually consumed is vastly different and varies significantly from culture to culture with each entailing their own specific set of societal rules governing ‘how’ and ‘why’. Some of the food rules we still conscribe to today in western society have origins in the recent past when new foods were introduced with the idea of social control.

Control, a lesser studied aspect of food and food consumption is one that greatly interests me. There are many pathways of by which the control which food exerts could be followed; for example, Mintz writes how “every act of eating can thus be made into a test of will” especially when it comes to negative food-related behavior like anorexia and bulimia which often manifest as way by which to “control and manage and discipline the body” (6).  Mintz further explores the institutionalization of sugar, “produced mostly by mass coercion” and “marked the first time a working class anywhere became deeply dependent on foods” (12). Beyond these written examples, I suggest that so many of the social facts surrounding foods are further examples of food-related control which are so ingrained in our understanding of life that we cannot separate them. For example, there are now national organizations like the FDA and Health Canada that almost entirely govern the overall social consumption of food. Traditional methods of consumption and procurement are no longer deemed acceptable which has brought a curt end to hundreds and thousands of foods-related tradition and cultural subsistence in favor of manufactured ideas that return power to a central authority rather than to the mouths of those who are consuming the food. Food studies offers great insight into the ways of how current society is structured and has been built by turning a biological necessity into a weapon of social control and structure.

Mintz, Sidney. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. 1996