Food Studies Commons^™

No. 12: The State Of Food Insecurity In Johannesburg, Michael Rudolph, Florian Kroll, Shaun Ruysenaar, Tebogo Dlamini

African Food Security Urban Network

Johannesburg is the economic hub of South Africa and the Southern African region. At the same time, it is a city of extremes which juxtaposes ostentatious wealth and conspicuous consumption with grinding poverty and food insecurity. Not enough is known about the prevalence and nature of food insecurity in the city, making it dif!cult to challenge and plan to reduce the urban food gap. This paper uses AFSUN data from three lower-income areas of the city (Alexandra, Orange Farm and the Inner City) to examine the characteristics and drivers of food insecurity in Johannesburg. Despite high overall levels of food …

No. 13: The State Of Food Insecurity In Harare, Zimbabwe, Godfrey Tawodzera, Lazarus Zanamwe, Jonathan Crush

African Food Security Urban Network

Harare is at the epicentre of the economic meltdown and political crisis that has devastated Zimbabwe over the last decade and led to a mass exodus from the country. Those who remained in Zimbabwe’s largest city and capital endured unprecedented hardship as the formal economy collapsed, unemployment soared and poverty deepened. Household surveys conducted in Harare with official sanction between 2003 and 2009 appear to demonstrate that food insecurity was not a particularly serious problem, a conclusion sharply at odds with reality. In 2008, at the height of the crisis, AFSUN therefore implemented its own baseline food security survey in …

No. 16: The State Of Food Insecurity In Msunduzi Municipality, South Africa, Mary Caesar, Jonathan Crush, Trevor Hill

African Food Security Urban Network

There is plenty of food in Msunduzi, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, but the urban poor regularly go hungry. This study of Msunduzi’s food security situation formed part of AFSUN’s baseline survey of eleven Southern African cities. The survey results show that the urban poor in Msunduzi are significantly worse off than their counterparts in Cape Town and Johannesburg. A third of the households reported that they sometimes or often have no food to eat of any kind. Household size did not make a great deal of difference to levels of insecurity but female-headed households are more food insecure than …

No. 09: Migration, Development And Urban Food Security, Jonathan Crush

African Food Security Urban Network

Over the last decade, two issues have risen to the top of the international development agenda: Food Security & Migration and Development. Each has its own agency champions, international gatherings, national line ministries and voluminous bodies of research. There is thus a massive institutional and substantive disconnect between these two development agendas. The reasons are hard to understand since the connections between migration and food security seem so obvious. Food security needs to be “mainstreamed” into the migration and development agenda and migration needs to be “mainstreamed” into the food security agenda. Without this happening, both agendas will proceed in …

No. 15: The State Of Food Security In Manzini, Swaziland, Daniel Tevera, Nomcebo Simelane, Graciana Peter, Abul Salam

African Food Security Urban Network

This study of the food security situation of the poor in Manzini, Swaziland’s economic hub, formed part of AFSUN’s baseline survey of eleven Southern African cities. It found that the urban poor here are less food secure than in any of the other cities in the survey. On the basis of the findings presented in this paper, AFSUN makes several policy recommendations to deal with food security challenges in the poor urban areas of Swaziland. Among these is that government needs to target urban households specifically in addition to its focus on poverty in rural areas. A more national approach …

No. 10: Gender And Food Insecurity In Southern African Cities, Belinda Dodson, Asiyati Chiweza, Liam Riley

African Food Security Urban Network

This gender analysis of the findings of AFSUN’s baseline survey of poor urban households in eleven cities in Southern Africa in 2008 and 2009 has implications for urban, national and regional policy interventions aimed at reducing urban food insecurity. By comparing female-centred and other households, light is shed both on the determinants of urban food insecurity – which relate fundamentally to income, employment and education – and on the manifest gender inequalities in access to the largely income-based entitlements to food in the city. These insights can be used to design and implement practical and strategic interventions that could simultaneously …

Craft Beer: Penetrating A Niche Market, Douglas W. Murray

Department of Nutrition and Food Studies Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the underexplored niche market potential of craft beer, especially as it may relate to independent food and beverage operations, as a means of gaining competitive advantage.

Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected through the distribution of a survey instrument to craft beer and home brewers, designed to assess the demographic profile, purchasing/restaurant selection, and decision behavior of this group and assess the likelihood of their future behavioral intentions toward continued participation in the craft beer segment.

Findings – The paper reveals that craft beer and micro brew pub success has been …

Behavioral Economics And The Psychology Of Fruit And Vegetable Consumption, Joseph Price, Jason Riis

Marketing Papers

Behavioral economics is an emerging paradigm that challenges the assumptions and predictions of classical economics. This new paradigm emphasizes that consumers do not always make optimal use of available information nor do they always make choices and tradeoffs in a manner that optimizes their well-being. After describing some basic concepts in behavioral economics, this paper reviews the growing literature that applies these concepts to the consumption of fruits and vegetables. A toolkit to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables is developed based on an analysis of previous research. Three general kinds of tools are described: tools for 1) displays and …

Simplicity, Sustainability, And A Greening Of The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Cara E. Erdheim

Presidential Seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

This essay is in part academic and in part anecdotal, although, from my perspective, the two need not be mutually exclusive. A unique Service Learning experience last May has crystallized my personal reflections on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, as well as clarified my literary scholarship in the field of American environmental writing.

Chapter 3, Daily Life In Intimacy And Community In A Changing World: Sikaiana Life 1980-1993, William Donner

Sikaiana Ethnography

This chapter is a discussion of daily life on Sikaiana in the Solomon Islands , 980-1993. It describes daily routines, work and events.

A related website can be found at www.sikaianaarchives.com

How Milk Does The World Good: Vernacular Sustainability And Alternative Food Systems In Post-Socialist Europe, Diana Mincyte

Publications and Research

Scholarly debates on sustainable consumption have generally overlooked alternative agro-food networks in the economies outside of Western Europe and North America. Building on practice-based theories, this article focuses on informal raw milk markets in post-socialist Lithuania to examine how such alternative systems emerge and operate in the changing political, social, and economic contexts. It makes two contributions to the scholarship on sustainable consumption. In considering semi-subsistence practices and poverty-driven consumption, this article argues for a richer, more critical, and inclusive theory of sustainability that takes into consideration vernacular forms of exchange and approaches poor consumers as subjects of global history. …

Television, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Using Pen Source Data Inputs To Map Food Insecurity In Cumberland County, Maine, Daniel Wallace

Muskie School Capstones and Dissertations

In 2010, Mapping Food Insecurity’s Project Director (PD) participated in “The Campaign to Promote Food Security in Cumberland County, Maine.” The Campaign drew together a 60 member coalition to address rapidly increasing food insecurity challenges in the county. It produced a report with a series of recommendations grouped under six strategic community goals. One of the recommendations called for the use of ‘mapping and connectivity software to determine location of vulnerable populations and services in order to plan best future delivery and use of food access services in Cumberland County

Good Food, Good People: Understanding The Cultural Repertoire Of Ethical Eating, Josee Johnston, Michelle Szabo, Alexandra Rodney

Publications and Scholarship

Ethical consumption is understood by scholars as a key way that individuals can address social and ecological problems. While a hopeful trend, it raises the question of whether ethical consumption is primarily an elite social practice, especially since niche markets for ethical food products (for example, organics, fair trade) are thought to attract wealthy, educated consumers. Scholars do not fully understand the extent to which privileged populations think about food ethics in everyday shopping, or how groups with limited resources conceptualize ethical consumption. To address these knowledge gaps, the first goal of this paper is to better understand how consumers …

Royal Pomp: Viceregal Celebrations And Hospitaity In Georgian Dublin, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Tara Kellaghan

Articles

During the successive reigns of the Hanoverian kings in England (1714-1830), a total of thirty-seven different viceroys were sent to Ireland as representatives of the British Crown (Table 1). The position of viceroy (also referred to as lord-lieutenant) was awarded as a matter of political exigency, but the viceroy’s role was one of social as much as political significance. The viceroy and his vicereine played the roles of the British monarchs in absentia, and the Protestant minority ruling class, often referred to as the Ascendancy, expected the viceregal court at Dublin Castle to not merely mirror, but to outshine that …

The Current State Of Cooking In Ireland: The Relationship Between Cooking Skills And Food Choice, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, John Lydon

Articles

This research investigated the attitudes of Irish people to food to ascertain whether the acquisition of cooking skills influences food choice. Caraher et al. (1999) report on the state of cooking in England noted that changing lifestyles has had a significant impact upon the demand of food offerings and on the variance of domestic cooking skills. Caraher et al. (1999) found that cooking skills play an important part in healthy eating as a vehicle for lower-paid people to achieve a healthy diet and is an essential life-skill. While these discourses advance, the deficiency of inherently Irish empirical data contributed to …

Nudge To Nobesity I: Minor Changes In Accessibility Decrease Food Intake, Paul Rozin, Sydney E Scott, Megan Dingley, Joanna K. Urbanek, Hong Jiang, Mark Kaltenbach

Marketing Papers

Very small but cumulated decreases in food intake may be sufficient to erase obesity over a period of years. We examine the effect of slight changes in the accessibility of different foods in a pay-by-weight-of-food salad bar in a cafeteria serving adults for the lunch period. Making a food slightly more difficult to reach (by varying its proximity by about 10 inches) or changing the serving utensil (spoon or tongs) modestly but reliably reduces intake, in the range of 8-16%. Given this effect, it is possible that making calorie-dense foods less accessible and low-calorie foods more accessible over an extended …

Fair Trade And Development: A Changing Paradigm, Daniel Jaffee

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book chapter.

By the time the fair trade movement celebrated the 20th anniversary of its founding in 2008, it had been transformed virtually beyond recognition. From a marginal European movement characterized by small ethical companies, non-profit charities, solidarity groups and alternative trading organizations (ATOs) selling coffee and handicrafts to a small group of politicized consumers through alternative world shops, fair trade has become an international market system with annual sales of nearly US $5,000m. (€3,500m.) (FLO 2010), reaching mass audiences of mainstream shoppers across the global North with a wide range of food and non-food products originating from both small …

Watch What You Eat: From Self-Surveillance To Affective Eating, Constance Calice

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

How is it that Americans are so obsessed with nutrition and dieting and yet remain unhealthy? This project attempts to give a theoretically driven answer to this great paradox within the Western diet. Constance Calice analyzes the practice and rhetoric of dieting as a crystallization of a problematic relationship to food using a Foucauldian understanding of discipline. Using examples from the media, she illustrates the way in which outside forces effect our food choices and the power relationships formed in this exchange. To offer an alternative view to nutritionism she looks to the Local Food Movement and affect theory to …

Irish Corned Beef: A Culinary History, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Pádraic Óg Gallagher

Articles

This article proposes that a better knowledge of culinary history enriches all culinary stakeholders. The article will discuss the origins and history of corned beef in Irish cuisine and culture. It outlines how cattle have been central to the ancient Irish way of life for centuries, but were cherished more for their milk than their meat. In the early modern period, with the decline in the power of the Gaelic lords, cattle became and economic commodity that was exported to England. The Cattle Acts of 1663 and 1667 affected the export trade of live cattle and led to a growing …