Search results

Stewed octopus on holiday in Greece, carrot sweets at the local Indian restaurant, termite delicacies in Africa on a TV documentary — in increasingly cosmopolitan Britain the more exotic differences in food habits are becoming just as familiar as the well known Lancashire hotpot or Welsh cakes of the regions, and chips and pickled onions or champagne and caviare of opposite ends of the social scale. We are left in no doubt that there are tremendous cultural variations in eating patterns. But what are we to make of these differences? Are they merely a matter of ‘taste’, chance and preference? Or can they tell us more about ourselves and our lives?

‘Everybody knows’ that women do the cooking. It was the Princess not the Prince of Wales who was asked in their eve of wedding TV interview whether she was a good cook, and it is Mrs Thatcher who is reported to cook breakfast for Mr Thatcher every morning. Even wives well enough placed to be able to leave it to someone else are still cast in the role of cook. As a result, the food industry's advertising is aimed at women, so too is much nutrition education, and studies of levels of nutritional knowledge are inclined to focus on ‘the housewife’. These rest on the supposition that if women are in charge of the cooking they also must determine the family diet. Indeed, earlier this year the Director of the US National Institute on Ageing, when describing measures increasing longevity and good health observed, ‘the biggest contribution a wife can make, if she's the one who prepares the food, is that she can have a great deal of control over food intake’. But does being responsible for cooking at home really mean that women also have control over family eating, the choice of menu, the timing of meals? My own research examining the sociological significance of food related beliefs suggests that the position is not so straightforward.

The social anthropology of food and eating displays considerable diversity in theoretical approach, research strategy and substantive focus. Raises the question of whether this form of diversity is located within the discipline or whether it results from drawing on work from other disciplines. Compares selected works in social anthropology with works in sociology, a relative newcomer to the field. Reviews three “matched” pairs of studies; two each investigating attitudes between dietary complexity and socio‐economic aspects, two on gender and drink, both alcoholic and non‐alcoholic, and two on cuisines in comparative cultural and historical perspective. Proposes that the study of food and eating is an especially appropriate arena in which to develop systematically a more considerable cross‐disciplinary fertilization.

This paper aims to present an analysis of the various dimensions of naturalness that shape the consumption practices of parents with young children.

The study builds on semi-structured interviews with 17 mothers and fathers focusing on parental decision-making in everyday consumption from pregnancy to the first years of the child’s life.

Naturalness is a tool allowing parents to navigate in a world of risks and part of an everyday consumption practice that constructs and maintains children as vulnerable and parents as responsible. Parents perceive naturalness as something with three dimensions: familiarity, purity and culture. These three dimensions lead to different parental practices around consumption.

The analysis contributes to the authors’ understanding of parenting, childhood, risk, safety and consumption by showing how and why parents of young children construct naturalness as a three-dimensional ideal in their consumption practices.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

There is no argument among serious researchers that a mongoloid stock first colonized the New World from Asia. Nor is there controversy about the fact that these continental pioneers used the Bering Land Bridge that then connected the Asian Far East with Alaska.– Gerald F. Shields, et al.American Journal of Genetics (1992)