Food and Health

Abstract

In many parts of the world the relationship between food and health is predominately defined by a nutritional and medical discourse today. This discourse focuses on food intake as a core determinant of individual bodily and mental health, prevention of under‐ or overweight, and of future diseases. Sociologists and other social scientists, however, have a broader understanding of the relationship between food and health and emphasize how cultural meanings and beliefs as well as social structures and institutions such as education, media, law, politics, and economy shape food practices. The aim of sociological research, reviewed here, is to understand the conditions of possibility for the emergence and prominence of a medical nutrition discourse on food and health and what it tells us about contemporary society.

A Qualitative Evaluation of Social Aspects of Sugar-Rich Food and Drink Intake and Parental Strategies for Reductions

“…Several parents report the same ambivalence when their child spent time with relatives, e.g., grandparents, and disregarded health concerns in order to avoid perceived counterproductive conflicts. Similar dilemmas between health and social concerns are common in the literature [ 46 , 47 ]. The processes and practices of changing habits around sugar-rich foods and drinks are embedded in social life and thus linked to a range of concerns that parents seek to balance—health not necessarily being the most important.…”

Sketching the future of human-food interaction: Emerging directions for future practice

“…For example, Comber et al (2012) proposed that HFI needs to pay greater attention to people and the ways in which they engage with food, rather than focusing on the efficiencies and novelties that new technologies offer; the authors also argued that due to the nuanced practices and experiences around food and technology, HFI has been evolving dynamically with the varied perspectives of understanding across transdisciplinary research fields, reflecting the diversity of ways people interact with food. For example, prior works from a range of fields, including anthropology (Holtzman, 2006;Mintz & Bois, 2002), medical sciences (Kendrick, 2008;Scrinis, 2013;Willett & Stampfer, 2013), psychology (Bays, 2017;Connor & Armitage, 2002;Rogers et al, 2016), and sociology (Schneider, 2018;Warde, 2016), have increasingly utilized food as a research vehicle to understand the beneficial impacts that the integration of food and technology can have on human health (McCurry, 2022), wellbeing (Block et al, 2011), social experiences (Chen et al, 2021), and planetary sustainability (Liu et al, 2018). This transdisciplinary nature of HFI has motivated researchers in the field to initiate a wide range of articulations of the relationships between food, human, and technology, and of HFI's social and environmental impacts.…”