ANTH203 Essay: Exploring the Relationship Between Food and Identity

This essay delves into the complex relationship between food and identity from a cultural anthropology perspective. It explores how food consumption reflects and shapes individual and group identities, examining the roles of gender, class, migration, memory, and national identity. The essay discusses how food serves as a cultural marker, reflecting historical backgrounds, lifestyles, and beliefs. It also highlights the impact of food on social power dynamics, cultural belonging, and how migrants use food to navigate new environments and maintain connections to their heritage. The paper further analyzes how gender norms influence food habits and consumption patterns, as well as the role of memory and sensory experiences in shaping food-related identities. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of food in preserving cultural uniqueness and understanding diverse cultural patterns.

Running head: CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Name of the Student:
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Introduction
Food is fundamental to individuals’ sense of uniqueness. The way any particular human
groups consumes food helps to understand its diversity, hierarchy and organization and
concurrently understand its individualities along with its individuality and distinctiveness of
whoever consumes food differently (Vartanian 2015, p. 75). Food is also fundamental to
individual identity in that any specific human individual is constructed, biologically,
psychologically as well as socially by the food an individual chooses to incorporate. Meals are
social constructions, which differ across cultures, and one of the specific ways, individuals
remembers various cultural patterns are through their food. Each community or nation’s cuisine
exhibits its historical background, lifestyle and beliefs. According to Gillebaart and de Ridder
(2015, p. 88), the national cuisines tend to incarnate the dietary wisdom of populace along with
their respective cultures. Food permeates every facet of individual being. Food is not just food
anymore, but it is a cultural place, which is predetermined within a broader cultural as well as
social structure, food culture that tends to act reflective of extensive social and cultural forms of
any particular society. The following paper will analyse the relation between food and identity.
In addition to this, the paper will highlight the way food tends to interrelate with gender, class,
migration, memory and national identity.
Discussion
Sociological as well as social anthropological studies of food have typically shed light on
food principles in addition to the shared character of food consumption amongst social
associations. Radstrom (2014, p. 92) have noted that eating patterns are attributes of various
groups of individuals and social relations existing between them are explored by observing these

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patterns. Studies of Abbar, Mejova and Weber (2015, p. 3198) have noted that individual’s
association with food cultures. The relationship between humans and food is a multifaceted one
and it can be comprehended from two different dimensions. The first related to biological,
national from the dietary purpose to the symbolic utility and the second related to separate and
cooperative from the psychological to the social. Sociologists of culture studied that social norms
governing eating and work exhibiting that ‘tastes’ can be comprehended as socially constructed.
According to authors, social constructionism is of the opinion that objects exist specifically after
they enter the communicative space.
A theoretical framework relying on social constructionism offers a foundation for
integrating food with social interaction. Gillebaart and de Ridder (2015, p. 88) have noted as
food appears to be fundamental to an individual’s identity, an individual is biologically,
psychologically as well as socially constructed by the food, an individual choose to incorporate.
Food as a result comprises a symbolic role in resolving social power and status associations,
tends to retain its competence to serve as an effective tool of identity, and establishes a sense of
cultural, religious, spiritual and social belonging. Food is as exclusive a human behaviour as
language. Radstrom, (2014, p. 91) have noted that among other tactics, migrants tend to deal
with the displacement and perplexity which they experience in different and unfamiliar places by
reconstructing a sense of dwelling about food construction, research as well as consumption at
the personal as well as interactive levels. Furthermore, the solidification of these practices as
well as the standards as well as values, which cultivate around them, is not only seen as a
consequence of the associations within formerly achievable dynamics, but also has been
considered as highly constitutive of their materialization. According to Abbar, Mejova and
Weber (2015, p. 3201), the major traits associated to edibility, sensory attributes, awareness and

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palatability which migrants tend to use in order to categorize foods are never developed in
segregation as significance of completely individual experiences and memories.
On the other hand, the individual consideration and eating patterns in relation to the way
place and they can be acquired is developed by the contribution of other who have the
implication to share equal or different cultural upbringing which determines the shared factors of
the experience. Lest migrants discover themselves unaided and abstain from any association, the
revision process to the different land is communal, subjective also formed by process of
interactions in any case within the close familial spheres, acquaintances, neighbours, connect in
addition to the undeviating social sphere. According to Cheung and Wu (2014, p. 69), these
recognizable associations are chiefly vital as migrants have to regulate to uncertain seasonal
cycles, foreign calendars in addition to extraordinary holidays where their food serve no decisive
role. In the view of authors, as migrants cooperatively increase and reform their culinary
capability to develop meaning to newly developed situations along with the shared repository of
memories and experiences associated to place of origin which tend to realize the process through
which they relate to each other. As per the view of Gillebaart and de Ridder (2015, p. 88),
collective experiences are supposed to be shared by individuals and groups that possibly will not
be in undeviating contact but somehow share the identical source and story. Hoppe, De Voogt
and Franz (2016, p. 118) have cited the example, that groups of immigrants coming from various
parts of Italy at diverse points in time with dissimilar forms of incentives, speaking mutually
unintelligible dialects and preferring different forms of food found themselves establishing a new
shared identity as Italians, moderately since the host community bunched them into an
undifferentiated assemblage and partially for the reason that they often shared neighbourhoods,
jobs, and a variety of social activities. Comprehensive studies of Berg and Sevón (2014, p. 289),

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recipes initiated disseminating direct spheres of acquaintances; importers offered certain
products along with a set of holidays and relevant occasions gradually acquired significant value
in comparison to others. Several migrants, specifically the individuals who are regarded as first
generation and sustain close associations with their place of origin through relatives,
involvement in events and special events and occasional trips.
Furthermore, Al-Swidi et al. (2014, p. 1562) have derived insights of fragments of
memory to strategize wandering direction towards an imagined ‘others of Asia’. Such fragments
of memory has been produced and consumed in culinary styles of Western regions. The Otak-
Otak primarily characterizes various sections of class, values, cultural patterns and gender to
sensory representation, which signified a cherished memory for identity in relation to floating,
and dreaming of entanglement as well as limitations. For instance, individuals who spent their
initial days in unknown nations have experienced the issues of fragments of memory in relation
to food where their memories have influenced by double diaspora of memories (Cavazza,
Guidetti. and Butera 2015, p. 266)
Individuals tend to connect to their cultural or ethnic grouping through food patterns.
According to Ajzen (2015, p. 121) food is typically used as a process of preserving their cultural
uniqueness. Individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds eat different types of foods. Without
eliminating own customs, principles, food culture in a number of regions have the capacity to
acquire a new visual uniqueness and aids individuals to better realize cultural patterns of their
own culture as well as the cultural patterns of others. On the other hand, food behavioural
patterns, private as well as public, are profoundly influenced by gender norms in relation to
masculinity and femininity. Berg and Sevón (2014, p. 299) have noted that sustainability has
developed as an appropriate challenge for women along with the value of harvests and meats. On

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one hand, as this elevates participation of women in agricultural policy, it is based on gender
standards and regulations. Authors have indicated that, women’s resentment and fanatical
concern are probably to be given approval when it falls within an apt, gender normative subject
of distress. Drawing relevance to factors related to agriculture, apprehensions over food
protection for women’s relations in addition to the situations of the world remained after their
descendants are recognized as few critical issues.
As a result, gender-norms tend to eliminate women from vital spheres of financially as
well as politically reliable positions in the public scope of food invention regardless of their
efforts in public as well as private food production. Thus, greater extent of exceptions is likely to
occur when processes in which women look for authority over food making suitably align to
gender customs regarding their appropriate role in taking care for others (Almerico 2014, p. 1).
Moreover, gender standards regulating food intake are not only applicable to size of body as well
as calorie consumption but further to patterns of food consumption. For instance, certain forms
of elements of French cultural patterns consider fish as unsuitable for French men to consume
due to the crumbling texture of fish must be consumed in insignificant mouthfuls and chewed
moderately in a way that tends to show divergences from the French norms of masculinity
(Hoppe, De Voogt and Franz 2016, p. 118). Women in several Anglo-heritage as well as
European countries are projected to eat salads as their primary food.
Conclusion
Hence to conclude, identity related to the food consumption has been major focus of
several sociological studies which present eating from a perspective of explicit demographic or
shared and communal categories related to age, gender, cultural patterns, body image or fitness.

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These anthropological or ethnographic observations have persistently shed light on the existing
dualities; whether individuals tend to exhibit their preference for a exacting type of eating
identity such as vegetarian or non- vegetarian or omnivore.

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References
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Ajzen, I., 2015. Consumer attitudes and behavior: The theory of planned behavior applied to
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