Feeding, cooking, sharing: A brief social history of food

Authors

  • Patricia Marcela Aguirre National University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.11.16091

Keywords:

food, anthropology, history of food, epidemiological transition, characteristic foods

Abstract

This work addresses the food system as a complex structure connected to the environment, like a living organism. It uses the contributions from multiple fields (including anthropology, nutritional, medicine, and economics) to establish connections between analytically disparate fields in order to highlight their transformations over time and space. It also studies social organisation over millions of years to understand the synergy between the environment, extraction technologies, economic and political structures, and the resulting cooking environments (each with their own social construction of tastes) as conditioning factors for sickness and death. In short, it delves into the anthropology of food by relying on three main pillars: critical thinking, a relational approach, and historicity.

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Author Biography

Patricia Marcela Aguirre, National University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).

PhD in Anthropology from the National University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), professor and researcher. She is a Full Professor of Food Anthropology within the Nutrition degree program at the National University of Lanús, Argentina. She is also a professor in several postgraduate degrees and specialisations and has worked for thirty years in the Nutrition Area for the Ministry of Health of Argentina. She has also been a consultant to the FAO, WHO, and UNICEF.  

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Published

2021-01-21

How to Cite

Aguirre, P. M. (2021). Feeding, cooking, sharing: A brief social history of food. Metode Science Studies Journal, (11), 107–113. https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.11.16091
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Good to eat. Food and health at a time of information overload

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