Food and Culture

reexamined: Broadening our understanding of social and evolutionary influences, pp. 155-190. Acknowledgments. The authors are grateful to Hazel R. Markus and Adam B. Cohen for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this chapter. The need to include cultural factors to explain behavior seems particularly obvious when it comes to food given an easily observed cultural diversity: People around the world eat very different things. Children are often first exposed to the diversity of cultures by the description of their stereotypical foods (e.g., " French people eat frogs and snails. ") and manners of eating (e.g., " Chinese people eat with chopsticks. "). And yet this diversity in food preferences and customs has been dismissed by cultural psychologists as superficial and trivial, as if focusing on it missed the point of meaningful psychological differences by focusing instead on distracting variation in tastes and practices. Acknowledging cultural differences in traditional food preferences and habits is sometimes discounted as " cultural tourism " (Aldridge, Calhoun, & Aman, 2000), and cultural psychologists warn against the fallacy that " multicultural understanding can be achieved through lessons about the food and festivals of minority groups " (Pattnaik, 2003), resulting in a superficial and stereotypical understanding of cultural differences. So should cultural psychologists avoid the study of food as trivial? We will try to show that it would be a shame. Given the paramount importance of food in daily life, food can provide a valuable window through which to explore and understand cultural contexts. We propose that food is an important but understudied aspect of cultures, and is deserving of thoughtful analysis that goes beyond deriding fairs and festivals as a parody of multiculturalism (Rozin, 1996, 2007). Food is unique in that it ties the intimate, domestic, and familial with society at large, and with institutional and corporate forces that shape and are shaped by individual-level processes. It is also a great illustration of the fact that individuals in the modern world find themselves at the 3 confluence of many cultures, pushed and pulled in a force-field of cultural influences. When it comes to food, we are all multicultural. This chapter consists of three parts. In the first part, we elaborate on our claim that food is a worthy object of analysis for cultural psychologists, likely to provide insights beyond those offered by more traditional objects of study in cultural psychology, and …