Foodways

In social science foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Foodways as "the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period".

Anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, historians, and food scholars often use the term foodways to describe the study of why we eat what we eat and what it means. The term, therefore, looks at food consumption on a deeper than concrete level and includes, yet goes, beyond sustenance, recipes, and/or taste. Thus, according to Harris, Lyon and McLaughlin: “…everything about eating including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it and who’s at the table – is a form of communication rich with meaning. Our attitudes, practices and rituals around food are a window onto our most basic beliefs about the world and ourselves.”

Topics like social inclusion and exclusion, power, and sense making are explored under the umbrella term foodways. Furthermore, the ways in which food shapes and is shaped by social organization are essential to examination of foodways. Since consumption of food is socially constructed, cultural study is also incorporated in the term.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, explains: “A very modest life of subsistence contrasts with our own use of goods, in for example, the use of food. How would we be able to say all of the things we want to say, even just to the members of our families, about different kinds of events and occasions and possibilities if we did not make any difference between breakfast and lunch and dinner and if we made no difference between Sunday and weekends, and never had a different kind of meal when friends came in, and if Christmas Day had also to be celebrated with the same kind of food?”

While in fields like anthropology, the production, procurement, preparation, presentation, and consumption of foods have always been regarded as central in the study of cultures the use of the term foodways in popular culture is used as an oriented way of looking at food practices. In this sense, the term is a consumer culture expression that encompasses, in popularly understandable and debatable formats, contemporaneous social practices related to foods as well as nutritional and culinary aspects of foods.

The term foodways can be employed when referencing the "ways of food" of a region or location. For example:

Immigrant foodways are also featured prominently in America. For example, The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, located in Southeastern Massachusetts - which has a very large immigrant population from Cape Verde - describes Cape Verdean Foodways by publishing recipes from these southern Atlantic islands.

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Wikipedia