The cultural meanings that are attached to food can be even seen in the way that food is served to the nursery school children. Japanese nursery school children, going off to school for the first time, carry with them a boxed lunch (obento) prepared by their mothers at home (Allison, 1991)
However, the Hua and somewhat fluid in their gender roles and the males even believe that they can actually get pregnant. For Orokaiva, taro and pork together are the paradigm of a proper square meal, so that the expression 'pork-taro' (o-ba) is used to mean 'food in general' or 'basic subsistence,' with a sense like the English idioms "bread and butter" or "meat and potatoes (Bashkow, 2006)
However, despite the types of foods consumed, the Japanese have a multitude of different cultural customs that guide how the food is prepared and served. Food preferences are so closely linked to identity and culinary diversity points toward separateness and division (Bestor, 2004)
Food Describe cannibalism as a system among the Wari according to Beth Conklin. What are their practices and beliefs? What are their motivations? How do they fit and not fit into the major world patterns identified for anthropophagy by anthropologies around the world and by Conklin? The Wari are an indigenous population with a population of about 1,500 people who live in the Brazilian rainforests and until roughly the 1960s the disposed of nearly all their corpses through mortuary cannibalism (Conklin, 1995)
Compare and contrast the views of Carole Counihan in "Food Rules in the United States," Gyorgy Scrinis in "On the Ideology of Nurtritionism" and Anne Meneley in "Like an Eatra virgin." Are their data and conclusions compatible? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each article? What kind of picture of American classification of food emerges from the three articles? In "Food Rules in the United States," Counihan outlines an interesting theory about how ideologies surrounding foods can be representative of other aspects of a culture and social constructs (Counihan, 1992)
Using Marvin Harris' "Abominable pig" chapter from Good to Eat, describe the pork taboo. Who practices it and how has it evolved historically? What is Harris' explanation for this widespread taboo? How does this explanation differ from Mary Douglas' approach as described by him? What are the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach? Of all domesticated animals, pigs possess the greatest potential for efficiently changing plants into flesh which makes the aversion to pork seem irrational compared to the aversion to beef for some (Harris, 1986)
In this way they are sexually binary and foods represent parts of the women's reproductive system. For a long time it was though that man had chosen diets based on opinions of male superiority, however some have also suggested that there is a component of inferiority and impotence that also perpetuates the trend (Meigs, 1984)
One example can be the trend in which extra virgin olive oil has risen in popularity. Olive oil has a unique combination of different appeals such as being ancient as well as receiving a lot of attention in the scientific community for being able to contribute to the prevention of heart disease, breast and colon cancer, and Type II diabetes (Meneley, 2007)
The discourse on the Japanese self vis-a-vis Westerners as "the other" took the form of rice vs. meat; from a Japanese perspective, meat was the distinguishing characteristic of the Western diet (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1993)
For example, the nutrition sciences have been well developed however this level of analysis simply confuses many consumers on different levels. Nutri-quantification also tends to cut across and undermine other ways of categorizing the qualities of foods; in particular, it blurs the qualitative distinction between different types of foods -- such as processed and unprocessed, plant-based and animal-based -- in favor of a quantitative ranking of all foods across these categories (Scrinis, 2008)
"Becker's paper, 'Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,' looks at criminals as rational individuals, just like anyone else. Criminals, like ordinary citizens, seek to maximize their own well-being, but through illegal instead of legal means" (Bahrani 2012)
Gladnick (2002), in his Aztec Human Sacrifice, the favorite human parts that the Aztecs eat were the thighs and hands. These were even served to Emperor Moctezuma with tomatoes and chili pepper sauce (Gladnick, 2002)
The rationale behind the strange and horrific practice of the Aztecs rooted from their belief in the concept of tonalli or also called as "animating spirit." The tonally, which was believed to live in the blood stream and concentrates in the heart (Pettifor, 1996), is the element why the sun stays in motion
They then went to the apartment of Joachim Kroll and in his refrigerator found "bags of human flesh" and on the stove "a child's hand inside a simmering stew." The police quickly realized that they had stumbled upon the "Ruhr Hunter" who had been actively murdering German citizens for at least twenty years (Ramsland, 2005, 190)
This incident could have been written off as a mere metaphor but for the sequence of events that deals closely with cannibals and Crusoe's dread of them in the latter part of the novel. The eating spree and the fear of cannibalism and animals eating each other does not end with the completion of the desert island and cannibal section of the novel as the horror of one creature devouring another was repeated at least twice -- when a horse is eaten by wolves and when a man is eaten by wolves (Defoe and Duvoisin)
This fear of cannibalism of Crusoe as depicted and imagined by the author, helps he author to enhance the problems that were faced by Crusoe as an important plot of the adventure story as the fear can be considered a possibility of the human condition. Moreover, the cannibals and cannibalism in the novel can serve a metaphorical function (Guest)
" But the inclination was resisted by the continuous and strong commands of Crusoe's father and the entreaties and persuasions of his mother and other friends. Crusoe writes that their commands and persuasions were as if that a tendency of Crusoe to go for sea adventure would directly affect his life and lead him to a life of misery which was sure to befall upon him (Mackintosh)
The eating spree and the fear of cannibalism and animals eating each other does not end with the completion of the desert island and cannibal section of the novel as the horror of one creature devouring another was repeated at least twice -- when a horse is eaten by wolves and when a man is eaten by wolves (Defoe and Duvoisin). But a hero being afraid of being eaten signifies a deep thought within the mind of the author and is somewhat uncommon of the author to project a hero who is fearful (Nishimura and Isoda)
Crusoe's reaction to cannibalism was so strong that he often finds himself indulging in orgies where he imagines attacking the cannibals and completely overpowering them and finally annihilating them completely. However towards the end o the novel, Crusoe somewhat justifies the act of the cannibals and detracts from giving shape to his imagination of attacking them when he becomes self-aware that the cannibals were not actually murders in the actual sense of the word but were killing people to satisfy their need for food (Novak)
Still, the parallels between this ceremony and the ceremonies of actual cannibals are hard to ignore. Just as consuming Christ's body and blood in this ceremony, the Wari tribesman of Brazil ritualistically cut into small pieces the corpses of their most loved family members so that many be one with their animal essence and carry them with them forever (Coffey, 2010)