This interdisciplinary thesis explores the foodways of six Syrian migrant families, both immigrants and refugees, in California and the role that culinary customs play in their homing process. The homing process is the dynamic way in which people create home according to their life circumstances: food, eating, and culinary customs after migration in this case. Home is not only the place where people live, but also, where they come from and how they feel comfortable; home is both a physical space and an abstract concept. Home, and the various definitions of home, are mapped out in this project because understanding these various meanings allows for a clear understanding of the homing process for migrants. To explore Syrian migrants’ foodways in California, I conducted interviews with these six families, and, in analyzing the interviews, chose four salient culinary customs to demonstrate the role of foodways in the homing process. The four culinary customs are: the distinct morning coffee ritual; mealtimes and meal routines imposed by work or school; lunch as the day’s main meal, which must be tabekh (cooked food); and the importance of handmade food. Taken together, the consistent patterns followed, and energy devoted towards food and culinary customs provide evidence that effort expended in maintaining customary foodways is effort in recreating home. This project adds to existing scholarship on the relationship between foodways and migrant communities’ identity maintenance in that it demonstrates a unique and particular devotion to the rhythm and ritual of foodways that allows Syrians to not only make a new home, but to also feel at home in a new land.

The general aim of this thesis is to use foodwork and cooking in Sweden as a way to better understand theoretical questions about men and masculinities. Paper I discusses how an increased public interest in elaborate cooking and gastronomy in Sweden, a country with a cultural idealization of gender equality, could explain why men in Sweden assume responsibilities for domestic cooking without feeling emasculated. Papers II, III and IV draw on interviews with 31 men from 22 to 88 years of age and with different levels of interest in food. Paper II shows how domestic foodwork and cooking are associated with ideas of Swedish progress in terms of gender equality and culinary skills. Paper III demonstrates further that domestic cooking is not only a responsibility which men assume, but also a way of being sociable with friends, partners and children. Thus, both papers II and III challenge the idea that men only cook at home if they enjoy it. The data rather indicate that domestic foodwork responsibilities are a cultural expectation of men in Sweden, ingrained in desirable masculine practices. Paper IV explores men’s responses to media representations of food. The interviewed men responded to these representations with indifference, pragmatism, irony, and at times even hostility. In general, the responses are based on gender and age-differentiated taste distinctions and notions of masculine and culinary excess. Paper V uses a mix of texts (81 online texts and two magazines) and observations from the food fairs GastroNord (2014 and 2016), Mitt kök-mässan (2014) and the chef competition Bocuse d’Or Europe (2014) complemented with pictures and videos. I argue that a Swedish culinary community that promotes Swedish culinary excellence is constructed by drawing on preestablished national (self-)images. This culinary community is constructed as open and tolerant, with ethical concerns for the environment and for nonhuman animals. Its culinary icons are represented by chefs in whites and the leading restaurants. In sum, this dissertation provides empirical and theoretical contributions to both food studies and gender studies that critically scrutinize men and masculinities. Food-issues are permeated by gender, both in people’s everyday life and in the gastronomic elite.

The thesis deals with the Czech food blogosphere and its development. It describes food studies and theoretical disciplines which had participated on the development. It presents current trends of online gastronomy. It defines blogs with the short note of the Web 2.0, describes their history. Also mentions the authors of the blogs as online influencers who might influence own readers and their opinions. It is followed by the history of foreign and Czech food blogs with their main representatives. Commercial possibility of blog and professionalism of bloggers is also mentioned. Part of the thesis presents the external and internal motivations to write blog. Shortly, the thesis describes the critism of food blogs and also the plagiarism issues. The thesis presents the future of blogging as well. The conducted qualitative research is based on six semi-structured interviews with food bloggers and deals with their opinions of the Czech food blogosphere and creating and maintaining the blogs. It researches their motivation to write and tries to find out the positive and negative aspect of blogging and presumed development of Czech food blogs.

Social networks play a significant role in adolescent decision making, specifically when it comes to dietary outcomes. This study, granted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), assessed the connectivity of these social networks and the impact they have on fruit and vegetable, added sugar and sugar sweetened beverage consumption. Additionally, the relationship between shopping companionship and dietary choices was studied. Positive and negative associations were found among adolescents who shop with parents or friends. It was also found that those adolescents with greater social network cohesion were found to have more negative dietary outcomes. Divulging further into the relationships within adolescent social networks may improve fruit and vegetable and decrease added sugar consumption within rural communities.

The study of food and foodways is a field that has until quite recently mostly been neglected as a field of history despite the importance that food plays in culture and as a necessity for life. The study of immigrant foodways and the mixing of and hybridization of foods and foodways that result has been studied even less, although one person has done extensive research on Western influences on the foodways of Japan since 1853. This paper is an attempt to study the how and in what forms the foodways of America-and in particular of Oregon-changed with the arrival of Japanese immigrants beginning in the late-nineteenth century, and how the foodways of the first generation immigrant Japanese-the Issei-did and did not change after their arrival. In a broad sense, this is a study of globalization during an era when globalization was still a slow and uneven process and there were still significant differences between the foodways of America and Japan.

Since the late 1990's, "food deserts" have dominated the academic and policy literature on food access and food security. Food deserts are defined as areas that lack easy access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food, and are typically measured using Geographic Information Systems and spatial data sets. However, while food deserts may provide a useful measure for identifying food insecurity at a broad scale, they fail to account for individual definitions and perceptions of food access (Barnes et al. 2015; McEntee 2009). Furthermore, the food desert model assumes a lack of agency on the part of low-income populations (Alkon et al. 2013), and ignores other factors of food access, such as walkability, grocery store safety, customer service, and personal preference. In this research, I examine the food access perceptions of residents, non-profit employees, and business owners in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Although Lents is classified as a food desert, there is also an abundance of ethnic grocers and specialty markets within the neighborhood. These grocers reflect the neighborhood's racial and cultural diversity, and are often overlooked by the spatial datasets typically used to measure food access. The research that I conducted in Lents revealed a disconnect between how the residents I interviewed perceive their food environment, and how government, non-profits employees, and business owners within the neighborhood view local food access. The findings underscore the importance of factors other than physical proximity when measuring food access, and also show the importance of ethnic and specialty markets in the landscape. These findings support the assertion that binary measures of food access often fail to capture the complexities of individual perceptions of food access (Alkon et al. 2013).

For years, critics and fans of C. S. Lewis have noted his curious attentiveness to descriptions of food and scenes of eating. Some attempts have been made to interpret Lewis's use of food, but never in a manner comprehensively unifying Lewis's culinary expressions with his own thought and beliefs. My study seeks to fill this void. The introduction demonstrates how Lewis's culinary language aggregates through elements of his life, his literary background, and his Judeo-Christian worldview. Using the grammar of his own culinary language, I examine Lewis's fiction for patterns found within his meals and analyze these patterns for theological allusions, grouping them according to major categories of systematic theology. Chapter two argues that ecclesiastical themes appear whenever Lewis's protagonists eat together. The ritualized meal progression, evangelistic discourse, and biographical menus create a unity that points to parallels between Lewis's body of protagonists and the church. Chapter three focuses on the sacrament of the Lord's Supper and charges that Lewis's meals which are eaten in the presence of the novel's Christ figure or which include bread and wine in the menu reliably align with the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. Chapter four studies how sinful eating affects the spiritual states of Lewis's characters. The chapter first shows how Lewis's culinary language draws from Edenic sources, resonating with a very gastronomic Fall of Humanity, then examines how the progressively sinful eating of certain characters signifies a gradual alienation from the Divine. The fifth, and concluding, chapter argues that Lewis's portrayal of culinary desire and pleasure ultimately points to an eschatological theme. This theme culminates near the end of Lewis's novels either through individual characters expressing superlative delight in their food or through a unified congregation of protagonists eating a celebratory feast during the novel's denouement. I close the study by emphasizing how this approach to Lewis's meals offers a complete spiritual analysis of Lewis's main characters that also consistently supports Lewis's own theology.

Throughout the 20th century, American farmlands, agricultural policy, and diets have seen dramatic transformations. The number of farms in America has decreased, but the average size of farms has increased. These larger farms are increasingly more industrialized and produce a short list of profitable, subsidized commodity crops. Similarly, changes in the American diet throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have reflected these shifts in the landscape of American farmland. Simultaneous to the evolution of American farms was an increase in federal involvement in American agriculture through policy that seems to encourage these trends. Although separating out the causes from the effects can be difficult, this paper attempts to understand the role that policy has played in a changing American farmland, the players behind American food and agricultural policy, and the implications these changes have had on the American diet.

Agrihoods are a recent trend in real estate development that integrate agricultural amenities - such as working farms, orchards, or community gardens - into residential or mixed-use communities. As an emergent trend, agrihoods have the potential to enhance farmland preservation and local and regional food systems, making them a ripe area for research. However, very little scholarly research has been carried out to characterize, contextualize or evaluate agrihood developments. Thus far, the development model has primarily been detailed in popular media sources. This thesis serves as a baseline study that seeks to understand how neighborhood food systems operate within agrihood developments and how residents engage with their agricultural amenities. A mixed-methods approach utilized an online survey for agrihood residents and interviews with developers and farm managers to describe a subset of agrihoods as case studies. Seventy-eight agrihoods were identified; six were selected for case study analysis, three of which provided results for the resident survey (n=388). Survey results indicate that the character of the community was a more important motivator for agrihood residents to move to their community compared to the agricultural amenities. While all vi case study agrihoods sell produce directly to consumers through a CSA, farm store, or both, few survey respondents indicated they were CSA members or regularly shopped at the neighborhood farm store, with cost and convenience identified as the biggest barriers. While resident engagement with the neighborhood farm may be limited, charging an annual resident fee to support the farm – an approach taken by four out six case study communities – may provide a guaranteed revenue source to the farm amidst low levels of resident engagement with the agrihoods’ sales outlets. Interviewees provided insight into the nuances of operating agrihood farms, enhancing resident engagement, and the spatial design of communities. The results of this thesis can help agrihood developers and managers, and land-use regulators to further understand this new development model. Furthermore, the findings in this thesis provide avenues for future research on how agrihoods contribute to farmland preservation and local and regional food systems.

U.S. food banks emerged thirty years ago as part of a temporary, charitable food assistance safety net to address government welfare shortfalls. Over time their size and scope expanded significantly alongside growing food insecurity. As government entitlement programs continue to erode, the ensuing institutionalization of food banks secured their future. Yet scholars such as sociologist Janet Poppendieck argued over twenty years ago that these charitable programs inadvertently prevent the government from reassuming responsibility by providing the public the illusion of a solution despite their inability to adequately meet the need. This research argues that food bank advocacy can be used to reduce hunger and address its root cause—poverty. A case study analysis of the advocacy programs of the San Francisco-Marin and Alameda County Community Food Banks describes how their advocacy work, in practice, addresses both Poppendieck’s and contemporary food bank critiques. This analysis illustrates how both case study organizations built their advocacy programs on a foundation of public food program outreach—redirecting their clients to government programs—but now affect change through divergent approaches. San Francisco employs a top-down government system reform and technical assistance model. Alameda’s bottom-up social justice model reaches past food programs to broader anti-poverty advocacy. In the process, both food banks have positioned themselves as models for their peers and as bridges connecting food assistance scholarship to public policy and practice.