This research explores the dynamic relationship between place, history and landscape in an urban food market, Catania, Sicily. This market informs a mythological image of the island and my main concern is what significance lies underneath this representation. I examine the ways in which this image has been constructed through ideas of history, space, landscape, modernity and tradition. Unpacking these notions in the light of my in-depth ethnography, I address how vendors and buyers frame and define their relationship with space and time. After placing the market in relation to its historical and geo-political context, I argue that the representation of passivity and the lack of agency have contributed to the maintaining of elitist local and national powers. The use of space within the market informs a distinctive cosmology, in which the landscape constitutes the main local organising principle. The landscape is looked at as a cultural process, constantly renegotiated and recontextualised. The principal categories of food classification ‘wild’, ‘local’,and ‘foreign’ are explanatory notions of a specific relationship between people, food and locality. The interaction between vendors and buyers cannot be understood as a purely economic transaction. Their relationship is articulated through a unique set of practices, which are analysed throughout this thesis. Senses, social interactions, culinary knowledge, and conviviality contribute to the ability to operate within the market. I look at my own ethnographic experience as a practical “apprenticeship”. I also address the local ideas of tradition and modernity, mainly through the analysis of the shared fears of being left behind and of losing control over the process of change. The idea of modernisation as an ongoing process carries with it a sense of loss, of nostalgia for an idealised past.

In this report, I examine representations of women eating alone in various sites of American popular culture, including 1980s women’s magazines, mid twentieth-century lifestyle guides, and early twentieth-century popular literature. Exploring the resonances between these various moments and sites of culture through which the meaning of eating alone has been produced reveals a complex pattern of signification, one that demonstrates the centrality of this mundane and often overlooked element of our daily lives to some of the most fundamental narratives about the place of women, food, and family in American culture and society. Taking as a starting point the existing scholarship on the food practices of women in the United States that demonstrates the existence of strong historical and ideological correlations between food, family and femininity, I argue that, for women, eating alone is necessarily marked as a non-normative and potentially subversive behavior. A woman eating alone in effect upends the family dinner table through which an entire system of economic, social and personal relationships based around heteronormative domesticity is imagined to be constituted. The figure of the woman eating alone, then, is a powerfully charged – even dangerous – symbol, a condensed site of meaning through which dominant ideologies may be reified, reproduced and resisted. / text

There are two ways of understanding assemblages of humans and non-humans inspired by actor-network theory (ANT): consolidation and fluidification. ANT argues that both subjects and objects take shape as a result of assemblages of numerous heterogeneous ingredients. There is, however, some disagreement over how these subjects and objects travel far and endure while staying the same. On the one hand, ‘consolidation’ suggests that heterogeneous materials should be consolidated into networks so that the integrity of assemblages remains while subjects and objects relocate. On the other hand, ‘fluidification’ suggests that fluid-like adaptation may be more feasible, although the integrity of subjects or objects may be at stake. The thesis investigates this tension between the two modes of assemblage via a historical and ethnographic study of milkfish farming in Taiwan and an examination of unsuccessful efforts to export them to mainland China. This study first explores the mutual formation of milkfish and milkfish farming and argues that not only are the physical characteristics of milkfish shaped alongside the socio-technical transformation of the milkfish assemblage, but the fish also act as an agent involved in the shaping of milkfish assemblage. Secondly, this study draws attention to how an industrial version of milkfish as a bulk commodity takes shape as well as how it is enacted so that it becomes the dominant reality for milkfish. It is argued that, paradoxically, this version of reality is maintained through fluidification, in which human actors compromise with enacted multiplicities of milkfish. Thirdly, this study turns to the milkfish export scheme. Set up under the auspices of the Chinese government in 2011, milkfish were exported to Shanghai. But milkfish failed to find a market in Shanghai, and so the export scheme was terminated in 2016. This study first reveals that the material characteristics of ‘ready-made’ milkfish are not easy to integrate into local ways of cooking and eating. Moreover, the fish are excluded from adaptation, while the scheme was adapted in practice to suit the requirements of various other actors brought together by the scheme. This thesis suggests that the lower the demand for milkfish in China, the higher is the need for such an export scheme in Taiwan, but that such a scheme will most likely take the form of continued ‘consolidation’, keeping the export of unsalable fish going while bringing minimal changes to the status quo of milkfish assemblage. Overall, this study of milkfish argues for the co-existence, in tension, of consolidation and fluidification. That is, neither mode of assemblage is in opposition to nor replaceable by the other. The implications for material politics of this study include not only a need to make visible the work of ‘purification’ that keeps both subjects and objects apparently separate from one another, and from others within each realm, but also a need to highlight efforts to erase other possible modes of assemblage, in which the formation of objects and of object-oriented collectives are embedded differently.

In this essay I explore the importance of beef consumption in performing a traditional masculinity that defies the supposed effeminization embodied in the image of the metrosexual. Research on perceptions of men and women eating demonstrates cultural visions of eating as a masculine activity. Furthermore, cultural analysis bears out the link between meat consumption and masculine identity. The recent popularization of metrosexual masculinity has challenged the harsh dichotomies between masculine and feminine gender performances. Against such a trend, burger franchise advertising portrays burger consumption as men's symbolic return to their supposed essence, namely, personal and relational independence, nonfemininity, and virile heterosexuality. In all, I demonstrate the relationship between men and food as productive of a masculinity that perpetuates a male-dominant ideology in juxtaposition to women and metrosexual masculinity.

Food programs that provide employees free meals have become increasingly popular at tech companies. Through the use of multiple research methods including photo documentation, observations, and interviews, this thesis will explore the foodscape created by Airbnb’s food program. This thesis seeks to understand the ways in which a company can promote health, sustainability, and commensality in a food program and avoid inadvertently causing negative health outcomes. The research presented here will help offer insights into how offering free meals can affect the culture of the workplace and the health of employees with the hopes of identifying areas for future research.

Food and Pleasure in Modern American Literature is a study of the dynamics of pleasure in literary scenes of food, eating, and hungering in American poetry and novels from the early 20th century to the present. From infamous poetic instances of plums and memorialized moveable feasts in the early twentieth century to present-day preoccupations with overdetermined foods and bodies, food scenes in literature help develop character, play out cultural or social dynamics, or dramatize appetite and desire. In many instances, pleasure (or its absence) is what gives such scenes weight and dimension. I apply tools and concepts from both structuralism and phenomenology to explore the tensions between seemingly opposing ideas introduced in food-focused texts, which have been selected from a broad range of genres and eras. Chapters 2 through 6 focus specifically on poetry, which offers the opportunity to explore specific structuralist and phenomenological concepts within the space of a few lines, for closer attention. Chapters 7 through 10 examine fiction and non-fiction prose at lengths which permit many more layers of conflict and desire in regard to food and pleasure. The culminating chapters examine contemporary food writing and recent novels that shed light on the food issues of the present day. / English

Die Sächsischen Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB) bildet seit geraumer Zeit einen Schwerpunkt zur Kulinarik und baut diesen kontinuierlich weiter aus. Beginnend mit der Schenkung der Bibliotheca Gastronomica, welche der Oberkellner Walter Putz im Jahr 2005 an die SLUB übergab, gefolgt vom Nachlass des Publizisten Wolfram Siebeck, der 2018 von dessen Witwe Barbara Siebeck erworben werden konnte und der im Jahr 2020 ans Haus gekommenen Sammlung des für den Burda-Verlag tätigen Kochs Ernst Birsner ergänzen Sammlungen mit rein kulinarischem Charakter die Sammlungen der SLUB. Damit entwickelt sich ein Bestand, der sowohl Forschenden und Lehrenden als auch kulinarisch Interessierten eine wahre Fundgrube an historischem Quellenmaterial bietet und sich in die lange Tradition der Kochkunst und Esskultur am Dresdner Hof und den sächsischen Publikationen zur Kulinarik eingliedert. Im Oktober 2022 gründeten die SLUB Dresden und die Technische Universität Dresden (TU) das Deutsche Archiv der Kulinarik, um gemeinsam die inter- und transdisziplinäre Forschung in den Geistes-, Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften rund um die Themen Kochkunst, Tafelkultur und Ernährungskunde weiter zu fördern.

Food relates to the experience of life, survival, and memory. It impacts us every day, whether we have plenty of it or not. It influences our memories and connects us to one another, while structuring details of our identities and cultures. As a creative writer and English major, I recognize that food influences a story to accentuate literary concepts and unveil them, such as a character’s compassion or the poison that a villain uses to unfold the plot. The best example of food as an impactful device within a story is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. From the first chapter onward, Collins grants food deeper relevance in her book’s themes, the characters’ lives, and the world of Panem. Food studies explore the impact of food on societies and the world, which underly the concept of food as a device in the Hunger Games. For this thesis, I will explain specific utilizations of food as a literary device in the Hunger Games as it functions in world building, characterization, and plot momentum.

Analyzing cookbooks, gastronomic guides, literature and film, this dissertationoutlines the creation of a Spanish national cuisine. Studying the works of Carmen de Burgos, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Dionisio Pérez, Ana María Herrera, Juan Mari Arzak and Ferrán Adrià among others, the project examines the evolution of this nationalist discourse by identifying common and recurring themes in an effort to extrapolate and describe the historical and cultural evolution of food from 1900 to the present day. Within the framework of Food and Cultural Studies, this project treats cookbooks, culinary manifestos and guidebooks as texts. Influenced by a variety of culinary and gastronomic of critics such as Roland Barthes, Arjun Appadurai, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Mintz and others, this dissertation analyzes nationalism through the perspective of gastronomy as a cultural practice that contributes to individual and collective identity building. This dissertation concludes that Spanish national cuisine has been defined as a unique, pluralistic blend of regional cuisines since the early twentieth century. While early authors such as Pardo Bazán admit to heavy French influence and the centralized hegemony of Madrid due to its privileged status as economic and political capital of Spain, most subsequent authors acknowledge that Spanish national cuisine is a construction of various regional influences and by the 1960s, this regional view of national cuisine is universally accepted. Shaped during the twentieth century by civil war, Francoism and globalization, Spanish cuisine today continues to be a blend of regional cuisines that mutually influence each other while also exhibiting the effects of a globalized world by incorporating non-Spanish ingredients and techniques into nationally accepted dishes.

Food Security is a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO, 1996). 17% of Kentuckians are food insecure (Kentucky Department of Agriculture, 2016). This study explored the quality of life (QoL) impact of the Bluegrass Double Dollars (BGDD) program on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants through secondary data analysis. Utilizing the categories of quality of life indicators established by The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (CMEPSP) the results from this study concluded that participating in the BGDD program provides some level of quality of life benefits.