Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

Food, Morals and Meaning examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. However, instead of seeing this discipline as dominant or oppressive it argues that a rationalisation of pleasure plays a positive role in our lives, allowing us to better understand who we are. The book begins by exploring the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of 'natural' appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body. Key Features:^l * Health sociology is a rapidly growing subject area

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Coveney, John

Diets & Weight Loss

Routledge

Using the fascination with the science of nutrition in many Western cultures, this book examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. It highlights the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity. Secondly, it examines how those concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of "natural" appetite which had to be curbed (the connection between food and sex is examined in detail). Thirdly, the book argues how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Lastly, it illustrates how a rationalization and calculation of food - through a variety of modern nutrition programmes - provides consumers with the means by which they construct themselves as "good", moral agents of food choice. In this last section, the book focuses on the social organization of food in the modern home to illustrate that the meal table - a traditional site for the inculcation of cultural rules - now incorporates the scientific principles of nutrition as form of moral training, especially for children.

Psychology & Counseling

Food, Morals and Meaning

Following on from the success of the first edition, John Coveney traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, he explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This up-to-date edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about the obesity ‘epidemic’. Focusing on how our food anxieties have stemmed from social, political and religious problems in Western history, Food, Morals and Meaning looks at: <ul>
<li>the ancient Greeks’ preoccupation with eating </li> <li>early Christianity and the conflict between the pleasures of the flesh and spirituality </li> <li>scientific developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and our current knowledge of food </li> <li>the social organization of food in the modern home, based on real interviews </li> <li>the obesity ‘epidemic’ and its association with moral degeneration. </li>
</ul>
Based on the work of Michel Foucault, this fresh and updated edition explains how a rationalization food choice – so apparent in current programmes on nutrition and health – can be traced through a genealogy of historical social imperatives and moral panics. Food, Morals and Meaning is essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &amp; Francis, an informa company.

Food (Shortcuts)

The centrality of food in life, and the importance of food as life, is undeniable. As a source of biological substrates, personal pleasure and political power, food is and has been an enduring requirement of human biological, social and cultural existence. In recent years, interest in food has increased across the academic, public and popular spheres, fuelled by popular media’s constant play on the role of food and body size, and food and cooking, as a mass spectacle for TV audiences. In Food, a new book part of the Shortcuts Series, John Coveney examines ‘food as…’ humanness, identity, politics, industry, regulation, the environment and justice. He explores how food helps us understand what it means to be human. Through food, we construct our social identities, our families and communities, but this book also highlights the tensions between the industrialisation of food, the environment, and the fair (or otherwise) worldwide distribution of food. It considers how the food industries, on which most of us have to rely, have also had direct effects on our bodies – whether through diet and longevity, or the development of illness and diseases. This book is for all students and general readers alike – or for anyone with a fascination with food. It questions the idea that food is merely something inert on the plate, and instead shows how influential, symbolic, powerful and transformative food has come to be. This book is part of the Shortcuts series published by Routledge, a major new series of concise, accessible introductions to some of the major issues of our times.

The centrality of food in life, and the importance of food as life, is undeniable. As a source of biological substrates, personal pleasure and political power, food is and has been an enduring requirement of human biological, social and cultural existence. In recent years, interest in food has increased across the academic, public and popular spheres, fuelled by popular media’s constant play on the role of food and body size, and food and cooking, as a mass spectacle for TV audiences. In Food, a new book part of the Shortcuts Series, John Coveney examines ‘food as…’ humanness, identity, politics, industry, regulation, the environment and justice. He explores how food helps us understand what it means to be human. Through food, we construct our social identities, our families and communities, but this book also highlights the tensions between the industrialisation of food, the environment, and the fair (or otherwise) worldwide distribution of food. It considers how the food industries, on which most of us have to rely, have also had direct effects on our bodies – whether through diet and longevity, or the development of illness and diseases. This book is for all students and general readers alike – or for anyone with a fascination with food. It questions the idea that food is merely something inert on the plate, and instead shows how influential, symbolic, powerful and transformative food has come to be. This book is part of the Shortcuts series published by Routledge, a major new series of concise, accessible introductions to some of the major issues of our times.

Following on from the success of the first edition, John Coveney traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, he explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This up-to-date edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about the obesity ‘epidemic’. Focusing on how our food anxieties have stemmed from social, political and religious problems in Western history, Food, Morals and Meaning looks at:  the ancient Greeks’ preoccupation with eating  early Christianity and the conflict between the pleasures of the flesh and spirituality  scientific developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and our current knowledge of food  the social organization of food in the modern home, based on real interviews  the obesity ‘epidemic’ and its association with moral degeneration.  Based on the work of Michel Foucault, this fresh and updated edition explains how a rationalization food choice – so apparent in current programmes on nutrition and health – can be traced through a genealogy of historical social imperatives and moral panics. Food, Morals and Meaning is essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.

Food

London ; New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group

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Books by Coveney, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coveney, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

Food, Morals and Meaning

Food (Shortcuts)

Food (Shortcuts)

Food, Morals and Meaning

Food

Food (Shortcuts)

Food (Shortcuts)