Food Media

The Rough Guide to Food

by KATHARINE REEVE

Published 2009 Rough Guides, Penguin UK. Co-authored with George Miller

Winner of Guild of Food Writers Award for Investigative Writing 2010

New research into the world of food:... more Winner of Guild of Food Writers Award for Investigative Writing 2010

New research into the world of food: global industry, cultural trends,etc.,

The medicalisation of food pedagogies in primary schools and popular culture: A case for awakening subjugated knowledges

by Rosie Welch

(forthcoming) Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Co-Authored with Jan Wright and Samantha McMahon

In this paper we interrogate how nutrition and health has become increasingly influential to children’s everyday life... more In this paper we interrogate how nutrition and health has become increasingly influential to children’s everyday life practices and conceptualizations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between ‘good’/ ‘bad’ or ‘healthy’/‘unhealthy’; ideas widely promulgated in health texts, popular culture and pedagogical practice. Yet, whilst these dominant medico-scientific discourses are pervasive to accounts of food, they are not the only meanings that permeate the popular cultural and pedagogical landscape; for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in culinary cooking programs and food sustainability in recent years. In this paper, we use Foucault’s notion of biopower to trace the various ways food is: governed through interventions; pedagogised by popular culture; and, taken up by schools’ uptake of overweight and obesity related school policies and practices. We draw on interviews with 32 Year 5 students from Australian public and private primary schools. Not surprisingly, the analysis demonstrates how students reiterated food as a practice of ‘temptation’ and ‘risk’, similar to nutrition based knowledge of food circulated in popular culture and health programs. This suggests that other meanings of food are often socially and pedagogically marginalised. We argue that because of the perceived risk attached to food practices, these young people see food as an object of much guilt and self-surveillance. After discussing the results we consider some of the consequences for young peoples’ sense of self and their relationships with food in every day life, particularly in light of the perilous effects of deeming food as ‘good’/‘bad’ from such a young age. As a point of departure we explore some of the subjugated knowledges that can be brought to the table of food pedagogies in schools in order to bring about a broader assemblage and reflection of food ‘truths’.

Flavor visualization: Taste guidance in co-cooking system for coexistence

by Jeffrey Tzu kwan Valino Koh

Neurophysiological studies have demonstrated multisensory interaction effects in the neural structures involved in... more Neurophysiological studies have demonstrated multisensory interaction effects in the neural structures involved in saccade generation when visual, auditory or somatosensory stimuli are presented bimodally. Visualauditory interaction effects have been demonstrated in numerous behavioural studies of saccades but little is known about interaction effects involving somatosensory stimuli. The present study examined visualsomatosensory interaction effects on saccade generation using a multisensory paradigm, whereby task-irrelevant distractors appeared spatially-coincident with, or remote from the designated saccade target. Somatosensory distractors reduced the latency of saccades when presented before the visual target and the greatest facilitation effectwas observed with spatially-coincident stimuli.Visual distractors spatially-coincident with a somatosensory target reduced latency (and increased peak velocity) when presented before and after the target.Visual distractors contralateral to somatosensory targets increased saccade latency and produced high error rates of saccades made to the distractor. The high error rates and latencymodulation with visual distractors is consistent with a bias for visual stimuli in the saccadic system. In the visual target condition, saccade latency was modulated by a somatosensory distractor that was entirely task-irrelevant and this effect was always greatest with spatially-coincident distractors. The multisensory distractor effects are discussed in terms of saccades being programmed to the non-target modality, the early triggering of a non-spatial saccade when signal, and multisensory neuronal enhancement effects.

Food Representations in Early Modern Europe: Powerful Appetites

by Brian Cowan

chapter nine in: A Cultural History of Food, Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers, general editors, vol. 4, The Early Modern Age, Beat Kümin, ed., (Oxford: Berg, 2012), 165-83.

In both the visual and verbal media of early modern Europe, a number of new genres of food representation emerged. In... more In both the visual and verbal media of early modern Europe, a number of new genres of food representation emerged. In painting and printed images, the still-life and the genre scene developed as distinct genres of visual representation after the late sixteenth century. In the realm of written texts, innovation in genres such as the cookbook and early or proto-gastronomic writing developed somewhat later, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Food was central to these new genres. They were also works which sought to represent food and its consumption realistically, rather than works in which food served primarily as a symbol for something else. This chapter examines the emergence of these new, realist genres of food representations from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.