Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa became major health concerns in the 1970s and 1980s, attracting particular attention from second-wave feminists because the conditions were perceived as women’s illnesses. Because these illnesses were thought to exclusively strike prosperous and educated women of the middle class, critics hypothesized that there was something particular to middle-class identity that made these girls and women distinctly vulnerable. Industrial capitalism was newly framed as a cause for the development of eating disorders. Historians traced the origins of anorexia to the Victorian era—the disease first appeared in the medical record in the 1870s—seeing it as a reaction to the pressures and struggles women faced in the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Although anorexia was itself an obscure diagnosis in the 19th century, late-20th-century literary critics and historians traced anorexic aesthetics and ideals in art and culture of the time, and industrial capitalism was thought to delineate a particular, and pathological, relationship between consumption and bourgeois women. Anorexia became a way to conceptualize the harms of capitalism on middle-class women and to articulate their lives as simultaneously prosperous and deeply oppressive, if not incapacitating.
The idea that early industrial capitalism primed middle-class women for eating disorders was revised by contemporary cultural critics who were struggling to understand why such unprecedented numbers of girls and young women were developing and being diagnosed with eating disorders during the 1970s and 1980s. This unprecedented and inexplicable epidemic implied that postwar consumer growth had specifically gendered harms. Thus, second-wave feminists, including historian Joan Brumberg, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, and philosopher Susan Bordo, analyzed anorexia and bulimia as a way to articulate the dangers posed by postwar consumer capitalism for girls and women. For them, consumer capitalism was perceived as a primary driver of anorexia and bulimia. The analysis hinged upon the paradoxical meaning of consumption in postwar capitalism, which was the cause of and symbolized by the deadly self-denial of the anorexic and the irrational gorging and purging of the bulimic. Eating disorders thus expressed the gendered and destructive impacts of late-modern capitalism on the female body, combining the demand for unbridled consumption and individual empowerment with expectations of female self-denial and physical smallness. These new ways of thinking about the relationship between economic systems and the health and appearance of individual bodies, particularly though not exclusively female bodies, had profound consequences that shape 21st-century conversations around obesity and the neoliberal market. These attempts to contextualize and historicize anorexia and bulimia by exploring their relationship to consumer capitalism not only made material the link between economic systems and women’s lives and bodies; they also suggested that affluence itself could be a source of sickness.
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Article
Anorexia, Bulimia, and the Embodiment of Capitalist Consumer Culture
Alice Weinreb
Article
Bread as a Social Indicator in Egypt
Nefissa Naguib
Bread plays a crucial role in Egypt, profoundly impacting identity, family, and public interactions. Made from wheat, bread is not only a vital component of the national diet but also a focal point of Egypt’s social policy. Ensuring its affordability remains a central aim of the government. Despite these efforts, the availability and affordability of bread have continued to be points of debate and tension within Egyptian society. More than just a material good, bread in Egypt functions as a significant social indicator that affects and establishes relationships between people. It signals various states such as prosperity, distress, anxiety, and social and political mobilization. Bread is a remarkable commodity that provides nourishment while also serving as a potent symbol, encompassing spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions.
Throughout Egypt’s political history, bread has emerged as a potent symbol in political discourse. Bread-related protests and movements have often signaled dissatisfaction with food policies and government actions. Shortages or price fluctuations in bread have frequently triggered public outcry and served as catalysts for social and political change. The political history of bread in Egypt encapsulates themes of division and cruelty as much as generosity and fulfillment. This was starkly evident during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, when bread became a powerful symbol of protest. Women held up pieces of bread, and men made helmets from it, emphasizing the slogan, “Bread, Dignity, and Social Justice.” Though bread may appear mundane, it is far from trivial. It represents power structures, human agency, and patterns of social relations. Bread is a gift that satisfies hunger, provides pleasure, evokes memory, and creates attachments. It acts as a link between the powerful and the powerless and between abundance and scarcity on family dining tables across Egypt. Bread’s presence at the core of daily life, the desperate measures families take to secure it, and its role in moments of crisis all underscore its significance.
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Calorie Counting
Nina Mackert
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
In the 21st century, calorie counts are ubiquitous in weight-loss advice, but historically they are a fairly recent phenomenon. In the late 19th century, a transatlantic coalition of researchers and reformers began to understand food as energy for human motors that could help to optimize human and social productivity, even on a global scale.
It was not until the early 20th century that calorie counting was introduced into weight-loss diets. This contributed to the emergence of fat shaming by suggesting that an individual’s excess body weight was the direct and causal result of eating more than their caloric needs, placing the responsibility for their body and health in the hands of that individual. Recent diagnoses of “the death of the calorie” confirm that the history of the calorie is a political one, in that they perpetuate the calorie’s legacy of framing weight loss as a capability of self-governing citizens.
Article
Candy and Sweets
Susan Benjamin
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Everyone knows candy. In every culture, every land, just about every person indulges in candy at some point—usually innumerable points—in their lives. The modern impression of candy is both gleeful and condescending; candy is delicious, but is it really food? People enjoy candies, but are they healthy? And its relevance in the historical food timeline? What relevance?
What is known is that candy, whether hard candies, chocolates, or gummies, is unique. While other foods promise nutritional value, the essential purpose of candy is to make consumers happy, to accentuate experiences of fun. Just think of cotton candy at carnivals: happy shades of blue, reds, and yellow strands melting in our mouths.
Candy is also uniquely dynamic: historically, rarified creams and sugar plums were available to the wealthy few while cheap hard candies were sold at saloons to mask the smell of alcohol on the breath. Industrial candy of the late 1800s gave working-class children an opportunity to become consumers, and a promise that they, too, could be part of the middle class. Candy was affordable, fun, and made just for them.
Yet beneath the tip of this food-based iceberg, candy has a complex history. Many candies are both ritualistic and symbolic, unbeknownst to those who enjoy them today. Consider sugar-coated almonds. Romans threw at weddings as a fertility charm, a symbol in keeping with the almond tree’s flowering cycle as one of the first trees to flower in spring. In 2024, it is still common to serve Jordan almonds at weddings.
Hard candies, toffees, and mints found a place in the candy bowls of 20th-century grandmothers in the United States, who had experienced sugar shortages during economic downturns and the two world wars. When candy, an embodiment of sugar, returned, it was a symbol of affluence and a sign that everything was alright again.
Conversely, in the mid-1800s through the early 1900s, candy also became a symbol of the hazards of industrial foods. As they were often made with adulterants whose safety and effect on health had never been checked, such claims certainly had validity. Some, on the other hand, were unlikely: candy consumption was said to incite undesirable behavior ranging from setting fires to murder.
Most surprising is the fact that candies were also born of necessity, as they were used for health and healing. Chewing gum, for example, originated with tree resins, which were chewed to clean the teeth and heal dental issues. The fun and fruity latex-based gums that followed are still used for health-related issues, whether to ease dry mouth or cleanse the breath. Even sugar, in its candy form as rock candy or candy drops, has long been used to ease sore throats.
The trajectory of candy history takes us to a salient point: the confluence of people, places, and customs. Candy bars, for example, contain chocolate (from Mesoamerica), cane sugar (Asia), peanuts (South America), nougat (Europe), and various dried fruits.
As people age and their sense of taste recedes, they crave sweetness. Candy offers both the sweet flavor their bodies demand and a visceral reminder of candy shared with others, many of whom may be dear and have long since passed. On another front, scientists recently discovered that strands of cotton candy mimic human capillaries. So close is the connection, researchers are using cotton candy machines in their efforts to develop artificial organs which may well enable people to live longer than they could have dreamed.
Article
Children’s Food: Historical, Sociocultural, and Public Health Perspectives
Tina Moffat
The category of children’s food was invented in the 20th century with the rise of nutrition sciences, the industrialization of food, and changing societal attitudes to children and childhood that resulted in newfound autonomy and food purchasing power for children in middle- and upper-income countries. Studies of children’s food can be found in both the public health and social sciences. There is some transdisciplinary overlap among topics such as children’s first foods, the marketing of unhealthy food to children, school food, food allergies, and children’s food security. Studies in public health sciences have been more concerned with the nutritional aspects of children’s food, whereas the social sciences literature has taken up the examination of children’s food as a reflection of adult preoccupations with children and childhood within neoliberal and capitalist societies. To date, there is a dearth of studies that include children’s perspectives, though the field is changing with more calls to include children as active participants in studies of children’s food.
Article
Class Mobility among US Farmworkers
Alex Korsunsky
Racial hierarchies have defined US agriculture from its beginnings, structuring access to land and imposing boundaries between farmers and farmworkers. Racialized exclusion from other economic opportunities and from the full protection of the law have been key factors curtailing farmworkers’ opportunities for upward mobility within agriculture. Despite these barriers, farmworkers have consistently attempted to move up the agricultural hierarchy and establish themselves as independent farmers.
In the wake of the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black workers sought to acquire land to farm. Some succeeded, but their ability to advance was severely limited, and many remained trapped in debt peonage or sharecropping arrangements. Despite widespread anti-Asian sentiment and legal prohibitions on land ownership in the late 19th and early 20th century, some Asian immigrant farmworkers in California and in other West Coast states established themselves as successful orchardists and truck farmers. As agribusiness came to increasingly rely on Mexican farm labor in the early 20th century (a trend that accelerated and expanded geographically from the Second World War onward), Mexican workers’ immigration status as Bracero guest workers or undocumented migrants often kept them mobile and legally barred from putting down roots.
As more Mexican farmworkers began to settle in the latter part of the 20th century, increasing numbers of them found ways to access farmland. Others achieved economic mobility by transitioning from seasonal to year-round jobs, occupying more specialized and responsible roles, becoming labor contractors, and establishing nonfarm businesses to supply growing immigrant communities. Studies of class mobility among Mexican immigrant farmers reveal not only the barriers they have faced, but also the resources that these farmers have used to seek advancement, including their experience in agriculture, access to labor, and capacity to self-exploit their own labor. The turn to agriculture is not purely a financial decision, but also reflects personal and cultural values and aspirations, and links some farmers into wider social movements organized around the concept of food justice.
Article
Colonial Era British Food and Spice
Amanda E. Herbert
Growth of the British colonial system also meant big changes to British diets and to the spice and flavor of British food. Britain’s actions in invading, colonizing, and settling the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds gave British people, both at home and abroad, access to new and more ingredients. In 1972, historian Alfred W. Crosby identified the early modern global exchange of animals, plants, and—crucially and tragically—diseases and pathogens, as the “Columbian Exchange,” a cataclysmic biological moment instigated by Christopher Columbus in which separate biomes came into sustained contact for the first time. Scholars have since expanded the scope of this study, with Judith Carney, Edda Fields-Black, and Jessica B. Harris, among many others, drawing critical attention the fact that the Columbian Exchange was a global phenomenon, and that while this was a moment of wonder and curiosity for some, it meant devastation for many others.
In this globalizing early modern world, the rapid and widespread movement of people, plants, and animals changed the ways that British Atlantic people flavored their food. Using ingredients from the Americas, cooks gained access to vanilla, chili and new kinds of palm oil. From the African continent, they learned of grains of paradise, peppermint, cottonseed oil, coffee, and sesame. And from Asia, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, and mace became staples in British Atlantic kitchens. Some of these spices and flavoring agents would have been familiar—cinnamon had been traded across the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia for hundreds of years—but others would have been novel. And all were much more widely available and were combined, altered, and adapted in fresh ways. For women and men in the British Atlantic world, this meant that foods like “pickled mango,” an entirely mango-free dish spiced with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chilis, had a spot at the table. It also meant that many different kinds of people, including Black women and men, indigenous communities, and white settler-colonizers, seasoned their foods in new ways. Made possible by access to global markets, facilitated by invasion and colonization, and undergirded by enslavement, British Atlantic foodways were both piquant and experimental.
Article
Corporate Concentration in the Food Industry
Steve Striffler
Food industry concentration, or the control of a relatively small number of corporations over the food system, has relatively deep historical origins, even if it has reached unprecedented levels since the 1980s. It is not simply that a handful of firms control a particular industry or crop. It is that all levels of the broader food system, including not only the production, processing, trade, and sale of food products but also of farm machinery, seeds, agrochemicals, and other inputs, are now controlled by relatively few and exceptionally large companies. This high level of concentration has determined the broad contours of our industrial food system, as well as our ability to transform it, while also having profound implications for food workers, farmers, consumers, animals, and the environment. This is true of the United States but is the case globally as well.
Article
Culinary Tourism
José López Ganem and Alicia Kennedy
For practitioners and scholars, culinary tourism is recognized as the voluntary decision to interact with foodways and foodstuffs outside of an individual’s daily places or habits.
The seminal definition for the contemporary field of food studies was articulated by Lucy M. Long, who encapsulated culinary tourism as “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other” (Culinary Tourism). Culinary tourists are understood as individuals who actively and willingly seek to construct meaning and value through an aesthetic appreciation of food.
Either through the act of moving themselves from one physical place to another or by incorporating “foreign” or “unusual” food items into a habitual physical place, the agent of culinary tourism—the culinary tourist, popularly conceptualized as a global foodie or food trotter—makes food, drink, or substance preparation and consumption the vehicle for personal value creation, either through a solo experience or within the broader context of a group similarly focused on such aesthetic appreciation.
Article
Edible Insects
Gina Louise Hunter
Insects have been an important part of the human diet from time immemorial. Although they are not a common food item in Western cultures, insects contribute to the traditional diets of many peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where they are valued for their sustenance, taste, and medicinal properties. Research on edible insects includes historical and archeological investigations, ethnographic descriptions of insect foods in indigenous cultures, and studies of insect food farming, commercialization, and acceptability. Like other animals, insects are a source of protein and fat macronutrients and many vitamin and mineral micronutrients. Given an increasing global demand for sustainable protein, insects are a potential food resource for the future. Agricultural development experts, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, suggest that farmed insects are environmentally sustainable because they offer high feed conversion efficiency, require less space, use less water, and need fewer chemical inputs than conventional livestock. Insects generally have a short life cycle, reproduce rapidly, and can subsist on a varied diet, sometimes including organic wastes and agricultural or industrial byproducts. Given that insects are not commonly eaten in Europe and Euro-America, much of the literature is written from the perspective of noninsect eaters on the potential and challenges of a novel or alternative food. Insect-based food items on the European, British, and American markets face regulatory challenges and lack of consumer acceptance.
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The Ethics of Veganism and Plant-Based Diets
Carlo Alvaro
Humans have been consuming meat and other animal products for millennia. Although people have been following vegetarian diets for just as long, for the past fifty years or so, many academic philosophers, as well as laypeople, have been arguing against the consumption of animal products and arguing for vegetarian or vegan diets. There are distinct differences between veganism, vegetarianism, and plant-based diets. There are also various ethical views in twenty-first century discussions concerning diets, as well as the ethical, environmental, and social implications of veganism and plant-based diets. As of the 2020s, lab-grown meat and the meaning and future of veganism has gained attention in the cultural consciousness.
Article
The Ethiopian and Yemeni Roots of Coffee
Michel Tuchscherer
The beginnings of the history of coffee can be found in two neighboring countries separated only by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Coffee’s history starts before its consumption in Europe during the middle of the 17th century and before the development of its cultivation in the European tropical colonies during the 18th century. Yet this history is not well known in the early 21st century and often is pervaded by myths, the best known being the myth concerning the goat-herder Kaldi. There are objective reasons for this situation. In Ethiopia, the origins of coffee are found solely in the southern part of the country. Written sources about coffee that predate the 18th century are extremely rare, and so far very few archaeological excavations have provided data about coffee consumption. In Yemen, the archives that could cast light on the relevant period, from the end of the 15th century to the start of the 19th century, are mainly in the hands of families who are scattered across the country. Because of early-21st-century conflicts in the region, access to these archives is completely out of the question.
Nevertheless, research published since the 1990s in the areas of history and anthropology, alongside genetic analyses of the species Coffea arabica, opens the way to a new view of the pioneering role of southern Ethiopia and Yemen in the dissemination of the coffee consumption, the domestication of the coffee plant, and the production of coffee beans since at least the 13th century and up to the 18th century.
Article
Family Farm Myths and the Effacement of Labor
Adam Calo
The debate on the role of family farmers in global food security often overlooks deep mythologies that shape our understanding of the food system and constrain our policy imagination. Two dominant myths present family farmers as either noble stewards of the land or as struggling, inefficient peasants. Both myths obscure the critical role of labor in agriculture. Labor relations in farming, whether involving unpaid family members, local knowledge-intensive practices, hired exploited workers, or mechanization, are the forces that shape the social-ecological balance of the food system. The myth of the family farm forces attention on who manages the land rather than the social-ecological relations that ultimately determine the fate of the food system. While objective measurements of family farm contributions are valuable, they cannot resolve the underlying power of myths. Instead, food studies in this area should focus on constructing new myths that highlight the labor and laborers in the food system, fostering a narrative that supports sustainable and equitable agricultural practices.
Article
Fat
Azita Chellappoo
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Research into the social and cultural dimensions of body size has been rapidly growing, including within the interdisciplinary field of fat studies. Fat studies scholars contest and critique mainstream ideas about body size or weight, including the view that “obesity” is fundamentally pathological or inherently unhealthy, or that individuals can control their body size. Researchers have also challenged negative stereotypes and highlighted the harms of moralizing and stigmatizing discourses about larger bodies. Research within this area often draws upon ideas produced within fat liberation activist movements, including rejecting the term “obesity” as overly medicalizing and pathologizing, and instead reclaiming “fat” and “fatness” as neutral descriptors.
Research has identified and characterized the pervasiveness of anti-fatness (weight stigma, or anti-fat discrimination) within and across societies. Anti-fatness has interpersonal and structural dimensions, both of which can have far-reaching effects on fat people’s lives, including effects on health outcomes. Scholars have traced the historical emergence of anti-fatness, the connection between anti-fatness and racial hierarchy, and the ways in which anti-fatness contributes to the moralization of food and the prevalence of dieting practices. Additionally, policies and clinical guidelines developed to address the “obesity epidemic,” such as calorie labeling and the use of body mass index (BMI), have been a target of critical examination. Researchers have suggested that these interventions can function as potentially harmful practices of control and surveillance that reinforce anti-fat attitudes and structures. Similarly, frameworks and understandings of food environments, food justice, and health have been evaluated in terms of the ways in which these discourses can continue to problematize fat bodies and contribute to discrimination or marginalization.
There has been increasing recognition of the harms of anti-fatness in fields such as public health, which has led to attempts to move away from stigmatizing language and interventions, and to reject placing responsibility on individuals. However, these attempts have been criticized for continuing to medicalize and pathologize fatness, and therefore continuing to perpetuate harm. As the language and policies around “obesity” or fatness shift, in part driven by the introduction of novel weight-loss interventions such as Ozempic, research into social attitudes toward fatness and the experiences of people with larger bodies continues to evolve.
Article
Fat Stigma in the United States
Amy Erdman Farrell
Fat stigma has deep roots in US and Western cultures, dating back centuries. Whatever leniency or even valorization given to a fat body for its sign of wealth or healthy fecundity was largely replaced by a colonial abhorrence of fatness linked to processes of racialization, white supremacy, and the legitimization of slavery. Fatness became a powerful signifier of an “uncivilized” body, one unfit for modern life. These ideas continue to resonate in the early 21st century, fueling a $90 billion diet industry, causing discrimination in every institution and organization, and creating untold harm in the lives of fat individuals and communities. Significantly, however, these ideas are not uniform. Not only are there varied perceptions of fatness (the idealization of a fat baby’s body, the enjoyment of fatty foods, the pleasure in the curves and flesh of a lover), there is also an organized and decades-old fat activist and fat studies movement that challenges fat stigma on every layer.
Article
Food and Ethnicity
Krishnendu Ray
Ethnic food is a slippery concept, used in various anglophone publications by the 1960s, peaking in the 1980s, and no longer used in major US metropolitan newspapers by the 2020s. It came into play in other parts of the world about a generation later and continues to be used unevenly. It is typically used to identify cuisines that are not considered mainstream or archetypical of a region or a nation. Inferiority (or lack of class), cheapness, spiciness, and authenticity are the typical tropes used to judge such cuisines. It has always had the stench of primitivism and Orientalism attached to it and is increasingly considered outdated, such as terms like “Negro” or “Oriental.” The term was historically used to describe a cuisine that is different horizontally, such as Thai, Indian, or Chinese, but it also carried a hierarchical connotation, where French or Nordic cuisines were hardly ever named as ethnic anywhere in the world. New York City offers a case study in examining the history and hierarchy between food and ethnicity.
Article
Food and Literature
Gitanjali Shahani
Writers from different historical periods and literary traditions have turned to food as a symbol, a metaphor, a thematic element, a plot mechanism, a polemic, or a point of departure for the exploration of identities, relationships, and locales. The analysis and exploration of these literary devices in secondary texts is referred to as literary food studies. This type of reading and writing about food may approach food as theme or form in relation to a particular body of literature, a time period, a genre, or another conceptual framework. Conversely, this field may also approach food genres as literature, examining thematic concerns, literary devices, or narrative techniques in the writing of recipes, menus, travelogues, or dietary literature. Any consideration of food and literature thus entails thinking of food in different genres, just as much as it calls for an engagement with food genres themselves.
Article
Food and Nationalism in India
Benjamin Siegel
The imbrication of food and nationalism in India and South Asia was an implicit concern in early anthropological literature on primarily Hindu foodways. In time, this theme became more explicit in historiographic work on colonial encounters and culinary resistance and in political economy of domesticity. It was also increasingly overt in and the emergence of food and hunger as a locus for nationalist claim making. The Bengal famine, coming at the crux of the freedom struggle in India, helped move these claims to more central positions in postcolonial Indian politics. An emerging body of work has seen culinary identity as central to both diasporic politics and questions of marginalization in Indian political life.
Article
Food and Philosophy
Andrea Borghini
The philosophy of food is an emerging field of contemporary philosophical scholarship, which distinguishes itself for its highly inter- and cross-disciplinary orientation as well as for the contamination of different schools and traditions of philosophy. Initially preoccupied with core issues concerning food ethics (e.g., vegetarianism and the ethics of agriculture) and food aesthetics (e.g., the nature of gustatory experience as well as its aesthetic value), the philosophy of food has since expanded to encompass a wide range of debates linked to food production, consumption, and representation. The list of topics includes, among others and in no particular order: food systems vis-à-vis climate change and environmental ethics; the ethics of dieting and obesity; food and cultural appropriation; questions concerning the identity of specific food items (e.g., natural foods, recipes, geographical indications); the aesthetic worth of specific beverages (among the most studied, wine, coffee, beer, whiskey); broad conceptions of food justice as found in local food movements, feminist approaches to the study of food, and social gastronomy. This list testifies not only to the broad spectrum of questions that philosophers have taken up, but also to the numerous methodologies that they have employed to address them.
Article
Food and Religious Rituals
Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus
Food rituals, whether articulated intentionally or performed unconsciously in our biologically necessary acts of eating, do nothing less than construct and maintain our fundamental relationships in the world, and define who or what we are in it. In that sense, one might say that all food rituals are religious, though that depends on very specific definitions of “ritual” and of “religion.” One should distinguish between rituals in the weak sense (habitual patterned behaviors performed unconsciously) vs. rituals in the strong sense (performed with explicit, conscious intention). However, all rituals are performances of myths, that is, the basic stories we live by, whether or not one practicing them makes their intentions explicit. Food rituals are religious in that they govern and express the fundamental relationships we have in the cosmos: who or what we eat; with whom we eat; and for whom we are “food.” Food rituals create and sustain worldviews, and so are all fundamentally religious or religion-like.
To distinguish between the way critical comparative scholars of religion use the terms “religion” and “religious” and their use in common parlance, it makes sense to underline that “religious food rituals” normally refers to food rituals in the strong sense. Thus, religious food rituals often involve specific words or scripts (eating and talking, eating and reading), as well as other nonverbal cues and modes of paying attention: music, costumes, special props, accentuated or exaggerated gestures, and designated authoritative officiants. For example, the Jewish Passover seder, Christian communion and Lenten fasting, Aztec human sacrifice, Muslim observance of halal rules and Ramadan fasting, Jain or Buddhist vegetarianism, and many forms of Hindu puja are rituals in the strong sense. Examples of food rituals in the weak sense are secular veganism; shopping for food in grocery stores; Weight Watcher dieting; or eating meals in a breakfast, lunch, and dinner sequence (Mary Douglas). These rituals imply certain assumptions about our relationships to animals and plants, capitalist consumer culture, ideals of beauty and well-being, and our identification with special social groups (e.g., family, national cultures, geographic regions). In other words, they too are enactments of the stories we live by.
