Measuring Food Culture: a Tool for Public Health Practice
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THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES (A CAMERON AND K BACKHOLER, SECTION EDITORS)
Measuring Food Culture: a Tool for Public Health Practice Rebecca Kanter 1
&
Joel Gittelsohn 2
Accepted: 7 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Purpose of Review Food culture is a ubiquitous aspect of all societies. This review provides an overview of methods for measuring food culture, and emphasizes the importance of these measures not just for description, but also for strengthening public health practice, primarily through the development of better interventions; to monitor and evaluate changes in diet and nutrition; and for the development of strategies for sustainability and dissemination. Recent Findings Food culture measurement has enriched public health practice through its use of myriad approaches, including interviews, cultural domain analysis, visual methods, observation, time allocation studies, focus groups and community workshops, household studies, and textual analysis. Summary Food culture measurement is essential for public health practice related to food and nutrition, and can lead to, among other outcomes, improved implementation research in nutrition, understanding household dynamics that impact nutritional outcomes, innovative textual analysis to identify food culture through language, and the selection of interventions conveyed through multiple strategies, including digital means, such as via social media. Keywords Food culture . Nutritional anthropology . Public health . Qualitative . Mixed methods
Introduction What humans eat, why we choose to eat those foods, the meanings and significance humans attach to foods, also known as food culture, is a ubiquitous aspect of all societies. While no single definition of food culture exists, the concept has been characterized by different scholars. Long defines the cultural construction of food as “the ways in which a group of people sharing a similar worldview and practices (a culture) define what can or cannot be considered food [1].” Long asserts that This article is part of the Topical Collection on The Obesity Epidemic: Causes and Consequences * Rebecca Kanter [email protected] Joel Gittelsohn [email protected] 1
Department of Nutrition, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Independencia 1027, 8380453 Santiago, Chile
2
Department of International Health, Center for Human Nutrition, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
“one approach, then, is to examine foodways—the total network of activities, practices, and concepts surrounding food and eating [2].” The seminal review “Anthropological Perspectives on Diet” by Messer is a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on food culture within anthropological studies up until 1984 [3]. A shorter precursor to the review by Messer is Fischler’s paper on “Food habits, social change and the nature/culture dilemma [4],” which stands out as a scientific work because in it Fischler links food culture to dietary h
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