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Both marine and terrestrial species of snails are consumed in most countries worldwide, including Southwest Cameroon where it is an age-old practice among various ethnic groups. Before the introduction of snail farming in the Southwest Region of Cameroon in the 1990s, all the residents who ate snails acquired them through gathering. There is significant internal variation in the history of land snail consumption among four ethnic groups: the Banyang, Mbo, Balung, and Bakweri. The long history of land snail consumption among the Banyang and Mbo can be attributed to their geographical proximity to the eastern region of Nigeria, where the consumption of land snails has been widespread since ancient times. In contrast, until recently, land snails were perceived by the Bakweri and Balung as filthy pests that crawled and ate dirt, especially excrement, and thus were unhealthy and/or taboo for human consumption. This paper intends to demonstrate how some groups refused to eat land snails in pre-colonial times and during foreign rule in Cameroon (1884-1960), and how due to women's roles, that changed so that they are currently nutritionally important in their diets due to the snails' multifarious importance as a source of food, medicine, and income. Keywords: Land snails, Cameroon, Snail farming, Banyang, Balung, Mbo, Bakweri, Introduction The consumption of land snails has been fast adopted by many in Southwest Cameroon. Land snail meat is known under various nomenclatures in Southwest Cameroon notably, Nyamangoro in Bakweri, [...]

Migration to a new country often results in a variety of social and economic challenges, often reflected in foodways. Food is of central importance in maintaining connections to home, and signifying ethnic identity among diasporic community members. Alternatively, new opportunities may be represented by the incorporation of new food elements into consumption patterns. Focus group interviews conducted with Arabic and South Asian immigrant women residing in a smaller Canadian city reveal the meanings women imparted to their own and their families' food choices and dietary habits. Women shared their struggles of maintaining ethnic cuisine as a marker of community affiliation while to varying degrees, integrating new foods, usually at their children's request. Experiences were not uniform, yet comparisons within and across these two communities suggest the importance of local social factors and politico-economic context in shaping commonly shared food and migration experiences and such shared realities highlight areas for advocacy. Keywords: gender, migration, family food practices, culinary heritage, identity, Introduction Migration to Canada frequently entails adapting to new lifeways, and part of this process may include adjusting conceptualizations of self and performance of identities. Experiences of this process of [...]

The Food Network owes it success to its promotion of extravagant eating as part of the 'good life.' It airs programs that promote excessive living as admirable, increasing the divide between the rich and the poor.

The relative importance of sociological and economic variables for predicting implementation by non-adopters and confirmation by adopters of U.S. beef was examined using data collected from a nationwide sample of 991 Japanese consumers. Implementation and confirmation decisions were evaluated at two stages of the innovation-decision process: symbolic adoption/acceptance and intent to use/continue using. In examining these decisions, socioeconomic variables were specified as both product characteristics and as market and infrastructure contingencies. As hypothesized by Klonglan and Coward (1970), at both the implementation and confirmation stages, sociological variables had more impact than economic ones on symbolic adoption, while the impact of economic variables outweighed that of sociological variables on intent to eat U.S. beef. Although economic and sociological variables played complementary roles within the innovation-decision process, both types of variables were better predictors of intent when specified as market and infrastructure contingencies rather than as product characteristics.

Food preparation and consumption practices are considered integral to the maintenance or deterioration of bodily health. As a consequence, individuals in western societies are regularly exhorted to follow health guidelines in their everyday diets. However many fail to heed this advice. Various reasons have been proposed for lack of behavioural change, but few have fully considered the social function and symbolic meanings of food and eating. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study using the innovative qualitative research method of memory-work to uncover the meanings surrounding food practices in developed societies. The data used are childhood memories about food written by students at an Australian university. The memories are examined for common themes and patterns, revealing important aspects of the ways in which food contributes to social relationships and cultural practices. The findings provide explanations for individuals' adherence to certain eating habits and avoidance of others, and point the way towards the further application of memory-work to elucidate the meanings and symbolic role played by food in western societies.

The Ajzen-Fishbein (1980) model to predict intent to perform behavior was used to assess the intent to consume beef among a stratified random sample of 400 Texas women. It was found that attitudes toward consuming beef do not predict directly intent to consume beef, but the subjective norm does. Specifically, the respondent's husband and friends strongly affect her intention to consume less beef. Thus, knowing the subjective norm permits prediction of her intentions because such intentions are not under attitudinal control. These findings call for an intensification of research efforts on food consumption on social influences such as referent others.

Food is perhaps one of the most mundane and taken for granted parts of our everyday life, yet the ways we think about shopping, cooking and eating are actually intensively reflexive. This paper uses the example of food to explore questions of identity in relation to the specific cultural location of `the home'. Using case study examples the paper illustrates some of the complex ways in which identities, throughout the lifecourse, are produced, articulated and contested through food consumption and the spatial dynamics of cooking and eating. In doing so the paper demonstrates that households, rather than being single units of food consumption, can be sites of multiple and sometimes contradictory consumption practices and that it is necessary to understand how patterns of eating are negotiated and contested within households in order to understand how the home functions as a `consumption site'., Introduction Sociological and anthropological work on consumption (eg Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Miller, 1987; Tomlinson, 1990) has established that material goods are not only things in their own right but [...]