Chapter 1: Approaches to the study of food, health and identity.

This chapter presents an introduction to the book Food, Health and Identity. The anthropological work on food published during the 1960s and 1970s remains important and influential, it shows clearly that culture plays a significant role in determining what people classify as food. Changes in consumption and their effects, particularly on health, have been an important theme in much recent writing on food. One debate concerns the extent to which palatability coincides not only with edibility, but also with desirability from a nutritional viewpoint. In a 1993 study of the eating patterns of Canadian teenagers, for example, Chapman and Maclean found that they divide food into two categories: junk food and good food. In her article in this volume, Murcott addresses the frequent complaints about the demise of the meal in Britain, noting that there has long been a gap between rhetoric and reality: for example, upperclass children in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries ate quite separately from adults, first at home in the nursery, and then, if boys, at boarding school. Several other articles in this book also deal with issues of culinary change and continuity. Those by Martens and Warde, and by Williams, consider the great increase in eating outside of the home in recent years. Changes in the wider society--such as new ideas ranging from the relationship between humans and nature, to that between husbands and wives--may be powerfully symbolised by changes in food and eating.