[Symbolism on "natural" in food]

Cien Saude Colet. 2011 Jan;16(1):147-54. doi: 10.1590/s1413-81232011000100018.
[Article in Portuguese]

Abstract

The incorporated senses represent a set of possibilities for future life able to build individual and collective identities. This work deepens the habitus, in Bourdieu's terms, associated with "natural" and fast-food styles, making an interpretative analysis of symbolic exchanges of elements reproduced in feeding practices. We believe that this bricolage arrangement of elements enables bartering and hybridism, marked by a tension that reflects the insecurity of technological innovations. The "natural" style represents an ideal of self-sustainability, non-polluting production, which faces the sanitary and ecologic crisis of the planet, against the large-scale industrialization and fast urbanization, defined as depredation factors of basic living conditions. The exchanges happen in a symbolic game connected with the global economic game, in which social actors make bets, illusio, according to particular intentions in concrete action. There is a chance to reformulate the rules of the game in the "game", although with a precarious balance of forces, in which the weaker side loses, an agent may have the possibility of not reproducing the pressures of globalized feeding, which is far from what might seem supernatural.

Publication types

  • English Abstract

MeSH terms

  • Fast Foods
  • Food, Organic*
  • Humans
  • Symbolism*