Universal Versus Culturally Constructed Aspects of Consumption

西密歇根大学的乔恩·霍尔茨曼将探索影响人们对特定食物偏好的生物和文化过程。该项目将采用不同的方法，强调人类饮食体验的普遍维度，而不是那些更强调文化特殊性的方法。因此，该项目旨在促进味觉研究的多学科方法，并参与营养和公共卫生方面的辩论。该项目将使用定性和定量相结合的方法来检查人们对食物消费的态度、体验和使用模式。这个问题最好通过检查甜味来解决，甜味是一种广泛的科学领域赋予人类的一种独特的、在很大程度上具有决定性的力量。到目前为止，这些科学文献要么强调了糖和精神活性药物的神经反应之间的相似之处，表明了进化上对甜味的固有吸引力，要么强调了它受到了全球“营养转型”研究的影响，研究表明，随着收入的增加，人们更容易获得糖，几乎不可避免地会导致流行性肥胖。人类学家倾向于对甜味和其他基本口味采取更谨慎的方法，通常承认人类味觉体验的普遍方面，但强调需要理解这些方面是如何形成的，并在特定的文化和历史背景下被赋予意义。日本被选为评估普遍和文化构建的食糖方法的主要地点，因为尽管日本拥有高水平的财富和食糖资源，但它是全球肥胖趋势的显著异常值。日本的异类地位的一个可能解释是日本复杂的食品体系的影响，这些体系将饮食与社会、审美和道德价值观联系在一起，该项目旨在研究这些价值观。通过了解限制甜食消费的因素以及与过度使用甜食相关的健康问题，该项目旨在评估味觉文化建设与更具确定性的概念的相对重要性，同时也为将直接影响美国和全球公共卫生辩论的食品消费问题提供见解。

Jon Holtzman of Western Michigan University will explore the biological and cultural processes that inform preferences for particular kinds of foods. The project will engage approaches varyingly emphasizing universal dimensions of the human experience of eating versus those placing a greater emphasis on cultural specificity. As such, the project aims to contribute to multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of taste as well as engage with debates in nutrition and public health. The project will use a combination qualitative and quantitative methods to examine attitudes, experiences, and patterns of use concerning food consumption.This question is best pursued by examining sweetness, a taste for which a broad range of scientific fields attribute a unique and largely deterministic power over humans. That scientific literature has thus far emphasized either the parallels between neurological responses to sugar and psychoactive drugs, suggesting an evolutionarily hardwired attraction to sweetness, or it has been influenced by research on the global "nutrition transition" that suggests increased access to sugar concomitant with rising incomes almost inevitably contributes to epidemic obesity. Anthropologists have tended towards a more circumspect approach to sweetness and other basic tastes, usually acknowledging universal aspects to the human sensory experiences of taste but emphasizing the need to understand how these are shaped and given meaning in particular cultural and historical contexts. Japan has been chosen as the principal site for assessing universal versus culturally constructed approaches to sugar because it is a notable outlier to global obesity trends despite high levels of wealth and sugar access. One possible explanation for this Japan's outlier status is the influence of intricate Japanese food systems that tie eating to social, aesthetic, and moral values, which the project aims to examine. By understanding what factors limit sweet consumption and the concomitant health issues associated with excessive sweet use the project aims to assess the relative important of cultural constructions of taste versus more deterministic conceptions, while also offering insights into issues regarding food consumption that will have a direct impact on public health debates in the U.S. and globally.