Universal Versus Culturally Constructed Aspects of Consumption

消费的普遍性与文化建构方面

• 批准号: 1330399
• 负责人: Jon Holtzman
• 金额: $ 10.53万
• 依托单位: Western Michigan University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-08-15 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1330399&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Universal; Versus; Culturally; Constructed; Aspects

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.

西密歇根大学的Jon Holtzman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，而不是更强调文化特殊性的方法。因此，该项目旨在为味觉研究的多学科方法做出贡献，并参与营养和公共卫生方面的辩论。该项目将采用定性和定量相结合的方法来检查有关食品消费的态度、经验和使用模式。这个问题最好通过研究甜味来解决，广泛的科学领域认为甜味对人类有一种独特的、在很大程度上是决定性的力量。到目前为止，这些科学文献要么强调了对糖和精神药物的神经反应之间的相似之处，表明进化上对甜味的固有吸引力，要么是受到了全球“营养转型”研究的影响，该研究表明，随着收入的增加，对糖的摄入越来越多，几乎不可避免地会导致肥胖症的流行。人类学家倾向于对甜味和其他基本口味采取更谨慎的态度，通常承认人类味觉感官体验的普遍方面，但强调有必要了解这些方面是如何在特定的文化和历史背景下形成和赋予意义的。日本被选为评估普遍与文化建构的糖摄入方式的主要地点，因为尽管日本的财富和糖摄入水平很高，但它在全球肥胖趋势中是一个显著的异常值。日本之所以如此特立独行，一个可能的解释是，日本错综复杂的饮食体系的影响，将饮食与社会、审美和道德价值观联系在一起，这也是该项目旨在研究的。通过了解限制甜食消费的因素以及与过度食用甜食相关的伴随健康问题，该项目旨在评估口味文化建构与更确定性概念的相对重要性，同时也提供有关食品消费问题的见解，这些问题将对美国和全球的公共卫生辩论产生直接影响。