The document discusses changes in eating habits over time. It notes that modern life allows less time for cooking, so convenience foods have become more popular. In the past, eating out was rare but now families do so weekly. Eating out may lead to more calories consumed. However, people today eat more fruits, vegetables, chicken and lower-fat dairy than in the past, due to better nutrition education.

1. Social Nutrition

2. The Change in Eating Habits
As has been seen, modern day cooking allows far less time than days gone by. Long gone are the hours spent
slaving over the stove. Instead, convenience food has become much more popular, with people reaching for
convenience foods and microwave meals several times a week. Contrast this with the 1930s when
convenience food simply meant food in tins – a convenience because it allowed people to eat fruit and veg out
of season and provided them with easy-to-prepare meat and fish. Convenience is a real selling point for people
these days: many people in the modern world don’t make time for food and believe that they’re always too
busy. Yet cooking fresh food doesn’t have to take hours – compare making a quick fresh pasta dish with
standing in a queue at a fast-food restaurant – the amount of time is likely to be the same.
Similarly, in today’s world, we spend a lot more of our days dining out at restaurants than we did in the past. For
our grandparents, eating out was likely to be a rare treat saved for special occasions. Nowadays, many families
eat out on a weekly basis. Additionally, you’re likely to consume more calories when you dine out as to when
you eat at home. This increasing trend in eating out is increasing our waistlines – perhaps the older generation
had it right after all – staying in may need to become the new going out!
However, it’s not all bad news. Although our grandparents may have eaten more home-cooked meals and fresh
home-grown vegetables, a Food Standards Agency report actually found that we eat more fruit, ‘exotic’
vegetables, chicken and turkey now than we did 50 years ago, as well as more lower fat dairy products, all of
which are much better for our health. (Note: always look for low-fat dairy products with a low sugar content as
many low-fat desserts have a high percentage of sugar to make up for the low percentage of fat!) Part of this
could be attributed to the fact that we’re much more educated in nutrition these days than our grandparents
were.

3. SYMBOLISM
A symbol is an object, image, or action that is conventionally understood to represent something else. Food is
particularly powerful as a symbol because it is so deeply embedded in everyday as well as celebratory life, and
can therefore be read in many ways. Because it fulfills physical as well as emotional and psychological needs, it
may be intentionally utilized as a symbol in some instances but not in others. And because food engages all the
senses, it tends to evoke strong sensory and emotive as well as cognitive associations. This range of
association adds to the potential symbolic power of food.
Three properties of symbols as defined by anthropologist Victor Turner are clearly demonstrated in food.
The first is condensation: many ideas or actions are represented in a single formation. For example, turkey
represents the American holiday of Thanksgiving, standing for the family gatherings, feasts, specific menus, and
football games that commonly occur with the celebration.
A second property is unification: symbols link disparate references. The turkey as symbol evokes abundance of
natural resources, a romanticized New England heritage, patriotism, family harmony, and the fall season.
The final property of symbols is polarization of meaning: they contain both ideological meanings (representing
values, ethos, social norms) and sensory meanings (related to the objective properties of the symbol and
representing physical aspects of life), merging these two poles and grounding conceptual references in felt
experience. For example, apple pie is an American symbol of both patriotism and maternal nurturing,
strengthening the referential power of each yet also lending the emotional associations of each to the other.

4. Prestige Food
According to sociologists, there are different groups of food that are divided up by their purpose and meaning.
There are cultural super foods, which are the staples for a culture. There are prestige foods, which reflect
economic status, and body image food which is mainly consumed for the betterment of the body. Sympathetic
foods are eaten for an acclaimed desirable property, like a superstition. Lastly, there are physiological foods,
which are consumed for a specific health reason (like what a pregnant woman eats for a healthy pregnancy).
These different categories help researchers and sociologists study culture in the perspective of food. It often
shows how food grows, molds and changes with society. For example, if someone believes in homeopathy, that
would fall under the sympathetic foods or physiologic foods. This is because they are consumed for their
properties and beliefs of what it could do. Another example of one of these categories of foods would be caviar or
oysters for the prestige foods, because they are often more expensive and those who consume it and purchase it
do so to show their socioeconomic status

5. FEASTS, FESTIVALS
A feast is commonly thought of as a lavish meal; in a religious sense, it is also a day of commemoration set
aside for an important personage, such as a saint. The word "feast" also connotes sensual delight, often
excessive, as in the expression "a feast for the eyes."
A festival is a period of celebration, often centered around a religious feast day or a holiday, such as Christmas,
a period of holidays celebrating an event (such as the completion of harvest), or a season (e.g., a winter
carnival).
The events above are all more than simply meals. They are highly elaborated performances done with reference
to religious and political worldviews, and are usually carried out by a group. One can examine the role of food in
other celebratory events along these axes of formal-informal, and sacred-secular.
Feast and fast meet in the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Muslims do not eat between sunrise and sunset, but
break the fast every evening with a festive meal. Neighbors and friends routinely visit during these evening
events, which feature special desserts to mark the occasion. The end of Ramadan is celebrated with the festival
of Eid. With Ramadan a ritualized relationship, a rhythm, of feast, fast, and festival may be observed—periods of
fast interspersed with periods of feasts. Each takes increased meaning from its juxtaposition to the other. Eid, as
a celebration, is especially meaningful coming at the end of a holy month of fast and reflection, much as Mardi
Gras and carnival precede the forty days of Lent in Christendom. Very generally, it is often thought that feasts
usually occur during periods of plenty, particularly after a harvest is completed. Surplus is consumed in
celebration, as well as stored against the winter, famine, or other periods of want.

6. What is food faddism?
The dietary practice based on exaggerated and often incorrect beliefs about the effects of food or nutrition on
health, particularly for the prevention or cure of illness. Food faddism can be unhealthy and is often
associated with eating disorders.
Originally referred to eating pattern that promote short-term weight loss maintenance with no concern for
long-term, by focusing on a particular food or food group, that don’t follow common nutritional guidelines.
How these food fads can affect our bodies?
· Weight gain
These diets will lead to weight loss but this loss won’t last long because it is not from the accumulated fats,
but it is mostly from water and muscles tissues.
· Slow metabolism
Loosing muscles mass lowers your basil metabolic rate, and that is because muscle tissue is metabolically more
active than fat tissue.
· Nutritional deficiencies
Since fads limits individuals food choices leading to vitamins & minerals deficiencies.
Food fad is a term originally used to describe simple, catchy diets that often focused on a single element such
as cabbage, grapefruit or cottage cheese. In 1974, the term was defined as three categories of food fads.[5]
• A particular food or food group is exaggerated and purported to cure specific diseases.
• Foods are eliminated from an individual’s diet because they are viewed as harmful.
• An emphasis is placed on eating certain foods to express a particular lifestyle.

7. Intra-household food allocation
It has often been described as a ‘black box’ that is poorly understood. This may be because economic
consumption and nutrition surveys are typically collected at the household rather than individual level, and also
because evidence has been segregated by academic discipline. Thus, this study aims to identify the
determinants of intra-household food allocation, focusing on allocation between adults from South Asian
households, using a systematic and multidisciplinary literature review.
Three quantitative studies corroborated this food-health-income link, although none directly measured the effect
of relative income on food allocation. Rathnayake and Weerahewa found that mothers’ incomes were positively
associated with their own relative calorie allocations, but the authors did not adjust for total household income.
Using body size as a proxy for economic capacity, Cantor and Associates found a positive association between
body size and relative food allocation, although it is not known whether the authors adjusted for the higher
energy requirements associated with heavier people. Pitt et al. found that men’s health ‘endowments’ (pre-
existing health status) determined their allocations of food, whereas women’s did not; a 10% increase in health
endowment was associated with a 6.8% increase in calorie intake for men but only one tenth of that for women.
These differences were posited to reflect gender differences in economic returns to nutritional investment.

8. Thank You!