Culture, Food and Eating. Notes on (Socio)Cultural Criteria and Perspectives

The aim of this paper is to recall and organise the reflections made by the sociological masters on food-related issues, in order to outline the different approaches which constituted several macro areas of food and eating sociology over time. Nowadays, we are trying to understand food-related practices across the most diverse theoretical sociological traditions and adjacent disciplines – and with a larger framework which includes i.e. eating habits, domestic and public foodwork, food in the media, cuisines, diet and health discourses, food politics, etc. However, rather than being a problem, this can be read as an invitation to facilitate sociological thinking by means of the prism of food and nutrition. The small legacy left by the masters of sociological thought here assumes a greater relevance because it enables us to retrace the perspectives of contemporary sociology of food and eating and to analyse its development.