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Archive for Food

Episode 27 Politics of Greek Cooking with Dr. David Sutton

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 27 Politics of Greek Cooking with Dr. David Sutton
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Dr. David Sutton hiking in Kalymnos, Greece

Dr. David Sutton collecting wild herbs in Kalymnos, Greece

Dr. David Sutton returns to AOTS, this time to talk about his long career’s work on the anthropology of food. Dr. Sutton explores the politics of food and commensality, or eating together, on the Greek island of Kalymnos at a time when international debt has increased outside pressures on Greece to transform their economics and culture to better suit neoliberal capitalism. For folks in Kalymnos, food and cooking are ways to connect the present to the past, whether it’s through telling stories of food eaten 40 years ago, eating foods today to evoke memories, or cooking using specific techniques and tool choices that emphasize cultural and kinship connections.
As people eat together, Dr. Sutton explains, there is an intimacy and materiality to food that correlates to social relations, the senses, and the political. Food becomes a metaphor for criticizing some of the more abstract elements of neoliberalism, such as the conscious use of food in discourse that opposes concreteness and intimacy of eating with abstract coldness of money and rational economics.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 16 Free Food in the Corporate World with Jesse Dart

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 16 Free Food in the Corporate World with Jesse Dart
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Anthropology Candidate Jesse Dart (Photo Courtesy of Mr. Dart)

Anthropology Candidate Jesse Dart works at the intersection of business anthropology and the anthropology of food. Mr. Dart researches how and why tech companies offer their employees free food. Looking at the same company’s practices in several different countries, he draws out how patterns of eating reflect regional cultural beliefs about labor, land, and tradition, and how corporate practices both reflect and reinscribe these ideas as well.

Just in time for American Thanksgiving, we discuss how food is tied to ritual, emotion, identity, and history. From local wisdom about specific foods like truffles to the deeply embedded symbols and practices of national holidays like American Thanksgiving dinner, food plays a unique role in our lives that extends well beyond simple nutrition. And just like the Thanksgiving parade and Black Friday shopping reinforce the central role business and capitalism have on our lives, so too do our workplaces shift our practices and views.

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