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.
