Eating Disorders

The strong connection between culture and food becomes even more apparent when we look at eating disorders as they are a clear expression of cultural influences on individual nutrition behavior and they are also a

countermovement to the abundance of food and the excess of eating (Ostendorf, Eating Culture 37).

In studying eating disorders, one can see most clearly how food habits are shaped by differing cultural patterns. According to Armelagos (579-595), to gain

a comprehensive scientific perspective on a subject it is always preferable to consider all the aspects of and influences on a given set of phenomena. We can learn about a culture not only by its ideals and its customs, but also from its failures and shortcomings. Susan Bordo takes "the psychopathologies that develop within a culture, far from being anomalies or aberrations, to be characteristic expressions of that culture; to be, indeed, the crystallization of much that is wrong with it” (229).

Food intake is dominated by the poles of pleasure and physical needs "and between these two poles there exists a difficult and complex history, strongly conditioned by the relationships of power and social inequality” (Montanari xi). It is our curiosity as individuals and our eagerness for pleasure which make us willing to taste foreign food.

Anna Freud identifies pleasure to be one of the leading forces that determine our diet from earliest childhood. "The amount of pleasure which an individual child gains from eating depends only partly on the adequate fulfillment of bodily requirements; for an equally large part it is dependent on the manner in which the food is given. The child finds feeding most pleasurable when it can eat what it likes, how much or how little it likes and in whatever way it likes” (109).

Freud therefore sees the causes for eating disturbances in early childhood experiences:

Where it is necessary, on medical grounds, to urge the child to eat beyond the limits of his appetite, or where mothers, for their own reassurance, force the child to eat against his will, emotional factors may enter into an otherwise simple feeding situation. Eating then becomes symbolic of a struggle between mother and child, in which the child can find an outlet for its passive or active, sadistic or masochistic tendencies towards the mother. (108)

It is not only the food itself, but also how and when to take it and to prepare it that is mainly developed during childhood. "Food habits are acquired early in life and once established are likely to be long-lasting and resistant to change”

(Fieldhouse 3). This can clearly be seen by looking at the results of overweight therapies⁹.

The importance of pleasure when it comes to food makes obvious the dilemma the United States must have had developing a food culture. As

explained before the founding period was accompanied by strong republican and puritan ideals that nearly got a religious meaning in form of the civic culture.

Ostendorf explains this dilemma:

... Jonathan Edwards erinnerte seine Gemeinde bereits 1630 daran, dass sie in ein ‚Arbeitshaus und nicht in ein Freudenhaus’

gekommen seien. Kein Wunder, dass das Essen bei der Arbeit und nicht beim Genuß landete. Seine Warnung brachte auch eine

problematische Beziehung von Nahrung zum Genuß, vom Essen zur Sünde, vom Appetit zur Sexualität auf den Weg, sinnesfeindliche Vorbehalte und asketische Bremsen gegenüber einer

verführerischen und gefährlichen Natur, die für die Anfänge einer republikanischen, will sagen innerweltlich-asketischen Esskultur in den USA prägend wurden. Es gab schließlich keinen sybaritischen Adel oder (außer in New York) keine Großbourgeoisie, die sich standesgemäß Domestiken und den tagtäglichen Genuß erlauben konnte. (Ostendorf 2003, p. 8)

This attitude is reflected in food studies as well. In his book Paradox of Plenty Levenstein writes that since the 1880s scientists, home economists and cookery writers propagated the ideas of a New Nutrition. These taught:

That all foods could be broken down into proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and that one should eat only as much of each of them as

9 Even though in a 1975 study no relation between childhood development and adult adiposities could be established (Buchwald, 2002).

the body required. The idea that the body’s energy needs could be measured in calories took hold, along with the notion that one would gain weight if one ingested more of these than the body burned. Ideals of feminine beauty changed markedly, as the heavily corseted matronly ideal of the late nineteenth century gave way first to the more lithe and athletic prepare Gibson Girl and then, in the early 1920s, to the positively skinny „flapper.“ (9)

The result was a struggle for slimness especially by women. Excess weight was blamed on consuming too many calories. Women went from one crash diet to the next. People no longer ate what they liked but what dietitians told them was good for them. In connection with this development food additives like vitamins that promised a healthier and better life came into fashion. These new attitudes changed American diet decisively and created their own food

subculture. People who did not fit into these new concepts became outsiders and turned to the opposite.

Obesity, therefore, is not only a medical, but also a psychological and a socio-cultural phenomenon. In his book, Body-Image and Self-Awareness, Bruch states, "The experience of self-hatred and contempt for being fat is frequent enough, yet it appears to be not only determined by social attitudes; it is also closely interwoven with psychological and interpersonal experiences early in life”

(221).

A sharp decline of self-consciousness is found to happen at a Body-Mass-Index¹⁰ (BMI) of 35 or above, but especially women feel discriminated against already with a BMI of 25 as Ardelt-Gattinger and Lechner found out. After a

10 Body Mass Index (BMI) is a tool for indicating weight status in adults. It is defined as the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters (kg/m2). For example, an adult who weighs 70kg and whose height is 1.75m will have a BMI of 22.9.

For adults over 20 years old, BMI falls into one of the following categories: Below 18.5:

Underweight; 18.5-24.9: Normal; 25.0-29.9: Pre-obese; 30.0-39.9: Obese; Above 40:

Very obese.

pregnancy, a resulting weight gain is medically still "of little negative

consequence" and even if the woman is medically considered to be mildly obese, Massara writes it might be culturally well accepted and even "may be aspired to for its positive connotations of 'tranquility', health and a lack of problems in life”

(252).

Marvalene H. Hughes states, “the interrelatedness of the concepts 'big' and 'beautiful' is African” (273). In a cross-cultural survey, Cassidy found that indeed there is a close relationship between well-being and weight, as usually the socially dominant persons also having a satisfying private life were more or less overweight. Elisa J. Sobo reports about the view on fatness held by the average Jamaicans: "Fatness at its best is associated with moistness, fertility and kindness (a sociable and giving nature) as well as with happiness, vitality, and bodily health in general” (260).

In comparison in American white society it is most likely to reduce the ability of people to move with the social strata, and to be the cause for discrimination.

An American saying is, "that you can't be too rich or too thin” (Sobo 256) and mainstream Americans, at least theoretically, prefer diets that lead to thinness (268). This preference is the cause for a higher level of depression and other neurotic disturbances to be found with severely obese people, says

Drunkenmolle.¹¹

Cooking and eating are thus a matter of a national culture but also a basic factor of everybody's own culture. It is hard to change the cooking of a country

"because the earliest-formed layers of culture, such as foodways, are the last to

11 Many medical articles are written on this subject and there has been a long discussion focused the possibility that personality differences exist in obese people, but finally it was shown that they are not really different. The best treatment of obesity is still in question.

Nearly all-interdisciplinary approaches are able to reach a weight loss for a short period, but only about 3% of the therapies are able to produce a weight loss of at least five kilograms lasting for at least four years.

erode" (Kalcik 39). According to Anderson, “foodways” are defined as "the whole interrelated system of food conceptualization and evaluation, procurement,

distribution, preservation, preparation, consumption, and nutrition shared by all the members of a particular society” (156). These contributions of the

“foodways” to obesity are complex:

In particular, cultural values and patterns surrounding the domains of family, sex role organization, food and health shape perceptions about the cause, significance and effects of weight gain, which, in turn, contribute to the etiology of obesity. (Massara 253)

Since eating is a very personal process Angela Little points out, "eating constitutes the most intimate act of our existence. In this regard, I put eating ahead of sex - usually considered the most intimate act - because the substance of food, and food alone, becomes transformed into our own very substance: we are indeed what we eat!” (24). Pierro Ricci describes the symbolic meaning of the mouth which serves nutritional aims as well as erotic ones (102). Nutrition and sex are closely connected in more than just one way. In a study with adult obese patients nearly half of them were found to have gravely disturbed body-image-concepts accompanied by impaired heterosexual adjustments (Bruch 223). The body image is "how a person perceives his or her own body and its relation to what he or she perceives to be the socially approved body image”

(Mennell 316). While it was found that the body shape is as important for severely obese people, up to a BMI of 50, as for people with an average weight, it was found that the people with a BMI above 50 cared significantly less about their outlook (Dixon, 2002).

Eating disorders do not necessarily lead to obesity but also severe weight loss. It was in the 1950s when women stopped showing an appetite for food but instead talked about various diets (Shapiro 221), and in the 1960s the leading

ideal of the slim, leggy teenager was created forcing everybody with a different shape to practice or at least consider dieting (Tannahill 347). Initially, women were primarily affected by eating disorders associated with dieting. The growing cultural importance of body shape, however, caused men to be increasingly afflicted with such disorders as Bordo points out (227). Women still comprise the largest portion of the anorexic population - approximately 90% (237). This phenomenon is obviously a result, at least in part, of culture and we should ask why "our culture is so obsessed with keeping our bodies slim, tight and young”

(228). Interestingly it is again the social situation that seems to determine which eating disorder develops. Obese people are often to be found in families with parents having known periods of real hunger in their lives (Bruch 15), while

"cases of anorexia nervosa arise disproportionately among the well-to-do strata”

(Mennell 332).

In general, body disorders show how strongly food affects our life. It is the intake, the ingestion, which sets food apart from the rest of the material culture of a society (Meigs 104). Which food to eat is not only a matter of taste but of complex social and cultural practices. "Humans cling tenaciously to familiar foods because they become associated with nearly every dimension of human social and cultural life” (Gabaccia 8).

Food intake and its form are responses to biological and socio-cultural stimuli (Fieldhouse 1). The body, far from being just a non-cultural constant, is to the contrary continuously influenced by culture (Bordo 229). The field of cooking and nutrition is the major link between biology and cultural sciences because there is none other in biology where the relationship with the social sciences is more inclusive and also more critical.

Nutrition is a field where culture directly affects the physical body, "Food habits are culturally determined; that is, the individual's subcultural background and orientation, as well as his or her personal characteristics and perceptions ultimately determine what his or her dietary patterns will be” (3). Bordo goes even further, when she states, "our bodies, no less than anything else that is human, are constituted by culture” (229). It becomes clear that different cultures have different body concepts. In a culture contact situation this must lead to a creolization of such images as well.

In terms of the creolization process Ostendorf reasons in his article “Melting Pot, Salad Bowl, and Gumbo. Die Neue Welt und ihre Küchen: Nationale,

regionale oder ethnische?” that one cause for most of the severe nutrition

disorders in America today lies within the ascetic beliefs of a republican founding society. He further emphasizes that the dynamics of a creolization process in terms of food traditions in the United States these days is highly influenced by the dichotomy between asceticism and hedonism (17). In terms of New Orleans the hedonistic aspect definitely dominates and forms a counterpart to the rest of the United States as will be seen later.