Food and Social Change

Social change has been key to social thought since its origins, either with the European “founding fathers” of sociology or with Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century. While social change appeared in the origins of the social studies of food, and currently appears as a background discussion, there is little systematization to discuss social change through food. This is precisely the aim of this session: using food as a productive lens to understand broader social dynamics by contributing to a key theoretical debate in sociology.

Methodologically, approaches to social change vary from comparative historical perspectives to purely theoretical models. Modernity (in its various definitions, criticisms, and derivations) has guided debates around social change, frequently from a normative perspective. By bringing food to the centre of this debate, the session would critically approach the two classical perspectives on this topic, that is, whether social change is predictable, irreversible and, ultimately, evolutionist, or if change is related to unpredictable social transformations, which leads to unexpected results.

We welcome proposals conducted at the micro-level of social interactions, when food consumption is a means of, for instance, “doing family” and “doing gender”; at the meso-level, in which the role of political organizations, socio-economic institutions and scientific knowledge regulate food practices; and at the macro-level, in which global market dynamics, international health standards, and cultural discourses impinge on food production, exchange and consumption. Such a combination of a range of theorization and research is most promising to grasp dynamics of social change.