TY - JOUR AU - Belasco, Warren PY - 2010/04/26 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - American Food JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/american-food SP - AB - Confused? Bemused? Fed up? (Pardon the pun.) Good! Now you’re ready to study food--the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our most frequently indulged pleasure, and also the object of major anxiety, for food may be the single most important cause of disease and death. -- But why, you ask, in an American Studies course? Doesn’t the study of food more properly belong in those distant places where people specialize in nutrition, agriculture, engineering (yes, especially chemical engineering), and marketing? "No," I reply. It’s precisely because all those specialists have long dominated the study of food that we generalists--ordinary people with a dash of background here, a smattering of experience there--need to take a look, too. The food supply belongs to us all. And we in American Studies may be especially well equipped to look at it because we are, by nature, interdisciplinary. We do not respect departmental or institutional barriers. True, we may not understand all the biochemistry involved in digestion; but we can speculate about why certain foods "taste good" at particular times and to particular people. We may not understand why one pesticide works better on mites than another; but we can still ask why farm workers’ children seem especially cancer-prone. We may not understand how genetic engineering works; but we still can wonder whether it is necessary in the first place. ER -