Investigating bio food through people’s personal, bodily and everyday relation with it, I was able to understand as it exists in (daily) reality – as it really is – not just what people tell about it and what circulates about it in the discourse. This embodied,...
In my other blogs on bio food in Belgium, I have explored bio food through people’s personal and bodily relation with it. I have dealt with how people bodily relate to and experience this food, how its sociocultural aspects (symbolic incorporation) have to be...
In the previous blog, I discussed two of bio food’s three most salient features associated with bio – its naturalness and health benefits. Now it remains to analyse its third characteristic and that is its ethicality. Indeed, bio food is deemed ethical not only...
In order to not only understand bio food but also our complexity of food, food’s composition and origins, it is crucial to try distinguish between food’s ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. However, food is becoming more and more complex and increasingly more food cannot...
I argue that in bio food’s edible materiality lies its inherent value. Indeed, bio food consumers take a particular interest in this materiality (Roe 2006). Although ‘value’ is one of those abused terms, when basically anything can have a ‘value’, especially in...
The goal of this blog is to manifest that it is the quality of bio food’s edible materiality that makes bio food bio, gives it its inherent value, and fundamentally differentiates from non-bio food. Besides bio food’s edible and inedible materiality, I see...
Food incorporation, identification and classification are real processes, which engage our body as well as mind (self). They shape us, and give rise to experiences, which are bodily and lived. In the process of both symbolic and literal incorporation, actual food...
The sense of taste and taste have to be taken together in their differences in order to really understand the complexity of our bodily relation with food and see how culture, society, the self and the body are integrated. We cannot really understand and explain...
To understand today’s complexity of food and human complicated relation with food, we need to start from human nature concerning food, that is, biologically determined mechanisms, tendencies and behaviours which determine our relation with food. Only then we can...
In Purity and Danger, a central part of Mary Douglas’ argument is that ‘rational behaviour involves classification and that classification is a human universal’ (2010:XVII). Indeed, classification, categorization, division, and organization are important mental...
Food pertains to everyone. Everyone needs it, and has a certain relation with it. Yet the evident presence of food in our individual, as well as social, lives is often taken for granted and in a sense overlooked. Food is an ordinary and mundane thing and eating...
To really understand food and our relation with it, I argue that food and people have to be seen and taken as an inseparable pair. The human-food relation does not allow us to reduce food to a sociocultural thing, representations or symbols and food’s impact to...
In what follows, I am going to describe a particular bio foodstuff/food/product (a bio rice drink) in its three ‘life phases’ - the purchase, consumption and post-consumption phase.The purchase phase This carton of rice drink can be found and bought in...
Food deserves more attention than we tend to give it. It reminds us that we are embodied beings. We do not simply have bodies but, rather, we are bodies. This fact calls for a more personal approach to food. We should not try to analyse food as such simply...
Ensures consumer trust The new European organic legislation has been in force in our country since 1 January 2022. This whole strives to harmonize the rules for the organic agricultural sector, to prevent fraud and to strengthen consumer trust. For example, all...
