CHASS Faculty Examine Food’s Moral, Social and Cultural Impact
At first glance — or first bite — food might not seem like a topic of serious inquiry. But for some faculty members in NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS), it is the lens through which they examine complex questions about disparity, culture, ethics and history.
One scholar investigates the roots and realities of modern food insecurity. Another is recreating ancient Mesopotamian beer to uncover what early brewing practices reveal about civilization. Others are exploring the rise of celebrity chefs and unpacking the cultural and moral debates that influence what and how we eat.
Together, their research shows how the humanities and social sciences help us understand and respond to real-world problems, including those tied to food access and equity. These CHASS scholars are using food to explore the past, confront the present and help build a more equitable future.
To learn more, we asked four faculty members a critical question about the broader impact of their work. Their responses deepened the discussion, offering new insights into how food can both mirror and drive societal change.
How does food insecurity impact people, and how does your work promote fair food systems?
Sarah Bowen
Associate Dean for Research and Engagement
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
We’ve found that parents will do almost anything to prevent their children from experiencing food insecurity, including skipping meals so they can save more food for everyone else. But even though parents make these sacrifices, children still experience the effects.
We also learned that kids notice when their families experience food insecurity, and they take steps to try to address it themselves, like going to bed early to stave off hunger. Other studies have found that food insecurity has negative effects on kids’ mental and physical health, their behavior, and how well they do in school.
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There are governmental programs – most importantly, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps– that provide resources for people experiencing food insecurity. When the government expanded those programs, that had a huge impact in reducing food insecurity and improving people’s overall health and well-being. For example, during the pandemic, the government expanded people’s SNAP benefits, and more schools began offering universal free meals. People also received financial assistance like the Expanded Child Tax Credit.
Unfortunately, the expanded benefits have been cut. And as that happened, food insecurity started to increase again – from one in every 10 Americans in 2021 to nearly one in every 7.
Most of us want to believe that in a country that produces as much food as ours, no one should be hungry. That is not the case. But we have the power – and the tools – to change this: by investing in people, reducing barriers and providing the resources needed for everyone to eat well.
What does your research reveal about the moral and cultural factors shaping food choices?
Michaela DeSoucey
Associate Professor of Sociology
My research explores how meaning-making around food is shaped by political, economic and cultural contexts.
There’s no denying that our culture, like all others, assigns moral values – like ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation,’ ‘healthy’ and ‘junk’ – to different foods and culinary practices. Across my work, however, I argue that food doesn’t just reveal social and cultural sensibilities – it also actively shapes them.
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What people choose to eat (or not!) is deeply intertwined with moral boundaries, social and identity expectations and group affiliations. Food can bring people together, but also keep them apart, sometimes at the same time. I’m especially interested in moments when specific foods become morally or politically charged.
Across my work, I ask: whose interests are served when certain foods or culinary practices are contested, challenged, or banned? What do these processes reveal about divergent social values as well as broader markets or political dynamics?
These tensions offer powerful insights for sociologists and others into food as a site of cultural and ideological struggle.
What does your work reveal about the origins of the celebrity chef?
Michael Garval
Professor of French
Today’s celebrity chefs dazzle diners and fans across the globe, so it’s hard to picture the cultural landscape without them. Yet they are a relatively recent phenomenon.
Modern culinary celebrity began to take shape in France, after the Revolution, within a new, broad-based gastronomic culture.
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From the outset, however, chefs’ long, prior history of obscure servitude in private kitchens, and the materiality and transience of their creations, made it hard to conceptualize this novel category of public figure.
My research reveals the complex process of imagining that has unfolded over the past two centuries, fleshing out the idea of the celebrity chef, particularly through the modern period’s fast-evolving visual media, from cookbook frontispiece engravings to television and film.
Focusing on emblematic figures like Antonin Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Eugénie Brazier, Raymond Oliver, or Paul Bocuse, I explore how chefs emerged into public view and consciousness, in France and around the world.
What does your research reveal about the cultural and political forces of food and drink?
Tate Paulette
Associate Professor of History
The world that I study faded away two thousand years ago. But the traces and echoes of this world are abundant: thousands of buried but once-teeming settlements, hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, numerous forms of deep influence and connection. The world of ancient Mesopotamia is still very much alive in our present.
The inhabitants of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers gave us the world’s first cities, kings, and writing. They also built the world’s first great beer culture, the focus of my research. Their agricultural fields were awash in barley, and much of the harvest made its way into human bodies as beer.
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They loved their beer: its colors, textures, tastes and intoxicating effects. They sipped it through long reed straws and praised it in song and story. They drank beer at home, on the job, and in neighborhood taverns––also at feasts, festivals and religious ceremonies. There was a goddess of beer, Ninkasi, patron of brewers and source of “what satisfies the heart.” Beer was consumed across the social spectrum, by women and men, rich and poor, enslaved and free. It was both staple food and luxury good; mundane necessity and political tool; marker of shared identity and sign of difference and exclusion.
For them, as for us, beer was many different things and occupied just as complex a position in their society as in ours. My research seeks to tease apart the multi-layered history of this potent and only partially understood beverage.
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