Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Anthropology
Reader 1
Lara Deeb
Reader 2
Emily Matteson
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2024 Sophia K Lewis
Abstract
In this thesis, I seek to critically examine how college students at American liberal arts institutions relate to food in their everyday lives and how those relationships to food are formed in a cultural landscape where what and how one eats can carry significant moral implications. Through a series of ethnographic interviews, I found that college students are negotiating a variety of interconnected social influences that have shaped their relationships to food, the most prominent being the ways that their parents taught them to relate to food in childhood and adolescence, cultural conceptions of health, and their own embodied reactions to food. Many students are attempting to improve their relationships with food by disengaging with the discourses and social influences that they identify as harmful because of the feelings of shame and moral judgment they can cultivate. However, the ideas and strategies that they employ to improve their relationships with food are themselves informed by the same moral and cultural logics as these harmful influences, rendering the process of reforming their relationships fraught with complexity.
Recommended Citation
Lewis, Sophia, "Good Enough To Eat: How College Students Are (Re)forming Their Relationships To Food" (2024). Scripps Senior Theses. 2395.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2395
