This blog post examines whether Food and Nutrition Studies is merely a discipline focused on training dietitians, or if it is a deeper field that explores human history and culture.
What comes to mind when you hear “Department of Food and Nutrition”? Most people think of it as a path to becoming a nutritionist, a course to become a home economics teacher in elementary, middle, or high schools, or a department focused on culinary practice. Indeed, the Department of Food and Nutrition does include subjects related to home economics education, preparation for becoming a nutritionist, or classes on culinary practice. But that’s not the whole story. Food and nutrition studies can be applied in diverse fields. For instance, graduates can work in large food corporations handling product development, quality control, or food safety. They may also serve in public institutions or non-profit organizations, developing food policies or nutrition education programs. This goes beyond simply dealing with food; it plays a vital role in enhancing people’s health and quality of life.
This article introduces food and nutrition from the perspective of the ‘Food and Culture’ major course offered at Seoul National University’s Department of Food and Nutrition. This course moves beyond learning simple ingredients and recipes to explore how food intertwines with culture and influences our lives. Through this, students learn how food transcends its role as a mere source of nutrition and plays a vital role within social and cultural contexts.
What does it mean when a particular food is widely consumed in a region? It could be simply because the ingredients needed to make that food are readily available. However, food often requires cooking or processing, and in many places, these cooking methods become fixed as part of the culture. And researching why people cook in such specific ways can yield quite fascinating results. For example, the Maya and Aztecs had corn as their staple food. Instead of simply removing the husks, they would soak the corn in lime water overnight before removing the husks. Consuming corn prepared this way prevented pellagra. Pellagra is a disease caused by a deficiency of the essential amino acid niacin. Since niacin, a vitamin, is not present in the edible kernels of corn, consuming only corn inevitably leads to pellagra. However, soaking corn in lime water triggers a chemical reaction that synthesizes niacin. Consequently, even when eating only corn, one does not contract the disease. Unlike the Native Americans, who passed down this method as part of their culture through accumulated experience over centuries of corn consumption, Spanish and European settlers who first encountered corn sometimes suffered outbreaks of pellagra.
The cultural background surrounding food encompasses more than just recipes. Specific cooking methods or dietary habits are closely tied to the region’s ecological environment, climate conditions, and social structure. For example, Japan’s sushi culture is deeply connected to its geographical characteristics as a coastal nation. The environment, which allowed for the immediate consumption of fresh seafood, led to the development of the unique cooking method known as sushi. Thus, food is a cultural product reflecting a region’s history, natural environment, and people’s way of life.
Cultural significance isn’t limited to commonly consumed foods. Foods that are not eaten also carry meaning. For instance, certain cultures strictly prohibit eating specific foods, declaring “You must not eat this!” This phenomenon is called a food taboo. Numerous hypotheses exist regarding the reasons for food taboos. The most widely accepted include functionalism, structuralism, rationalism, and the psychosocial development hypothesis. In reality, these four hypotheses are not mutually exclusive; rather, they offer complementary perspectives on explaining taboos. However, only rationalism addresses the issue from a nutritional standpoint, so we will focus on explaining this perspective.
Rationalism assumes all food taboos have material causes, arguing that food taboos serve the function of optimizing nutritional utilization within limited regions. For example, consider the Jewish taboo against pork. Jews consume cattle, sheep, or goats instead of pigs; rationalism attributes this to ecological habitats. Unlike pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats can digest fiber, allowing them to utilize feed that humans cannot eat. Pigs, however, consume food similar to humans and can only provide meat. Consequently, raising pigs incurs higher costs compared to the ruminant animals mentioned earlier. By prohibiting pork, Jews engage in economically efficient nutritional practices.
Cultures with specific food preferences or taboos have reasons behind them. These reasons may be simple, but sometimes they require research to uncover. Such studies can contribute to understanding human history, culture, psychology, and social structures, extending beyond the mere relationship between food and nutrition. Surprisingly, the knowledge gained in food and nutrition studies can be applied to research that traces the origins of such practices by connecting them to human history and culture. This provides a new perspective on human civilization and development, extending beyond mere sustenance. For this reason, I believe food and nutrition studies can be a highly compelling field of study.
