Eating in Utopia

Abstract

Social studies on food and nutritional authorities coincide in emphasizing
the paradoxical situation of the modern eater: people know how
they should eat but do not eat as they should. Dealing with paradoxes
successfully usually requires a certain —linguistic and disciplinary—
distance to gain suffi cient perspective. We suggest this should be done
from the historical perspective that a sociology of utopia offers on the
confl ict between food imaginaries. To this end, we outline the common
elements of utopian/dystopian thought in order to extract the categories
of major interest for a sociological analysis of food policies and eating
behaviours. Subsequently, we trace the ways in which some classical
utopias and dystopias have focused on —or blurred— the question of
food and we try to draw some conclusions.