SOC 808 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Commodity Fetishism, Canadian Cuisine, Nomadic Pastoralism

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 808
• Professor: Mustafa Koc

Document Summary

This week we will look at historical origins of the modern food system. As we discussed earlier, sociology tends to look at the big picture and follows a systems view. Changes in the food system reflect changes in the ecological, social and demographic trends and economic and political structures of the society. What have people been eating, how they have been producing what they ate, who has been involved in this process, how the products are distributed have changed over time. By reviewing these changes we will be able to understand what is unique about the way we produce and distribute food in the modern society. In their struggle for survival, human societies rely on their culture to learn from past knowledge and make new innovations. Lacking the pre-programmed instincts that help many animals to survive, humans rely more on culture than their genetic programming. Human societies survived on different parts of the world for thousands of years.