ABSTRACT
Rules about food consumption are an important means through which human beings construct reality. They are an allegory of social concerns, a way in which people give order to the physical, social, and symbolic world around them. This chapter utilizes data from college students’ food journals to examine rules about what and how to eat in US culture. It argues that students' food rules convey a belief in self-control and individual choice and that they uphold hierarchical social relations. The beliefs that success comes from individual hard work and taking control of ones life are manifest in college students' food rules. Because eating is such a basic condition of existence, people take their foodways for granted and rarely subject them to conscious examination. Anthropologists of very different theoretical perspectives have studied food to determine the cultural construction of reality.
