ABSTRACT
Mary Douglas’s writings on the meal have had profound impact on the study of food and eating. Her ideas are illuminating: she highlights how food – from what is being eaten to how it is being eaten – is essentially a symbolic system of communication. Food systems, she argues, are not isolated from the rest of people’s everyday lives. She goes on to show how people’s lives are highly ordered (or structured) in every aspect, such as from how they care for their bodies to the clothes they adorn – each of which is connected to the other, as much as food systems.
