ABSTRACT
This chapter explores food cultural orientations and how cultivating pleasurable experiences with food may increase wellbeing and health outcomes. It examines the food practices and the lived experiences of a bicultural Japanese and American family to investigate how everyday actions, norms, materials, and institutions of culture influence the pleasure derived from food. Food cultural orientations can be conceptualized as a spectrum anchored by anxiety on one end and pleasure on the other. The Japanese orientation is recognized as a balance between pleasure and health approaches, sharing similarities with both the American and French orientations. The histories, philosophies, geographies, and demographics of Japan and the United States highlight distinctions that influence their food orientations, practices, and aesthetics. Practices are culturally situated and aesthetically curated through taste regimes, which form shared understandings of materials that permeate consumer messaging and products in the marketplace.
