Aftertaste: an examination of perpetuation and change of food service during COVID-19

Gennaro, Emilio (2022) Aftertaste: an examination of perpetuation and change of food service during COVID-19. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

Food is perhaps the most ubiquitous cultural signifier for all peoples across the globe. What people eat and why they eat it denotes heritage, geography, movement, ritual, stratification, and technology. It is through the combination of these elements that food is, first and foremost, political. In communities, how food is produced, procured, exchanged, and laborers compensated are all emblematic of how the dominant power structure is enacted. This has been true since sedentary agriculture and animal husbandry became dominant modes of caloric sustainability and only became more apparent as the world turned increasingly globalized through empire giving way into capitalism. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, what foodstuffs were available, how people got food, then how and where people ate, all became questions of state authority and efficiency as well as calling into question personal agency and social responsibility. These were not new issues then, and have not been for millennia, however COVID-19 offers a lens through which to examine what a food system says about the society in which it exists. Values are exposed by food all the way from the fields to the bank accounts of fast-food employees. COVID-19 was a showcase for the tenuous nature of a for profit system being coupled with survival. To explore the political nature of the food industry during COVID-19, I conducted a media analysis of world and United States news articles and commercials pertaining to the food industry during the pandemic, as a retrospective of the pandemic and how the pandemic changed or maintained, the infrastructure of food service, such as the supply chain and production of foodstuffs. The shift in marketing of food that was necessitated by lockdowns and the somber nature of the current reality. Worker safety and elevated position of turning front line workers into heroes became the norm as frame of reference for the occupation. How workers were or were not compensated for keeping such a large sector of the economy running at great personal risk, and how adversarial that conversation became as the rejection of wage slavery grew in prominence, and, how food establishments and corporations engaged in political theater during the ideological battles taking place on the political spectrum. I found confirmation of the adage that, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” insofar as that, many issues which arose during COVID-19 were only new because the virus was, but the systemic nature that had brought them to exist was not new.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Food; Supply chains; Covid-19
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Social and Behavioral Science > Anthropology
Date Deposited:	12 Jun 2023 17:33
Last Modified:	04 Jan 2024 08:30
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/5998

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