Individual choices? Bioscience, culture and society as approaches to genes, eating and health

Summary

This paper presents the background and a plan for an interdisciplinary study that aims at examining the practices of eating as an entanglement of biology, culture and society all together. Our interest is on genes not only as a biological fact but also as a scientific discovery that increasingly shapes our understanding of the interconnections between genotype, eating patterns and health. Genetics is assumed to bear a growing role in the self-understanding and eating practices of future consumers. In this paper, we first highlight the basic assumptions on the role of the social and the individual in theory of practices, food-relating taste psychogenomics, and cultural studies.