Avant 2014

Articles

• Extension des marchés et normalisation : les systèmes agro-alimentaires dans la mondialisation
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  L’article se propose de caractériser le cadre d’action et de contraintes dans lequel les systèmes agroalimentaires ont eu à s’inscrire depuis le début de la décennie 80. Celui-ci est marqué par la « mondialisation » des échanges, entendue ici comme un processus social de construction et d’extension des marchés, via le développement du commerce international. Il met l’accent sur deux aspects de ce processus : la construction de vastes zones de libre-échange, notamment dans le cadre du Mercosur, de l’Union Européenne et de l’OMC ; l’expansion et la multiplication des dispositifs de normalisation.

• Alimentation et vivre-ensemble. Le cas de la créolisation
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  La créolisation est le fruit des situations d’acculturation qui caractérisent certaines sociétés formées avec la colonisation, donnant naissance à des configurations socioanthropologiques singulières, tant sur le plan des productions matérielles et immatérielles que sur celui des formes de vivre-ensemble. Dans ces processus, l’alimentation joue un rôle majeur en tant que support de construction et d’expression identitaires. Sur le plan sociohistorique, la créolisation de l’alimentation correspond aux formes d’entrecroisements culturels intervenus dans ces sociétés, donnant ce que l’on appelle localement les cuisines créoles ; ces hybridations se poursuivent aujourd’hui encore avec la globalisation et les migrations plus récentes. Plus largement, elle désigne les processus identitaires qui entourent l’alimentation et par lesquels les populations en situation de diversité culturelle marquent l’en-commun et la différence. La réflexion s’appuie sur l’étude du système alimentaire à La Réunion, où la cuisine créole et le manger créole symbolisent l’appartenance commune, alors que les autres cuisines soutiennent les dynamiques de différenciation et de construction de la mémoire des origines.

• Ultra-processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The relationship between the global food system and the worldwide rapid increase of obesity and related diseases is not yet well understood. A reason is that the full impact of industrialized food processing on dietary patterns, including the environments of eating and drinking, remains overlooked and underestimated. Many forms of food processing are beneficial. But what is identified and defined here as ultra-processing, a type of process that has become increasingly dominant, at first in high-income countries, and now in middle-income countries, creates attractive, hyper-palatable, cheap, ready-to-consume food products that are characteristically energy-dense, fatty, sugary or salty and generally obesogenic. In this study, the scale of change in purchase and sales of ultra-processed products is examined and the context and implications are discussed. Data come from 79 high- and middle-income countries, with special attention to Canada and Brazil. Results show that ultra-processed products dominate the food supplies of high-income countries, and that their consumption is now rapidly increasing in middle-income countries. It is proposed here that the main driving force now shaping the global food system is transnational food manufacturing, retailing and fast food service corporations whose businesses are based on very profitable, heavily promoted ultra-processed products, many in snack form.

• A safe and just space for humanity : can we live within the doughnut ?
  23 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Humanity’s challenge in the 21st century is to eradicate poverty and achieve prosperity for all within the means of the planet’s limited natural resources. In the run-up to Rio+20, this discussion paper presents a visual framework – shaped like a doughnut – which brings planetary boundaries together with social boundaries, creating a safe and just space between the two, in which humanity can thrive. Moving into this space demands far greater equity – within and between countries – in the use of natural resources, and far greater efficiency in transforming those resources to meet human needs.

• Un cadre commun entre de multiples expériences ?
  5 janvier 2018, par Roxane

  Un des défis majeurs à venir sera de parvenir à nourrir durablement les urbains, car dans le même temps, la communauté scientifique s’accorde pour pronostiquer un avenir fait de risques de pénuries de ressources naturelles non renouvelables, liés notamment à l’urbanisation galopante.

• Realizing justice in local food systems
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  For alternative agrifood social movements, food-system localization is both an ideal and a pathway to resolve environmental, social and economic issues in the food system. This article addresses the potential for equity within food-system localization in practical and conceptual terms. Historical processes have shaped regions and social relations with vast differences in wealth, power and privilege and this has implications for thinking about and enacting equity through food-system localization. If food-system localization efforts are to work toward equity, they must consider inherited material and discursive asymmetries within frameworks of economy, demography, geography and democracy.

• Improving the effectiveness of nutritional information policies : assessment of unconscious pleasure mechanisms involved in food-choice decisions
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The rise in obesity in many countries has led to the emergence of nutritional information policies that aim to change people’s diets. Changing an individual’s diet is an ambitious goal, since numerous factors influence a person’s food-choice decisions, many of which are made unconsciously. These frequently subconscious processes should not be underestimated in food-choice behavior, as they play a major role in food diet composition. In this review, research in cognitive experimental psychology and neuroscience provides the basis for a critical analysis of the role of pleasure in eating behaviors. An assessment of the main characteristics of nutritional policies is provided, followed by recent findings showing that food choices are guided primarily by automatic emotional processes. Neuroimaging and behavioral studies, which provide new insights into the relationships between emotions and food both in lean persons and in persons with eating disorders, are reported as well. Lastly, the argument is presented that future nutritional policies can be more effective if they associate healthy food with eating pleasure.

• Power at the table : food fights and happy meals
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  In family meals the normative and the performative are very far apart—though everyone likes to think of the family table as a place of harmony and solidarity, it is often the scene for the exercise of power and authority, a place where conflict prevails. My interest in this topic was sparked by research on middle-class parents’ struggles with their “picky eater” children. Besides narrating the way the dinner table became battleground with their own children, many parents also recalled their own childhood family meals as painful and difficult. From this very narrow focus on family struggles, I expand the discussion to the larger question of why this topic is relatively ignored in social science, and I question the sources of the normative power of the family “happy meal.” The ideological emphasis on family dinners has displaced social responsibility from public institutions to private lives, and the construction of normative family performances is part of a process that constructs different family types as deviant and delinquent.

• Introduction à la pensée complexe
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Nous demandons à la pensée qu’elle dissipe les brouillards et les obscurités, qu’elle mette de l’ordre et de la clarté dans le réel, qu’elle révèle les lois qui le gouvernent. Le mot de complexité, lui, ne peut qu’exprimer notre embarras, notre confusion, notre incapacité à définir de façon simple, à nommer de façon claire, à ordonner nos idées. Sa définition première ne peut fournir aucune élucidation : est complexe ce qui ne peut se résumer en un maître mot, ce qui ne peut se ramener à une loi ni se réduire à une idée simple. La complexité est un mot problème et non un mot solution.

  Edgar Morin propose ici un mode de pensée pour affronter la complexité du monde qui nous entoure.

• Aliments morts, aliments vivants
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Les végétariens sont-ils des marginaux aux croyances irrationnelles, de doux rêveurs aux pensées naïves ou de dangereux sectaires qui tentent d’imposer une religion des petites graines ? Ni l’ un, ni l’ autre, bien sûr, mais des réseaux de personnes aux croyances spécifiques. Ces croyances, à l’ instar de toute croyance, ne sont ni vraies ni fausses. Il s’ agit en fait de représentations, de conceptions qui proposent une interprétation particulière du monde et du rapport entre les hommes et les animaux.