Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
A Diabetic’s Digest: What Following 183 People with Diabetes in India, Denmark, USA, and China Taught Me about Designing Rituals for Coping
Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Priya Mani [+]
Description
Learning of a diabetes diagnosis is a moment of epiphany, one of learning a new body, realizing in a moment that ‘you don't have what you thought you had’. Food habits change in specific ways disheveling the day's meal order with a new diet deprived of starch and sugar. Managing diabetes thus requires reconstructing the eating experience as ingredients, cooking, and serving demand reconsideration. Mutual support, perseverance, and resilience are hallmarks of all rituals. In an uncanny similarity, diabetics and their caregivers are quickly folded into a new life of rules and rituals. Drawing upon the interviews and observations of my ethnographic fieldwork in China, India, and USA, this paper will examine and interpret the diabetic's quotidian, as it were, in a format I have chosen to call gastro-ethnology. This paper will focus on how diabetics adapt their food habits and ritualize their meals and medications to keep their condition under control.