eating
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eat·ing
(ē'tĭng) 
adj.
adj.
- Suitable for being eaten, especially without cooking: good eating apples.
- Used in the ingestion of food, as at the table: eating utensils.
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Aggressively beating out competition. For example, an analyst might say that one retailer is “eating the lunch” of a competitive retailer in the same town if it is gaining market share through an aggressive pricing strategy. The implication of the expression is that the winning competitor is taking food away from the losing company or individual.
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To survive, humans must ingest food — must eat ideally from an abundant, varied diet, several times per day. Perhaps due to this fact — the basic necessity of eating to human survival — the rituals and habits surrounding it have flourished across cultures and throughout history. Why do individuals, societies and particular classes or ethnic groups eat specific foods? Why do eating rituals develop and change over time? Historians, economists, and anthropologists debate the relative importance of various influences, but tend to agree that a combination of factors motivate eating habits. It is neither strictly cultural influences nor economic conditions that determine eating behaviour but the interplay of both. Variables such as survival strategies, agricultural patterns, industrial development, gender, and familial structures, and the symbolic perceptions of particular foods and foodways, interact to determine eating patterns. Though it is clearly a physiological function linked to vitality, cultural and social expectations have had a profound influence upon the act of eating. As Roland Barthes has stated, ‘food is but a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviors’.
Social meanings
In subsistence or peasant societies, economic realities may severely constrain food types and amounts, often leading to malnutrition and disease. In pre-industrial Europe, for example, while the upper classes enjoyed a varied diet including substantial amounts of meat, the masses ate an undiversified diet, primarily of cereals. Lacking meat (most consumed only about 2 oz per week), they suffered from diseases associated with a lack of protein. Similar conditions persist in Third World countries as well as among the poor in the most affluent of societies. Yet even where material circumstances limit dietary intake, food and eating customs contain social meaning. The great feasts of medieval Europe, while infrequent occurrences, settled status conflicts in feudal society, while gender relations were clearly marked by female responsibility for preparing food in African-American slave communities.
In regard to the symbolic meanings given to food and eating, folk and religious customs, class stratification, gender definitions, and ideas about health have had the most significant impact. In most cultures, religious beliefs have included specifications about food and eating. Prehistoric peoples, faced with erratic food supplies, devised elaborate ceremonies hoping to sway the Gods to provide bountiful foodstuffs. All of the major religious faiths contain food regulations. For example, Hindus, guided by their belief in reincarnation, avoid killing animals and thus do not eat meat. Class stratification is also at work as those in the highest castes follow the strictest vegetarian diet. Principles of ‘right action’ also encourage Buddhists to avoid killing animals, while Islam and Judaism both proscribe pork or blood. Moslems also undertake the mandatory fast of Ramadam. Christian practices vary by faith and denomination. Catholicism includes a prohibition of meat on Fridays as well as abstaining from meat, fish, and dairy products on certain fast days. Seventh-Day Adventists follow a vegetarian diet, while Mormons are expected to avoid tobacco, alcohol, and hot drinks.
Eating rituals have acted to differentiate the classes from one another. In what people eat as well as when and how, their class status emerges. Since prosperity permits the most elaborate food purchases as well as the furnishings of meal times (crockery, china, silver, linen, decorations, etc.), minute differentiations can signal economic and social standing. In the economic uncertainties of nineteenth-century America, the newly-middle class proved their status by acquiring the coveted accoutrements of a fine dining room and then entertaining, while in the early twentieth century, slenderness and its attendant dieting distanced middle-class women from their ‘robust’ working-class sisters. In the twentieth century, food knowledge as well as dining out at the finest restaurants demonstrated social status.
Eating the right thing in the right manner has also served to define masculinity and femininity. In modern Western cultures, prior to the late twentieth century, that has tended to mean dainty or polite eating for women and hearty eating for men. Once fat became disdained for both sexes, correct, healthful food choices came to dominate.
History
Ideas about healthy nourishment, particularly with the development of food science in the nineteenth century, spawned new eating behaviours. In the last 100 years, ‘healthful’ eating has meant a turning away from heavy, simple, protein-rich diets to ones dominated by fruits, vegetables, and complex carbohydrates. At the same time, Westerners tend to consume more and more ‘unhealthy’ but commercially viable, ‘fast’ foods. As a result, a constant tension exists between what one wants to eat and what one ‘should eat’.
Though eating patterns have differed widely by region and culture, some broad historical patterns can be outlined. Until about 12 000 years ago, humans sustained their diet by food gathering which included hunting. Small, isolated populations moved from place to place, foraging for plants, animals, and eventually fish. Though they had little control over their food supply, anthropological evidence suggests that they practised food sharing. Food production emerged in different sites between 9000 and 12 000 years ago as humans began to control their food supply through animal husbandry and domestication of plants. Some argue that this marked the ‘rise of civilization’. Malnutrition decreased and populations increased, resulting in more sedentary living and leisure, the rise of cities, complex political organization, and more aggressive societies.
The four major early civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and the Huang He Valley) intensified animal husbandry, tool and weapon development, and pastoralism. Ancient Greece (2000 bc), considered the birthplace of modern civilization, actually emerged with food habits about 1000 years behind those of earlier civilizations. Until about the fifth century bc, the Greek diet consisted of cereals, breads, olives, fish, root vegetables, some fruit, and wine. In the Hellenistic period, food rituals began to signify class difference. The wealthy enjoyed a wide variety of imported foods, while the poor existed on a simple, bland diet. The same can be said for Ancient Rome during the Republic (509 bc-27 bc). The upper classes imbibed wine (diluted to reduce salt content) and dined on plentiful meat, fish, figs, and fruits, while the poor ate porridge, bread, olive oil, and water. The Roman Empire (27 bc-ad 476), with its vast territory, produced or imported almost every type of food we know today. Wealthy Romans were known for their opulent dinner parties and gargantuan appetites. With so many food pleasures to chose from, it was as though they could not be satiated. Though the Romans emulated all things Greek, it is said that ‘they became gluttons, rather than gourmets’.
During the Middle Ages — known as the Years of Famine — food and eating, like most other activities, became severely restricted due to crop failures, disease, and war. Still, eating habits reflected the strict hierarchy of the feudal system. Serfs produced their own wine, ate wild game, raised pigs and chickens, and eked out seasonal vegetables. In contrast, feudal lords enjoyed plentiful meat and a wide variety of imported foods, including spices from the Mid-east. The Renaissance brought more trade and exploration and — again, for the most affluent — an increasingly abundant diet.
The economic and cultural contact ushered in by the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travels and immigration to the ‘New World’ highlighted the different values held by those in the East and West with regard to land, food production, and eating. Amidst much death, war, and disease, there was also sharing of skills and resources, especially in the mid-Atlantic region.
By the eighteenth century, people's relationship to food was increasingly infused with moral meaning. Embedded in religious language of self-control, eating behaviour began to signify one's moral standing. In the nineteenth century, the new science of dietetics began to elaborate basic nutritional standards. Much of the research, conducted on soldiers and workers in order to determine the minimum nourishment necessary to maintain health, emphasized models of efficiency. The body became just one more machine. To keep running smoothly, it needed the right balance of food, which acted as ‘fuel’.
— Margaret A. Lowe
Bibliography
- McIntosh, E. N. (1995). American food habits in historical perspective. Praeger, Connecticut.
- Minnell, S. (1985). All manners of food. Blackwell, New York
See also food.
Word Tutor:
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eating
IN BRIEF: n. - The act of consuming food.
Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship.
— Elsa Schiaparelli, Source: Shocking Life, ch. 21, 1954.
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Sign Language Videos:
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eating
sign description: One AND-hand comes to the mouth in a repeated motion.
The Dream Encyclopedia:
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Eating
Eating sometimes symbolizes partaking of nonphysical forms of nourishment. It may also represent enjoyment or indulgence. Because the English language uses certain eating metaphors, eating in dreams sometimes indicates anxiety ("What's eating you?") or being overwhelmed (being "eaten alive"). (See also Devour; Hunger).
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Combined prehension, mastication and swallowing.
- e. disorders — see anorexia, regurgitation, quidding, dysphagia, polyphagia, pica.
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Eating
"Eat" redirects here. For other uses of "eat", or "EAT" as an abbreviation or acronym, see EAT (disambiguation).
"Feeding" redirects here. For other uses, see Feeding (disambiguation).
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Eating (also known as consuming) is the ingestion of food to provide for all organisms their nutritional or medicinal needs, particularly for energy and growth. Animals and other heterotrophs must eat in order to survive: carnivores eat other animals, herbivores eat plants, omnivores consume a mixture of both plant and animal matter, and detritivores eat detritus. Fungi digest organic matter outside of their bodies as opposed to animals that digest their food inside their bodies. For humans, eating is an activity of daily living.
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Eating practices among humans
Many homes have a kitchen room or outside (in the tropics) kitchen area devoted to preparation of meals and food, and may have a dining room, dining hall, or another designated area for eating. Some trains have a dining car. Dishware, silverware, drinkware, and cookware come in a wide array of forms and sizes. Most societies also have restaurants, food courts, and/or food vendors, so that people may eat when away from home, when lacking time to prepare food, or as a social occasion (dining club).[1] At their highest level of sophistication, these places become "theatrical spectacles of global cosmopolitanism and myth."[2] At picnics, potlucks, and food festivals, eating is in fact the primary purpose of a social gathering. At many social events, food and beverages are made available to attendees.
People usually have two or three meals a day regularly. Snacks of smaller amounts may be consumed between meals. Some propose not snacking, yet advocate three meals a day (of 600 kcal per meal) with four to six hours between.[3] Having three well-balanced meals (thus 1/2 of the plate with vegetables,[4] 1/4 protein food as meat, ... and 1/4 carbohydrates as pasta, rice, ...) will then account to some 1800–2000 kcal; which is the average requirement for a regular person.[5]
The issue of healthy eating has long been an important concern to individuals and cultures. Among other practices, fasting, dieting, and vegetarianism are all techniques employed by individuals and encouraged by societies to increase longevity and health Some religions promote vegetarianism, considering it wrong to consume animals. Leading nutritionists believe that instead of indulging oneself in three large meals each day, it is much healthier and easier on the metabolism to eat five smaller meals each day (e.g. better digestion, easier on the lower intestine to deposit wastes; whereas larger meals are tougher on the digestive tract and may call for the use of laxatives)[citation needed]. However, psychiatrists with Yale Medical School have found that people who suffer from Binge Eating Disorder (BED) and consume three meals per day weigh less than those who have meals that are more frequent. Eating can also be a way of making money (see competitive eating).
Eating positions
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This section requires expansion with: Additional information regarding Far East, Europe and America. |
Eating positions vary according to the different regions of the world where many cultures influence the way people eat their meals. In most of the Middle Eastern countries eating while sitting on the floor is considered the most common way to eat and it's believed to be healthier than eating while sitting to a table.[citation needed]
Development of eating in humans
Newborn babies do not eat adult foods. They survive solely on breast milk or formula. Small amounts of pureed food are sometimes fed to young infants as young as 2 or 3 months old, but most infants don't really show interest in food until they are between 6 and 8 months old. Young babies eat pureed baby foods because they have few teeth and immature digestive systems. Around 8 months of age, many babies begin eating finger foods, though their diet is still limited because they generally do not have molars or canines at this age. By 18 months babies often have enough teeth to eat the same foods as adults. Learning to eat is a messy process for children and children often do not master neatness and etiquette when eating until they are 5 or 6 years old.
Emotional eating
Emotional eating is “the tendency to eat in response to negative emotions”.[6] Empirical studies have indicated that anxiety leads to decreased food consumption in people with normal weight and increased food consumption in the obese.[7]
Many laboratory studies showed that overweight individuals are more emotionally reactive and are more likely to overeat when distressed than people of normal weight. Furthermore, it was consistently found that obese individuals experience negative emotions more frequently and more intensively than do normal weight persons.[8]
The naturalistic study of Lowe and Fisher compared the emotional reactivity and emotional eating of normal and overweight female college students. The study confirmed the tendency of obese individuals to overeat, but these findings applied only to snacks, not to meals. That means that obese individuals did not tend to eat more while having meals – rather, the amount of snacks they ate between meals was greater. One possible explanation that Lowe and Fisher suggest is that obese individuals often eat their meals with others and do not eat more than average due to the reduction of distress because of the presence of other people. Another possible explanation would be that obese individuals do not eat more than the others while having meals due to social desirability. Conversely, snacks are usually eaten alone.[8]
Hunger and Satiety
Further information: Hunger#Biological mechanisms
There are many physiological mechanisms that control starting and stopping a meal. The control of food intake is a physiologically complex, motivated behavioral system. Hormones such as cholecystokinin, bombesin, neurotensin, anorectin, calcitonin, enterostatin, leptin and corticotropin-releasing hormone have all been shown to suppress food intake.[9][10]
Initiation of Eating
There are numerous signals given off that initiates what we feel as “hunger”. There are environmental signals, signals from the gastrointestinal system, and metabolic signals that trigger hunger. The environmental signals come from the body’s senses. The feeling of hunger could be triggered by the smell and thought of food, the sight of a plate, or hearing someone talk about food [11] . The signals from the stomach are initiated by the release of the peptide hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin is a hormone that increases appetite by signaling to the brain that a person is hungry [12] . Environmental signals and ghrelin are not the only signals that initiate hunger, there are other metabolic signals as well. As time passes between meals, the body starts to take nutrients from long-term reservoirs [11] . When the glucose levels of cells drop (glucoprivation), the body starts to produce the feeling of hunger. The body also stimulates eating by detecting a drop in cellular lipid levels (lipoprivation) [11] . Both the brain and the liver monitor the levels of metabolic fuels. The brain checks for glucoprivation on its side of the blood–brain barrier (since glucose is its fuel), while the liver monitors the rest of the body for both lipoprivation and glucoprivation [13] .
Termination of Eating
There are short-term signals of satiety that arise from the head, the stomach and intestines, and also the liver. The long-term signals of satiety come from adipose tissue [11] . The taste and odor of food can contribute to short-term satiety. It allows the body to learn when to stop eating. The stomach contains receptors to allow us to know when we are full. The intestines also contain receptors that send satiety signals to the brain. The hormone cholecystokinin is secreted by the duodenum, and it controls the rate at which the stomach is emptied [14] . This hormone is thought to be a satiety signal to the brain. Peptide YY 3-36 is a hormone released by the small intestine and it’s also used as a satiety signal to the brain [15] . Insulin also serves as a satiety signal to the brain. The brain detects insulin in the blood, which indicates that nutrients are being absorbed by cells and a person is getting full. Long-term satiety comes from the fat stored in adipose tissue. Adipose tissue secretes the hormone leptin, and leptin suppresses appetite. Long-term satiety signals from adipose tissue regulates short-term satiety signals [11] .
The Role of the Brain in Eating
The brain stem can control food intake, because it contains neural circuits that detect hunger and satiety signals from other parts of the body [11] . The brain stem’s involvement of food intake has been researched using rats. Rats that have had the motor neurons in the brain stem disconnected from the neural circuits of the cerebral hemispheres (decerebration), are unable to approach and eat food [11] . Instead they have to obtain their food in a liquid form. This research shows that the brain stem does in fact play a role in eating.
There are two peptides in the hypothalamus that produce hunger, melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH) and orexin. MCH plays a bigger role in producing hunger. In mice, MCH stimulates feeding and a mutation causing the overproduction of MCH led to overeating and obesity [16] . Orexin plays a greater role in controlling the relationship between eating and sleeping. Other peptides in the hypothalamus that induce eating are neuropeptide Y (NPY) and agouti-related protein (AGRP) [11] .
Satiety in the hypothalamus is stimulated by leptin. Leptin targets the receptors on the arcuate nucleus and suppresses the secretion of MCH and orexin. The arcuate nucleus also contains two more peptides that suppress hunger. The first one is CART (cocaine and amphetamine-regulated transcript), the second is α-MSH (α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone) [11] .
Disorders
Main article: Eating disorder
Physiologically, eating is generally triggered by hunger, but there are numerous physical and psychological conditions that can affect appetite and disrupt normal eating patterns. These include depression, food allergies, ingestion of certain chemicals, bulimia, anorexia nervosa, pituitary gland malfunction and other endocrine problems, and numerous other illnesses and eating disorders.
A chronic lack of nutritious food can cause various illnesses, and will eventually lead to starvation. When this happens in a locality on a massive scale, it is considered a famine.
If eating and drinking is not possible, as is often the case when recovering from surgery, alternatives are enteral nutrition and parenteral nutrition.[citation needed]
See also
- Aphagia
- Chewing
- Competitive eating
- Crop
- Dietary supplement
- Dieting
- Dining in, formal military ceremony
- Energy crop
- Forced feeding
- Swallowing
References
- ^ John Raulston Saul (1995), "The Doubter's Companion", 155
- ^ David Grazian (2008), "On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife", 32
- ^ Eating recommendations by BCM
- ^ Half of plate to be filled with vegetables, according to Harvard School of Public Health
- ^ Calorie requirements for regular person estimated at 2000 kcal
- ^ Eldredge, K. L., & Agras, W. S. (1994). Weight and Shape Overconcern and Emotional Eating in Binge Eating Disorder. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 19 (1), 73-82.
- ^ McKenna, R. J. (1972). Some Effects of Anxiety Level and Food Cues on the Eating Behavior of Obese and Normal Subjects: A Comparison of Schachterian and Psychosomatic Conceptions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 22 (3), 311-319.
- ^ a b Lowe, M. R., & Fisher, E. B. Jr. (1983). Emotional Reactivity, Emotional Eating, and Obesity: A Naturalistic Study. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 6 (2), 135-149.
- ^ Geiselman, P.J. (1996). Control of food intake. A physiologically complex, motivated behavioral system. Endocrinol Metab Clin North Am. 1996 Dec;25(4):815-29.
- ^ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/dispomim.cgi?id=164160&rn=1
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Carlson, Neil (2010). Physiology of Behavior. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. pp. 412-426.
- ^ Funai, M.D., Edmund. "Ghrelin, Hormone That Stimulates Appetite, Found To Be Higher In PWS". http://www.pwsausa.org/research/ghrelin.htm. Retrieved 29 April 2012.
- ^ Berg, JM. "Section 30.2Each Organ Has a Unique Metabolic Profile". Biochemistry 5th Edition. W H Freeman. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22436/. Retrieved 29 April 2012.
- ^ Little, TJ; Horowitz, M; Feinle-Bisset, C.. "Role of cholecystokinin in appetite control and body weight regulation.". Obesity Reviews. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16246215. Retrieved 29 April 2012.
- ^ Degen, L. "Effect of peptide YY3-36 on food intake in humans.". http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16285944. Retrieved 29 April 2012.
- ^ Shimada, M. "MCH (Melanin Concentrating Hormone) and MCH-2 Receptor". Mice lacking Melanin-Concentrating Hormone are hypophagic and lean.. http://www.phoenixbiotech.net/allobesity/Catalog%20Files/MCH%20Section/MCH.html. Retrieved 29 April 2012.
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