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To classify is a social being, and the classification between edibility and inedibility is crucial for people in their everyday life. This article focuses on the tight relationship between eating and identity and delves into the sociomental logics underlying people's food habits. Rather than focusing on marked food habits, this article considers the unmarked. Through a broad examination of various food habits, this article maintains that it is conventions that lead socialized people to regard objects as edible and/or inedible and stubbornly to stick to this social classification in their everyday food choices. While there are no sacrosanct ways to classify edibility and inedibility, this article claims that, to prevent their insular selves from being "polluted" by consumed foods, socialized people carefully distinguish edible and inedible objects. Moreover, this article articulates how language and temporal and spatial factors play roles in the sociomental logics beneath people's food habits. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@trans formative studies. or g Website : http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2016 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS: Social Construction, Classification, Food Culture, Cognitive Sociology, Identity, Eating Habits.
In everyday life, individuals seem able to effortlessly distinguish edible objects from inedible objects. However, as in many other aspects of social life, it is the "social scalpel" that helps socialized individuals carve out "mental slices" from the continuum of reality and to experience edible and inedible objects as discrete entities. As Eviatar Zerubavel claims, the sociomentally constructed discontinuities of reality are "mental chunks" that bring meaning to things (1991: 5). Individuals rely heavily on the broadly accepted classification system to manage their everyday life, and it is thus difficult (if not impossible) to imagine a society without classification. To classify is a social being (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Douglas, 1996; Bowker & Star, 1999), and it is not going too far to say that socialization is an ongoing process that leads individuals to learn the "desirable" ways to classify in a specific society (Mead, 1967). Classification is a sociomental mechanism that categorizes things into islands of meaning, and socialized individuals thereby perceive great gaps between things that are situated on distinct islands (Zerubavel, 1997).
For socialized individuals, there is a fine line between edible and...