Good Food and Nice People : Hospitality and the Construction of Quality Among the Italian Middle Class

This chapter addresses the aesthetical and ethical dimension of ordinary food consumption in contemporary Italy. In particular, we consider how Italian middle-class families bestow value onto food by constructing its \u201cquality\u201d. Reference to the local territory is often employed to construct a notion of food quality that is typically set against notions of globalization and massification; likewise reference to greenness and sustainability are contrasted with industrialism and corporate interests. Green, local food is appreciated both for its aesthetic and ethic prerogatives. Quality food becomes an aesthetic and ethic dispositive used to portray visions of personal as well as family wellbeing. These visions are carefully performed during dinner parties which work as rituals that mark and fix the meanings attached to food in ordinary life. The chapter thereby starts by considering party-giving and how this social occasion helps us understand the aesthetics and ethics of food consumption in Italy. From the onset of our study, it was evident that hospitality, and dinner parties in particular, still play a fundamental role in the ceremonial consolidation of meanings around food consumption. As we shall see, food consumption experiences are organized to stress domestic intimacy and familiar identity through food and, at the same time, negotiate gender relations. These meaning dynamics likewise construct a notion of food quality which is both aesthetically and ethically charged

Correlates of African American Men’s Sexual Schemas

Sexual schemas are cognitive representations of oneself as a sexual being and aid in the processing of sexually relevant information. We examined the relationship between sociosexuality (attitudes about casual sex), masculine ideology (attitudes toward traditional men and male roles), and cultural centrality (strength of identity with racial group) as significant psychosocial and sociocultural predictors in shaping young, heterosexual African American men's sexual schemas. A community sample (n=133) of men in a southeastern city of the United States completed quantitative self-report measures examining their attitudes and behavior related to casual sex, beliefs about masculinity, racial and cultural identity, and self-views of various sexual aspects of themselves. Results indicated that masculine ideology and cultural centrality were both positively related to men's sexual schemas. Cultural centrality explained 12 % of the variance in level of sexual schema, and had the strongest correlation of the predictor variables with sexual schema (r=.36). The need for more attention to the bidirectional relationships between masculinity, racial/cultural identity, and sexual schemas in prevention, intervention, and public health efforts for African American men is discussed