Practicing food anxiety: Making Australian mothers responsible for their families’ dietary decisions

Concerns about the relationship between diet, weight, and health find widespread expression in the media and are accompanied by significant individual anxiety and responsibilization. However, these pertain especially to mothers, who undertake the bulk of domestic labor involved in managing their families’ health and wellbeing. This article employs the concept of anxiety as social practice to explore the process whereby mothers are made accountable for their families’ dietary decisions. Drawing on data from an Australian study that explored the impact of discourses of childhood obesity prevention on mothers, the article argues that mothers’ engagements with this value-laden discourse are complex and ambiguous, involving varying degrees of self-ascribed responsibility and blame for children's weight and diets. We conclude by drawing attention to the value of viewing food anxiety as social practice, in highlighting issues that are largely invisible in both official discourses and scholarly accounts of childhood obesity prevention

Feeding friends and others: Boundaries of intimacy and distance in sociable meals

This is about “eating in” with friends and others. Georg Simmel suggests that eating together is a profound intersection of the social and the individual, since what the individual eats, no one else can eat under any circumstances. This research uses qualitative interviews and participant observations to explore occasions where people inviting non-kin into their households for food and sociability. Using the work of Mary Douglas, Marjorie DeVault, and Pierre Bourdieu, I explore the concrete pleasures and labors of cooking and the discourses of food that shape the experience. When people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to partake of a meal within their household, they are engaging in forms of sociability, delineating lines of intimacy and distance. Chapters describe the events themselves, the shared meal and the sociable moments surrounding it, as well as the performances of self that are created through these everyday interactions. Narratives describe potlucks, dinner parties, buffets and barbecues as social forms that express something about the relationships being enacted. Each involves different degrees of formality, different roles and social expectations for participants, and different divisions of labor in the actual production of the food, the event, and social interactions. People choose to participate in these events as a way of constructing close relationships that are not necessarily rooted in the obligations associated with kinship. Commensality with friends and others is a key component to the ongoing construction of gender and class boundaries in contemporary America. Analyzing people\u27s narratives along with texts like Emily Post\u27s Etiquette and Martha Stewart\u27s Entertaining, I suggest that domestic hospitality is a shifting social form, where an ethos of comfort and individuality often collides with more formal cultural templates of sociable meals. Among my interviewees, formal dinner parties remain important to upper middle class professionals, generally requiring invisible labor done by women, even when men cook. Others modify formality through buffets, asking guests to contribute to the meal, and using commercial foods. Potlucks are the most informal social form, with a potentially egalitarian division of labor and greater opportunities for diverse groups from different social strata to share food

Representations

Representations -- Hiding Gender and Race / Alice P. Julier -- Indian Spices across the Black Waters / Sharmila Sen -- The Border as Barrier and Bridge: Food, Gender, and Ethnicity in the San Luis Valley of Colorado / CArole M. Counihan

Vehicle detection and counting from VHR satellite images: efforts and open issues

4 pages, planned for a conference submissionDetection of new infrastructures (commercial, logistics, industrial or residential) from satellite images constitutes a proven method to investigate and follow economic and urban growth. The level of activities or exploitation of these sites may be hardly determined by building inspection, but could be inferred from vehicle presence from nearby streets and parking lots. We present in this paper two deep learning-based models for vehicle counting from optical satellite images coming from the Pleiades sensor at 50-cm spatial resolution. Both segmentation (Tiramisu) and detection (YOLO) architectures were investigated. These networks were adapted, trained and validated on a data set including 87k vehicles, annotated using an interactive semi-automatic tool developed by the authors. Experimental results show that both segmentation and detection models could achieve a precision rate higher than 85% with a recall rate also high (76.4% and 71.9% for Tiramisu and YOLO respectively)

Vulnerability, Relationality, and Dependency: Feminist Conceptual Resources for Food Justice

This article articulates how core concepts in feminist ethical and social theory such as vulnerability, relationality, and dependency are central for understanding both injustices in contemporary food systems and how best to pursue food justice. It argues that denials of dependency, relationality, and vulnerability take the form of normal, but ethically problematic, attitudes and practices, such as reductionism, detachment, and privatization, and thus constitute the underlying shared roots of myriad agricultural and food-related injustices. In particular, this feminist approach helps resolve the tension between critiques of the industrial food system and critiques of the sociocultural politics of food and health