Congratulations to Kristie O'Neill and Daniel Silver whose article won the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award for 2017 for the ASA Section on Consumers and Consumption. Kristie is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology. She is currently working on her dissertation, A New Doctrine of Development which is supervised by Erik Schneiderhan, Dan Silver, Josee Johnston, and Zaheer Baber. Dan Silver is an Associate Professor of Sociology specializing in the sociology of culture and theory.
Their winning paper is "From Hungry to Healthy: Simmel, Self-Cultivation and the Transformative Experience of Eating for Beauty" published in the journal, Food, Culture & Society 20(1): 101-132. Please see the abstract below.
Kristie O'Neill and Daniel Silver. 2017. From Hungry to Healthy: Simmel, Self-Cultivation and the Transformative Experience of Eating for Beauty. Food, Culture & Society 20(1): 101-132.
We examine American Cosmopolitan in order to understand how specific foods have been linked to dominant forms of beauty. Three food-beauty nexuses emerge, namely moralism, strategy and holism. To understand how women engaged with these nexuses, we draw on Simmel’s “religiosity.” Simmel traced deeply-felt experiences like self-cultivation (beauty) through cultural objects (food) using religious imagery. In this respect, changing messages about diets suggest profound encounters with the limits of forms of beauty. But the conflict of culture is also apparent: it is difficult to create new forms of beauty or do away with gendered beauty standards altogether.