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Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 264–265

Book review

The psychology of food and eating: A fresh approach to

theory and method

John L. Smith (Ed.); Palgrave, Hampshire, UK, 235pp

There are few readable books about the psychology offood and eating. John Smith’s book is therefore a raretreat. His style is refreshingly personal, the text litteredwith anecdotes, jokes, and asides. It is also amusing andaccessible. This is particularly laudable as The Psychol-

ogy of Food and Eating reviews some very difficult textsfrom an unusually divergent field. Anthropology.sociology, psychology, and physiology have all madeclaims on the subject of our relationship with food,often with little reference to the contributions of eachother’s disciplines. John L. Smith’s approach is to drawfrom all these approaches but also to place food where itbelongs—in the context of everyday life—and toremember the pleasures of preparing and eating food.This is also unusual. Psychologists are not, as a rule,very good at discussing pleasure.In line with his post-modern stance, Smith prefaces

his book by putting himself at the centre of the work,giving us an account of his life with emphasis on hisculinary experiences. The first chapter of the book hedescribes as ‘an appetiser’ in which he covers thedevelopment of appetites and tastes from baby to adult,briefly discusses the social construction of food pre-ference, finishing with some speculation about thecontribution psychologists might make to the study offamine, poverty and malnutrition—traditionally thedomain of the sociologists and economists. He thenreviews the contributions made by a variety of fields ofstudy to our understanding of what we eat and why.This does not produce a mind-numbing, thesis-style‘review-of-the-literature’, but rather an entertainingaccount, illustrated by choice studies from each bodyof work. Smith’s selection of studies might make himvulnerable to accusations of subjectivity. However, henever claims to be objective even if his philosophicalstance allowed for the possibility.He begins each chapter by setting out his stall and

making his prejudices plain. There are review chapterson nonbiological and biological aspects of eating,covering psychoanalytic theory, structuralism, codes ofeating, semiology, class and culture in food consump-tion, the control of hunger and appetite, the biochem-istry of flavour and some ‘kitchen chemistry’. There is,however, remarkably little mainstream psychology. To a

large extent, this is explained by Smith’s reluctance todiscuss the social psychological work on food choice. Herefers to his previous book The Psychology of Action

which describes in detail the theory of plannedbehaviour which forms the basis for much of the currentpsychological literature on food. Not wishing to coverthe same ground twice, there is only passing reference tothis literature in The Psychology of Food and Eating.This omission makes the book seem slightly lop-sided,

but by doing this, Smith is in fact pointing up thegenerally lop-sided approach that psychology has toissues of food and eating. Unless you are describingpathological eating behaviours, such as anorexia orbulimia, are interested in the neurological control ofappetite, or are prepared to work within the confines ofthe theory of planned behaviour, there is no arenawithin which to discuss ‘food’ psychology. If you wish toplace your work in a ‘real world’ context, then you haveto turn to other discourses within social science. Andthis is what Smith does. His journey through thesealternatives is illuminating. For those of us who havenever read L!evi-Strauss, Bourdieu or Lacan, he providesa useful introduction to their approach to food, thoughhe is not always kind to them or to the other thinkerswhose work he reviews. I particularly enjoyed Smith’streatment of Freud, Klein and the pleasure-painprinciple. On Freud, he muses about how Freud couldpossibly have known that children falling asleep full ofmilk after breast-feeding would show the same expres-sion of bliss that they would show later in life afterorgasm. He chooses some amusingly eccentric sectionsfrom Klein’s discussion of breast-feeding, admits thatthe material is difficult to handle, and concludes thatone might be seriously tempted to dismiss the approachas a ‘load of old tosh’(p. 30). He goes on to debunkBarthes and agrees with others who claim Lacan’s styleof writing to be deliberately obscure. At the end of hiscanter through the ‘biomedical discourse’, he concludesthat control of appetite and body weight has probablymore to do with ‘intention’ (i.e. psychology) than theaction of ‘neuropeptide Y’ (i.e. physiology).With the introduction of ‘intention’, we are back to

psychology. People’s eating habits and food choices arenot simply the result of class, culture, the media, genderor hormones, but are also the outcome of individualintention and agency. Most of the rest of the book is,therefore, devoted to descriptions of Smith’s dinnerparties and excursions to restaurants, in which he

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explores his own intentions, their effect on his foodchoices and the effect of those choices on him. Hedescribes the process of hosting a dinner party andeating breakfast, lunch and tea in a selection of caf!esand restaurants. The value of these idiographic accountsis that they describe the social and physical contexts ofthe eating occasions, and his reflexive style is helpfulbecause it explains how the context of these eatingoccasions is important in shaping the food choices hemakes. During the first of these occasions he describeshow he ends up choosing and eating food he does notlike and does not want apparently because of the socialnorms operating in the restaurant and its ratherconfusing layout:

I do remember I was rather confused. I just had achance to glance at some dishes on display beneaththeir labels on the serving counter, and then thewoman in front was gone and this young man wasasking me what I wanted.

yI was panicking. I had to make a decision, yet Icouldn’t see anything conventional like a menu. yInoticed the dish in the middle, directly in front of meand remembered that I had had it before.yI decidedit would do. (pp. 151)

So Smith eats a piece of potato pie with tomato sauce(a) because he was confused by the restaurant layout, (b)because it was directly in front of him, and (c) becausehe felt pressured into making a quick decision by thepresence of the serving person. Later in the account, hedescribes buying a drink he does not want because hecannot see what he does want and is conscious of theimpatience of other customers around him.The social and physical context of the eating

environment seems to have been important aspects ofthe social psychology of this eating experience. How-ever, this is not Smith’s focus. He is more concernedwith the methodology. As a self-professed ‘critical socialpsychologist’, his express intention in these sections ofthe book is to offer an alternative to the mainstream,quantitative approach to the psychology of food. This is

a laudable aim and alternative research methodologiesin this area are definitely to be welcomed. However, it isnot clear from Smith’s account that his idiographicapproach necessarily takes us any further forward. Hesays that the main use of his accounts of eatingexperiences is in generating research questions, but doesnot make clear what these questions might be. From anenvironmental psychologist’s point of view, this repre-sents a missed opportunity. There are so many featuresof the eating experience that common sense woulddictate must be important in explaining why we eat aswe do, but on which there is almost no research. Smith’sconfusion in the restaurant could be put down to hisdifficulty discerning the ‘place rules’ (Canter, 1983). If hehad better understood the layout and menu, he mighthave chosen a different dish, and his eating experiencemight have coincided with his expectations on enteringthe restaurant.Ultimately, John L. Smith is to be congratulated for

producing an engaging book about a thoroughlyengaging subject, and for striking out in a newmethodological direction. As he says, working out whatto put in the place of the nomothetic is by no means aneasy task.

References

Canter, D. (1983). Putting situations in their place: Foundations for a

bridge between social and environmental psychology. In A.

Furnham (Ed.), Social behaviour in context (1st Ed.). Newton,

MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Mary Barker is a research fellow at the Medical Research Council

Environmental Epidemiology Unit in Southampton. Her research

interests include the psychology of food and the eating habits of

young women.

Mary BarkerMedical Research Council Environmental

Epidemiology Unit, Southampton General Hospital,

Southampton SO 16 6YD, UK

ARTICLE IN PRESSBook review / Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004) 264–265 265