Dear Pelin,
Thanks for your note. I appreciate this insight into your thesis project and find many of the ideas intriguing.
If I may, I'll offer two comments on an aspect of the underlying rationale. Your decision to use Maslow's (1943, 1997) hierarchy of needs offers an interesting starting point. This is significant. If you do this, you must also look more deeply into psychology, particularly Maslow's work. While food involves basic physiological survival needs, the interactions and rituals surrounding food involve survival needs, deficiency needs, and growth needs.
To survive physically, Turkish migrants to the Netherlands could shop at any Dutch supermarket or eat at any Dutch restaurant. If they didn't like Dutch cuisine, they could eat the food of any migrant group, Chinese, Sumatran, or Spanish. Adequate food supply involves safety and security needs. One must move up the hierarchy to love and belonging, then to self-worth and self-esteem to find national identity and the national cuisine of migrant groups. But because interaction and the rituals surrounding food also involve growth and self-expression, the top three levels of the hierarchy also come into play — knowledge and understanding, aesthetic needs, and self-actualisation. This involves many issues.
The other point is the comment that only human beings share food. This is not so. Other animals share food, from our fellow primates to more distant vertebrate cousins — along with others. This statement requires a fact check with ethologists.
All told, I enjoyed your comments. This looks like a good beginning.
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | University email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Private email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia
References
Maslow, Abraham H. 1943. "A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 370–96.
Maslow, Abraham H. 1997. Toward a Theory of Human Motivation. 3rd Edition. New York: Pearson.
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