Lived food and judgments of taste at a time of disease

Medical nutritional therapy (MNT) is a key feature of treatment for and management of type 2 diabetes. There are two elements to this therapeutic approach: collecting a diet history and prescribing therapeutic diets. For the clinical encounters observed in this paper, MNT often became a source of conflict between practitioners and patients. As clinicians endeavor to collect accurate information regarding food choices and eating so as to offer appropriate medical advice, and patients struggle to come to terms with a sickness in which food and eating have become toxic and risky, "judgments of taste" regarding food and patterns of eating become especially profound for both practitioners and those who seek treatment. Bourdieu's (1984) insights into the social situatedness of "taste" provides a useful framework for examining clinical practice and individual foodways. MNT is based upon and promotes a "taste for necessity," - "a form of adaptation to and consequently acceptance of the necessary" (ibid. 372), which judges food choices and eating patterns in terms of the bio-function of food and eating. In addition to this particular judgment of taste, study participants managing type 2 diabetes rely on other "judgments" that have been cultivated over the course of their own socially situated lives. At a time of disease these judgments of taste are conjoined as ongoing, multiply inflected lived histories of food and eating. Collecting life histories of food is one useful method for researching these patterned and idiosyncratic food and eating experiences.