Globalizarea şi practicile de consum alimentar

Abstract

With multiple facets and dimensions – economic and political, religious, cultural and social which interrelate in a vast and complex framework, the globalization is the irreversible process that equally affects us all. By penetrating national borders, it requires a reorientation and reorganization of activities which can reshape local diversity, ethnic identity and community values. Concerning the global market, it has also penetrated it by creating new generic structures – supermarkets – being considered the local expression of marketing and globalization. They use standard codes to ensure uniform, quality and “ethical” safety of food content. These standards represent a form of knowledge that intends to go beyond the ways of local practical knowledge used in food production and trade. The internationalization of gastronomy against the background of consumer society is global, technogenic and urbanized and inevitably involves changes in eating habits in everyday “cultural” practices which intervene daily in the lifestyle through fast food, pizza, Chinese food, Indian or Mexican food. In the world of digitalization and advanced technologies, which favor the extension of sedentary lifestyles, as a result the cases of overweight of the population increase in regions of the globe where such cases practically did not exist. Among the reasons invoked from this perspective we mention the control of food and agriculture which is concentrated in transnational corporations and their distribution chains, becoming “increasingly global”, and the food and practices through which they are produced become increasingly more standardized. No country or region can be isolated anymore, what is happening somewhere in the world is no longer a local process. All discoveries, victories and cataclysms affect the whole world.