Protected: “What’s in your lunchbox?”
Conversations about healthy food might seem objective and helpful, but they really reveal a lot more about our own judgments of other people.
- by
- Martha Sif Karrebaek
- with Heather Mejilla Flores and Evan Owens
WATCH & LISTEN
Danish rapper, Waqas Qadri, Lunchbox Mine
(lyrics below)
Lunch-box Mine
Livet er som en madpakke
Life is like a lunch-box
Man ved sgu aldrig hva man får
You bloody never know what you get
Rugbrødet ka være det samme men pålægget ka variere
The rye bread may be the same but the topping may vary
Især der hvor han kommer fra
Particularly where he comes from
Som lille knægt var min skolegang en smule anderledes end de andre børns
As a small lad my school-time was a bit different from that of the other kids
Vi ka grine af det nu men dengang var det ikke skægt
We may laugh of it now but back then it wasn’t fun
Den første knægt med skæg
The first kid with a beard
Den stod på rugbrødsmadder med kebab på
There was rye bread sandwiches with kebab
Hva fanden er det for noget som du har på madpakke min
What the fuck is it that you have in your lunch-box mine
Det kunne lugtes i hele kantinen og ja de gjorde grin men det var fint
It could be smelled in the entire canteen and yes they made fun but it was okay
må du ikke spise svin du da en underlig en
can’t you eat pork you’re really a strange one
Podcast:
Racial Food Stereotypes, Cultural Identity, and David Chang’s “Ugly Delicious.”
READ MORE
Original article:
Martha Sif Karrebaek. 2012.
What’s in your lunchbox today?
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(1):1-22.
Anne Allison. 1990.
Japanese mothers and obentos: The lunchbox as ideological state apparatus.
Anthropological Quarterly 64(4):195-208.
Amy Paugh & Carolina, Izquierdo. 2009.
Why is this a battle every night? Negotiating food and eating in American dinnertime interaction.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2):185–204.
JUMP IN
1. Discuss a time you felt that you were judged on the basis of your food or you judged someone else.
2. Which foods do you believe are “bad,” and which are “good”? Explain.
2. Which foods do you believe are “bad,” and which are “good”? Explain.
MEET US
Martha Sif Karrebæk
Professor at University of Copenhagen
I am a speaker of Danish, and I learned English, French, and Spanish in school. I spend a year in a French high-school in France and in an international American high-school in Thailand as a teenager; here I spoke French and English. As a linguist, I have studied other languages as an adult, too – in particular, Thai, Greenlandic Inuit/Eskimo, and Arabic. I find that the way people use a diversity of languages in many different ways to live their life and create relations is so interesting and important that I will never get tired of studying it.
Heather Mejilla Flores
Harvest Collegiate High School
I speak Spanish, English, and Spanglish.
Evan Owens
UMass Amherst
Growing up in Hawaiʻi, I spoke English and Japanese at home and learned ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi in school. After moving to New York, I took American Sign Language in high school and decided to study Portuguese in college after learning I had Japanese family in Brazil.
