M Day

Food and Everyday Life provides a qualitative, interpretive, and interdisciplinary examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Edited by Thomas M. Conroy, the book offers a number of complementary approaches and topics around the parameters of the “ordinary, everyday” perspective on food. These studies highlight aspects of food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the discourse on food.Chapters discuss examples ranging from the cultural meanings of food as represented on television, to the practices of food budgeting, to the cultural politics of such practices as sustainable brewing and developing new forms of urban agriculture. A number of the studies focus on the relationships between food, eating practices, and the body. Each chapter examines a particular (and in many instances, highly unique) food practice, and each includes some key details of that practice. Taken together, the chapters show us how the everyday practices of food are both familiar and, yet at the same time, ripe for further discovery.

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theorizing about the natural origins of religion. More specifically, it argues that Darwin's commitment to locating elementary forms of the religious life in non-human animals was informed by his desire to sever the connection between the moral status of being human and the anthropological status of having a religion. The essay concludes that when we carefully examine the Darwinian solution to the evolutionary puzzle of religion, we discover how his naturalist project was structured in quite fundamental ways by his normative commitments.

This article is concerned with the childhood experience that seems to be preparatory for the onset of bulimia. Three women's serial experiences of bulimia were investigated and one pattern of experiencing that led to bulimia emerged. As the interview process deepened, the data moved from symptom-related to life-related. The general structure that captured the essence of the lived experience of bulimia remained the same but the individual experiences varied as these women live out their unique lives. In understanding the totality of the phenomenon of bulimia, it is important to remember that although each of the six key constituents is described separately, in the life-world all the constituents merge together as they interact with each other and with the whole of the experience. These bulimic women reported having family backgrounds in which they experienced a sense of diminished self and dissatisfaction in interactions with significant others and self. They found themselves pressured to maintain a less than integrated life, and in rapid transition from 'awareful' behaving to automatic and anonymous functioning. A psychological hunger seems to possess them and this is lived out during the anonymous phase of their existence. Their need for the mastery and control ordinarily lacking in their lives becomes a symptomatic expression that has relevance for them in respect to the deep psychological pain that is only partially expressed. The phenomenal body and self are given priority over objective reality, resulting in distorted perceptions of "fatness" and feelings of terror of "fat."

Although the theological elements of Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy have received careful scrutiny, his reflections on economic issues have largely been overlooked. This article takes a small step towards redressing this state of affairs. Rather than argue that Boyle – like John Locke or David Hume – was as interested in political economy as he was in discovering the nature of Nature, the article treats him as a point of entry for considering how early-modern England negotiated the revolutionary cultural and economic changes that emerged as capitalism took command. More specifically, it uses one of Boyle’s less-famous inventions – a hydrostatic device for discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit coinage – in order to explore how economic exchange began to acquire a patina of ‘objectivity’ in the 17th-century imagination.

There is much law and many guidelines surrounding the whole issue of the indemnity for human volunteers when it comes to clinical trials. The system that had been put in place to protect individual volunteer drug trialists seems largely to have worked by the fact that there are so few examples of legal cases being issued. However, recent events have shown that when the system fails it fails somewhat spectacularly. The difficulty for groups such as the ethics committee is that lawyers look for targets to try and meet the difference between the claims and the monies available and it might therefore always be possible that the ethics committee becomes centre stage in terms of the pursuit of the action.

Comparatively few studies have analyzed the social behavior of multinational corporations (MNCs) at a cross-national level. To address this gap in the literature, we propose a “transnational” model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that permits identification of universal domains, yet incorporates the flexibility and adaptability demanded by international research. The model is tri-dimensional in that it juxtaposes: 1) Bartlett and Ghoshal’s (1998, 2000) typology of MNC strategies (multinational, global, “international,” and transnational); 2) the three conceptual domains of CSR (human rights, labor, and the environment) proposed by the UN Global Compact (Compact 2003); and 3) Zenisek’s (1979) description of three CSR perspectives (ideological, societal, and operational). The end result is a multidimensional typology that permits the organization and development of empirical CSR research in an internationalsetting.