The Cultural Context of Hunger

One approach to increasing understanding of hunger and its psychological
components is to examine hunger in its cultural context. In American culture,
the experience of hunger is inextricably tied to weight, eating, body
image, self-concept, social definitions of fatness and thinness, and other factors
which take the issue of hunger far beyond the physiological facts. Historian
Hillel Schwartz has traced the American cultural preoccupation with
hunger, eating, and diet by examining the cultural fit between shared fictions
about the body and their psychological, social, and cultural consequences.
Hunger becomes a broader social issue when viewed in the context
of the culture’s history of obsession with dieting, weight control, and body
image. The personal experience of hunger is affected by the social and historical
context.

Eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive overeating
provide evidence of the complex relationship between the physiological
and psychological components of hunger. Obesity has also been examined
using medical and psychological models. The etiology of hunger’s relationship
to eating disorders has provided insight, if not consensus, by investigating
the roles of hereditary factors, social learning, family systems, and
multigenerational transmission in hunger as well as the socially learned eating
patterns, food preferences, and cultural ideals that can mediate the hunger
drive. Body image, eating restraint, and eating attitudes have been assessed
by various methods. The focus of much of the research on hunger
beyond the early animal experiments has been eating disorders. The findings
confirm that hunger is more than a physiological need and is affected
by a multitude of variables. 412