Social and cultural dynamics become faster and more complex thus impacting functions of life values including character of food consumption. Arguably, industrialization, rationalization and globalization have ambivalent consequences for human beings today. On the one hand, food consumption leaves its local cultural, seasonal and climatic context, becomes more efficiently and less time-consuming; its quality is controlled. On the other, – reflection of food by human beings becomes manipulated by global businesses pursuing pragmatic interests by means of imposing cosmopolitan food and respective tastes. Thus, new aspects of de-humanization and alienation do emerge along with culturally conditioned diseases. This is a background for sociologists' efforts to re-discover explicit and latent functions of eating and analyze new vulnerabilities.

 

social and cultural dynamics; food; agrarian revolutions; vulnerabilities; hierarchy of eating; cosmopolitan food; cosmopolitan taste; hybrid food; fast food; performative food