March
29, 2002
You
Are What You Eat: Paul Rozin to Link Food Choices and Culture
in Lecture April 4
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Paul
Rozin's talk is titled "Learning about Everything by
Studying Food."
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You will dive right
into a plate of chicken or fish but would be repulsed by a dish
of worms, lizards, or bugs. Although you associate guilt and issues
of right and wrong with morality, not with menus, you feel that
you are being "bad" when you eat chocolate, ice cream,
potato chips, and other fatty foods. How do such preferences and
feelings about food develop? What do they say about a culture?
Why do fried eggs mean "cholesterol" to Americans and
"breakfast" to the French? University of Pennsylvania
professor Paul Rozin asks such questions in his crosscultural
research on determinants of food choice and eating and diet-health
attitudes. Rozin will visit Mount Holyoke April 4–6 as a
2001–2002 Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar. His talk is being
cosponsored by MHC's interdisciplinary program in neuroscience
and behavior and the Department of Psychology and Education. All
are welcome to attend his lecture, titled "Learning about
Everything by Studying Food," Thursday, April 4, at 7:30
pm in Hooker Auditorium, as well as a reception at 8:30 pm in
the foyer of the Reese Psychology and Education Building.
Rozin's talk,
focusing on food as a system for studying how humans deal with
the world, will cover such issues as the acquisition of preferences
and aversions, determinants of food cuisine, universal predispositions
to food, disgust, the connection between food and morality, and
the regulation of food intake. In addition to the public lecture,
Rozin will deliver three seminars for students from psychology,
biology, neuroscience, and anthropology: "Food and Culture,"
"Disgust and Contagion," and "Natural Science and
Social Science: Observation and Experiment."
Says Karen Hollis,
professor and chair of psychology and education, "Professor
Rozin is a pivotal figure in the field of learning psychology.
Although much research in that field has a reputation for being
abstruse, Rozin's work demonstrates how basic scientific
research can be applied creatively to interesting and important
real-world issues. But allow me to plug Professor Rozin's
public lecture in another way: Anyone who is interested in good
food, in food for any reason, will be fascinated by what he has
to say—it's real food for thought!"
Rozin earned a bachelor's
degree, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Chicago and master's
and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He has been a member
of the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
since 1963. In 1997 he was named the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn
Professor. He serves as codirector of the school's Solomon
Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, and for
eight years he directed the university-wide undergraduate honors
program.
Currently the psychology
adviser for W. W. Norton, a member of the Society of Experimental
Psychologists, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and the American Psychological Society, he is the former
editor of the journal Appetite and was twice a fellow at
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In addition
to his work on psychological, cultural, and biological determinants
of human food choice, Rozin has researched and written on magical
thinking, cravings, determinants of pleasure, cultural evolution,
forgiveness, and identification. He conducts research in the United
States, India, Japan, and France.
With
David Kritchevsky, biochemistry professor at the University of
Pennsylvania's Wistar Institute, Rozin is now writing a book
for the general public on how to think sensibly about food and
how to understand the politics that influence scientific consensus
about what is healthful. "I want people to respect science
as the best show in town for establishing truth, for establishing
knowledge—but as one that is imperfect and takes a while
to get everything right," said Rozin. "I don't
want people either to think it's worthless or that it's
perfect. And that's very hard to do."
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