May 8: "The Displacing Foods of Modern Commerce"

Seremetakis talks about the reshaping of everyday experience in relation to global forces transforming our food system as these occurred in her hometown in Greece. How can we see this reflected in the Highland Ecuadorian community studied by Weismantel?

In particular, she documents the incursion of highly processed foods into a local peasant economy in ways that go beyond their being an occasional novelty to an everyday necessity. What larger economic changes does this index?

How can we see this in our own context in terms of the transformation of food into a simulacrum of food (in which food is a neutral substrate in which things like taste and texture are engineered rather than emerging from the food itself) as discussed by Haden? How do these "edible food-like substances" (to use a phrase borrowed from Michael Pollan) become everyday necessities?

Don't forget to bring in quotes from the readings as a jumping off point for your discussion.