Alimentary Delinquency
Résumé
Alimentary delinquency, a term originally coined by French sociologist Pierre Aimez, will be used here to designate a wide range of eating practices that are generally considered by society at large as aberrant and as going beyond the normal, comprising a number of disturbed ingestion practices that are widely considered as taboo and/or excessive: ingestion of nonfood (nonnutritive) items or of excessive amounts of food, doing things with food that should not be done, and forcing/duping people into eating something they would not normally eat. Although evidence of alimentary delinquency as described dates back to antiquity, it will be discussed here as specific to the modern, contemporary period, as a symptom of “gastro-anomy,” a term coined by Claude Fischler to describe the consequences on eating and food-making practices of the bio-cultural crisis experienced by modern eaters. Fischler...