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Leon
Rappoport, Ph.D
Author, “How We Eat”
Dr.
Rappoport received a Ph.D. in personality-social
psychology at the University of Colorado
in 1963, and is professor of psychology
at Kansas State University. He is the
author of a textbook on personality
development, co-editor of anthologies
on social psychology, psychohistory,
and judgment- decision-making, and co-author
with George Kren of "The Holocaust
and the Crisis of Human Behavior."
He is currently conducting research
on the psychosocial meanings of food
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in 1825 Brillat-Savarin precociously observed,
"tell me what you eat and I will tell
you what you are." In “How We Eat”,
Leon Rappoport uses the insights of modern
psychology to prove how profound the French
food writer’s comment was by answering
such questions as: What accounts for the broad
range of differences in human eating habits?
Why do so many teenagers begin to resist their
parent’s familiar diets? What can we
learn about a person by observing how they
eat?
Drawing
on a wide variety of psychological, historical,
cultural, and biological sources, Rappoport
illuminates the various existential forces
that shape our eating behaviors. Along the
way, he explores the origins and development
of many of our common foods, cuisines and
ways of eating. Although touching on everything
from designer diets to cannibalism, table
manners, eating disorders, eccentricities,
aversions, vegetarianism, and the uses of
food in matters of sex and aggression, he
maintain a consistent focus on everyday experience.
We learn how food and our eating habits form
the very foundation for our sense of consciousness.
Without eating, there is no being. And with
eating, comes the most basic, inescapable
experience of self-awareness that shapes our
perception of self and the world around us.
Rappoport concludes that from childhood onward,
our ability to control what we eat, or whether
or not to eat at all, is the single, most
basic aspect of life in which we have full
power to assert our autonomy. So, in truth,
"You really are what you eat."
website:
www.ksu.edu/psych/
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