Consumers - Food - Consumer Behavior. Historical determinants of nutrition in the digital global society.

In the current profound transformation of society, economy and technology, nutrition has become the most important means of expressing identity, negotiating worldviews or even maintaining health and optimizing the body. At the same time, the future of the planet depends on the conditions in which food is produced. In politics, agriculture and the food trade, however, what we eat is usually considered primarily from an economic and technical point of view. Cultural factors here are at least as important as consumers follow different logics; traditional patterns, our "cultural baggage" or even milieu-specific values shape our eating habits. Based on these premises, the lecture spans a broad arc from the past to the present - and on this basis ventures a forecast for the food of the future.

Gunther Hirschfelder, Professor of Comparative Cultural Studies at Regensburg University, works on nutrition and agricultural research in cultural studies from a historical and contemporary perspective.