Descriptions

This page offers a comprehensive exploration of key terms crucial for understanding the metadata and categorization system used in the Alimentopia literature collection.
Here you can also find detailed information for interpreting the data within the repository. By following the link, you can access the Alimentopia database, which features excerpts from utopian, dystopian, and science fiction literature relevant to food studies, all unified under this collection.
The database will be revised periodically, allowing the opportunity to suggest modify and contribute to its content. Over time, new subjects will evolve into new research questions, inviting further participation and collaboration!

Questions

This research is driven by a set of key questions. We wanted to know:

Who prepares, serves and cleans up after the meal?
Who do people eat with?
Where do meals take place (at home, at restaurants, in community, in canteens)?
Are there any prohibited kinds of food or drink? Which ones?
What do people eat and drink?
What are the biological and psychological consequences for human health?
What happens to the leftovers?

Each question is answered directly through excerpts from specific novels, which can also be filtered and selected from the Utopian Literature page.
The purpose of these questions is to explore both societal and individual aspects related to food, addressing topics such as who consumes, prepares, serves, and cleans up after meals. They also examine the collective and ritualistic nature of eating and drinking, as well as the biological and psychological effects of food on human health. Additionally, the questions touch on broader ecological concerns, such as the fate of food waste and leftovers.

Subjects Descriptions

TYPE OF DIET is a theme that explores which types of diets are mentioned or described in the book. It allows access to the excerpts, connected to what type of diet the society or individuals consume.

It is divided into the following categories:

Carnivorous – relating to a person, animal, or other living thing that eats meat

Omnivorous – naturally able to eat both plants and meat

Pescetarian – someone who eats fish but not meat

Vegetarian – a person who does not eat meat for health or religious reasons or because they want to avoid being cruel to animals

Vegan – a person who does not eat or use any animal products, such as meat, fish, eggs, cheese, or leather

Other – Any other category that better describes the type of diet reported or described in the book

FOOD AND ECOLOGY are the themes connected to the ideas, descriptions, and consequences of food waste and ecological concerns in the different societies explored in the stories of the repository. It shows how food gets wasted, by whom, and what happens to the leftovers.

For now, this theme includes only one category:

Food waste – refers to edible food that goes uneaten, occurring at various stages of the supply chain, including production, processing, distribution, retail, and consumption. This waste can happen for a variety of reasons at each stage, contributing to the significant loss of nearly one-third of the global food supply.

TEXTS refer to the type of literary book that is included in the repository.

Utopian – Utopianism can be understood as social dreaming. A utopian society is a non-existent one described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived (Sargent, 1994).

Dystopian – Dystopia or negative Utopia? A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived (Sargent, 1994).

Science Fiction – texts about an imagined future, predominantly about space travel or other planets.

OTHER RELEVANT TOPICS is a theme allowing one to filter through some of the most important social, class and humanitarian issues that are explored through the excerpts from the novels. The issues that can be explored are:

Food and Gender –Through this filter, it is possible to identify novels that explore the relationship between food and gender. This filter primarily helps answer questions about how food production, preparation, consumption, and distribution are linked to specific genders and how these connections reflect gender stereotypes in different societies.

Food and Class – This filter allows to explore novels that examine the connection between food and social class. It helps address questions about how class structures influence access to, production, and consumption of food, and how these relationships reflect broader societal inequalities and class distinctions.

Food and War- Many novels in the repository reflect the consequences of war on food production, consumption, and overall accessibility. This filter highlights that relationship. Through the questions answered by the excerpts, readers can explore how conflict affects food production, distribution, and scarcity, revealing how food becomes both a weapon and a means of survival during war, while also illustrating the broader struggles and hardships faced by those impacted by conflict.

GENRE is a theme that shows which type of literary genre is represented in the database. For the moment, all books fall under the following category:

Novel is a fictional prose narrative, typically lengthy and intricate, that explores human experiences in a creative and imaginative manner.

Repository metadata vocabulary

In the full item page of each item in the database, you will find a lengthy list of metadata. Whenever possible, we adopted standard vocabularies, such as Dublin Core. To better understand the handle the information, below we describe the meaning of each term:

Alimentopia.company answers the question: Who do people eat with?
Alimentopia.consequences answer the question: What are the biological and psychological consequences for human health?
Alimentopia.leftovers answers the question: What happens to the leftovers?
Alimentopia.places answers the question: Where do meals take place (at home, at restaurants, in community, in canteens)?
Alimentopia.servers answers the question: Who prepares, serves and cleans up after the meal?
Alimentopia.species describes the kind of food the excerpt is referring to: meat, fruits, etc.

Other information:

Dc.contributor.author – the name of the author of the novel
Dc.date.accessioned – the date when the data appeared in the repository
Dc.date.available – the date since when the data is available in the repository
Dc.date.first_ed – The original edition date
Dc.date.issued – The original publication date
Dc.description.abstract – The short description of the novel
Dc.identifier.uri – The link to the metadata in the repository
Dc.language.iso – The original language of the publication
dc.publisher – The name of the original publisher
Dc.rights – The description of the data accessibility
Dc.subject – contain descriptions of what type is the text (Utopian/ Dystopian). It can also contain information about Type of Diet, and Food and Ecology.
dc.title – The Original Title
Dc.title.alternative – The English Translation of the title

Information about the books:

Name – The name of the book
Size – The size of the file.
Format – the format of the data (ex. Joint Photographic Experts Group/JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF)
Description – Description of the book