Navegar é preciso: sentidos e significados da alimentação de jovens em universidades públicas no Brasil e em Portugal em tempos de crises

Abstract

When food is analysed as an aspect of social life it reveals that eating practices are intensely ordered and merge themselves with material and symbolic issues that are constantly being negotiated in the subjects' practices and can only be understood from their point of view. In this perspective, we seek to understand some senses and meanings of contemporary eating practices. We developed an ethnographic research in which the eating practices of university students were observed in two public institutions, one in Lisbon and another in Rio de Janeiro. Being young and attending higher education characterizes a unique profile of youth. It is observed because this profile refers to young people who have the possibility to study or to reconcile it with work, and also because university life has a singular modus vivendi. In this meaning, each University is a microcosm where operates a habitus built in social relations in this social space which delimits a way of what it is to be young and university student. It involves not only the academic formation, but also the relationship stablished between the university students. We analysed in this research the importance of eating practices, inside the University and in places in the city related to the university life, in the construction of the social relations between the young people. We observed that the eating practices of university students (together with clothes and music) are symbolic of a mood for the new and representative of being in a hyper-modern and interconnected world. In the urban and tourist scenario of these metropolises, in a context of economic and political crises in both countries, eating practices of university students reflect these tensions and at the same time are moved by joy and companionship