A comensalidade nos Guias Alimentares da América Latina e Caribe

Abstract

The most innovative and effective Food-based Dietary Guidelines to promote adequate and healthy food are those that link health and the environment to cultural norms. This paper aimed to analyze whether and how the Food-based Dietary Guidelines of Latin American and Caribbean countries addressed the social aspects of eating, in order to know if these references were stimulating commensality, a social component of the eating act. This was a descriptive study and as a corpus were used the Food-based dietary guidelines of the Latin America and the Caribbean countries. Data were analyzed using the methodologies of content analysis and still images from three dimensions: food ambience, sharing group and ritual around the meal. Of the Caribbean Food Guides, only Cuba has raised questions related to the interests of the research, in text form. However, in the references of Latin America, these questions were portrayed by Colombia and Paraguay in still images, and Brazil, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Venezuela in both ways - textual and imagery. The guides from Brazil and Uruguay presented the social dimension successfully. Thus, they were considered here and by several researchers, government agencies and non-government related to food and agriculture as model guides.