(Posted 11-1-00)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
News Service Contact: Laurie Gengenbach, 336-334-5371
DR. TOM FITZGERALD DELIVERS LECTURES AT HELSINKI UNIVERSITY
GREENSBORO — Dr. Tom Fitzgerald, professor of anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, recently presented two invited lectures at Helsinki University in Finland.
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His lectures, "Nutritional Anthropology: Migration & Reciprocal Changes in Diet," and "Food Stereotypes & Healthcare," drew on his extensive research on nutritional anthropology.
Fitzgerald, a native of Lexington, earned his doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill and joined the faculty of UNCG in 1970. He has published six books and 86 articles, many of them from his nutritional research in the South Sea Islands. He also has surveyed changing food habits of migrant groups in North Carolina and the South Pacific, and studied sweet potato consumption in North Carolina as well as the food habits of African-Americans and whites.
To help researchers get people to talk about and remember what they actually eat -- versus what they only remember eating, Fitzgerald developed the Food Choice Game. It consists of a game board with three scales: Foods I like/dislike; foods I use most frequently/less frequently, and foods I think are healthful/not healthful. He presented the game to students at Helsinki University.
"Nutritional anthropology is such a fun area to work in, because people feel free to talk about food, and it is such a natural way to get into their cultures via such preferences," he said.
Fitzgerald’s latest research project, conducted jointly with Dr. Martha McEnally, professor of international business at UNCG, is "Aging, Identity & Possessions," which considers changes in identity and their relationships to the meaning of material possessions in the last stages of adulthood.
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