Abstract
Prescribed and supported by the state, public catering in Hungary fulfils a common social need; its aim is to meet the nutritional requirements of consumers in terms of both quantity and quality. Public catering is legally regulated and is also important from the perspective of health policy. As the smallest unit of common catering, family meals differ from public catering in several respects. One fundamental difference is that public catering rests on scientific foundations: it is planned, organized, and controlled by a qualified manager. This manager may be a trained dietitian or a catering manager, according to the National Qualifications Register. The training for these two roles is interlinked and goes back more than a century.
Abstract
The present study examines the Hungarian practice of public catering for children from an economic perspective, bearing in mind that the production and consumption of food is, at the same time, an economic activity. Taking this approach, we focus on which institutions contribute to or hinder efficiency, by which we mean the efforts of economic agents to generate maximum welfare from the available (meager) resources. For social reasons, the supply of public catering for children is a statutory obligation on the part of local authorities, where efficiency must be combined with social considerations. The study reviews the rationing mechanism of school meals catering as a public service, looking first at the main factors determining the level of demand for public catering for children, and then at the main factors that influence supply.
Abstract
The study examines the provision of school-holiday meals for children and shows how it is embedded in society. Proper nutrition is very important for children's physical and cognitive development. However, international research shows that children's social and cultural background has a significant impact on their nutrition. To reduce these disparities and ensure that all children have a healthy diet, effective government intervention is necessary. In Hungary, school canteens and free meals during school holidays for children in need serve this purpose. The latter service is of great importance for the children of families affected by food poverty. Yet, statistics show that some of these children are unable to use this service. This study examines the period before 2016 and highlights the social embeddedness of the service and its consequences on the provision. Whether child food poverty is perceived as a social issue and a common cause generating community intervention largely depends on the local actor's correct perception of the issue, the local appraisal of need, and the consideration of parents' “deservingness.” The study also makes some suggestions about areas where further interventions should focus to improve the nutrition of children affected by food poverty.
Abstract
In Sweden, free school lunch has been served for more than a hundred years, and it is now a democratic right of all elementary school children. The school meal has always been associated with different opinions and subject to much debate. The aim of the study is to explore school meal food and taste memories in a convenient sample of Swedish adults. A web-based survey was carried out in the summer of 2020. The 246 respondents attended school between the 1940s and the early 2000s. The material was collectively analyzed using NVivo 12 Pro (QSR International), resulting in two overarching themes. “The traditional school food heritage” theme consisted of accounts of traditional Swedish food through the ages and meanings attached to it. Memories were connected to likes and dislikes of certain foods and dishes. “The social school food heritage” theme consisted of accounts of coercion, control, and peer pressure, but also joy, friendship, and commensality. The Swedish school meal is a shared experience surrounded by strong feelings and memories regarding the food and the context. It means a lot both culturally and socially, acting as a carrier of a common food heritage.
Abstract
In the social sciences, it is a classic practice to contrast the development of the countryside and the city as two endpoints of a chain. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, the validity of the rural-urban dichotomy has been increasingly questioned, and we are now talking about two interconnected and complementary systems instead. In examining contemporary school meals, we ourselves observed this close and varied pattern of intertwining between the city and the countryside. Therefore, we believe it is useful to identify rural and urban features in contemporary public catering practices, and to outline mixed models that can be placed between the two endpoints in space and time. All of this can be edifying because urbanized foodways, following current food health and gastronomic trends, sustainability, climate and environmental protection requirements, as well as social considerations, return from time to time to the old village farming practices and foodways in various ways, and utilize knowledge related to traditional farming. Illustrated with specific examples, the study outlines three types of school catering models, from the oldest practice called “rural” to the “urban” (urbanized) type. A comparison of these types of public catering practices reveals the problems observed in today’s public catering.
Abstract
Background and Aims
Advocates of psychedelic medicine have positioned psychedelics as a novel therapeutic intervention that will solve the mental health crisis by liberating individuals from their entrenched habits and limiting beliefs. Despite claims for novelty, the psychedelics industry is engaging in the same profit-oriented approaches that contributed to poor clinical outcomes with SSRIs and other earlier pharmaceuticals, which threatens to undermine their purported clinical benefits.
Methods
We present evidence that the liberatory rhetoric of psychedelic medicalization promotes neoliberal, individualised treatments for distress, which distracts from collective efforts to address root causes of suffering through systemic change. Drawing examples from the psychedelics industry, we illustrate how the discourse of psychedelic medicalisation subjects socially-determined distress to psychotropic intervention through the mechanisms of depoliticisation, productivisation, pathologisation, commodification, and de-collectivisation.
Results
Rather than disrupting or subverting the psychopharmaceutical status quo, the psychedelic industry's current instantiation aligns with and upholds key facets of neoliberal ideology by adhering to the same facilitative mechanisms that scholars identified in the antidepressant industry. We identify these common mechanisms in examples unique to the psychedelics industry, including the search for psychedelic analogues and political lobbying to reschedule psychedelics.
Conclusion
We demonstrate how a neoliberal mental health paradigm that individualises and interiorizes mental distress cannot meaningfully resolve suffering with ubiquitous origins in the current sociopolitical environment, which is characterised by inequality, precarity, exploitation, and ecological collapse. As a result, psychedelics must decouple from neoliberal incentives, and demonstrate efficacy, if they are to facilitate durable improvements in well-being and prosocial outcomes.
Abstract
Background
This study aimed at improving a real-time polymerase-chain-reaction (qPCR) assay for the detection of Histoplasma capsulatum, a fungal pathogen that can cause severe respiratory infections in humans, in clinical and soil samples.
Methods
Primer and probes were in-silico designed, in-silico and in-vitro evaluated including clinical biopsy materials and finally subjected to a real-world application with collected soil samples.
Results
Applying the qPCR assay with liver and lung biopsies from 71 patients each, including 59 patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as well as with Sabouraud (SAB) agar culture as the diagnostic reference standard, diagnostic accuracy of the qPCR assay of 100% (5/5) sensitivity and 96% (63/66) specificity for liver samples and 100% (4/4) sensitivity and 94% (63/67) specificity for the lung samples was recorded. When applying the assay with soil samples from caves near of Presidente Figueiredo city, Amazonas, Brazil, one sample from the Maroaga cave was confirmed as positive.
Conclusions
The improved qPCR assessed in this study was successful in detecting H. capsulatum with high efficiency and accuracy in in-vitro evaluation, including the identification of the target pathogen in both clinical and environmental samples.
Abstract
In our study, using a combination of eye-tracking parameter analysis and the van Westendorp method, we investigate whether participants pay more attention to products that they perceive as more expensive or to those that they prefer in the ranking process. The experiment involved 50 participants, a questionnaire with ranking and pricing tasks, and an eye-tracking measurement. Three wine varieties (Irsai Olivér, Rosé and Merlot-Shiraz) and three different label alternatives were tested. When comparing the results of the ranking and the pricing tasks, the product that is considered more expensive is not always the one that is most appealing to the participants. If we compare the results from the analysis of the eye-tracking parameters and the pricing, we can say that in all cases the labels that received the most visual attention were those that were priced more expensively by the participants.
A Morbid Kíváncsiság Skála magyar nyelvű változatának adaptációja
Adaptation of the Hungarian version of the Morbid Curiosity Scale: MCS validation
Háttér és célkitűzések
Az erőszakos, kellemetlen vagy halálhoz köthető tartalmak iránti érdeklődés a morbid kíváncsiság mértékével jellemezhető. Az ilyen tartalmak általában félelmet, undort, illetve elkerülő viselkedést váltanak ki, ugyanakkor egyes embereket a kiváltott arousal emelkedés miatt mégis vonzanak. A jelenség részletesebb feltárásával pontosabb képet kaphatunk arról, milyen tényezők játszanak szerepet olyan specifikus fóbiák esetén, ahol mind az undor, mind pedig a félelem releváns érzelmi reakció. A jelen tanulmány célja a Morbid Kíváncsiság Skála pszichometriai elemzése egy megfelelően nagy és az életkor szempontjából diverz magyar anyanyelvű mintán.
Módszer
A kutatás során összesen 592 fő (442 nő, 150 férfi) töltötte ki a kérdőívcsomagot. A kitöltők átlagéletkora 34,2 év (SD: 10,64; terjedelem: 18–73 év). A Morbid Kíváncsiság Skála mellett a résztvevők a Szenzoros Élménykereséses Skálát és az Undorérzékenység Skálát töltötték ki. A Morbid Kíváncsiság Skála pszichometriai mutatóit klasszikus és modern tesztelméleti eljárásokkal is ellenőriztük.
Eredmények
A Morbid Kíváncsiság Skála megfelelő pszichometriai mutatókkal rendelkezik a vizsgált magyar mintán. A kérdőív tételei megfelelően diszkriminálnak a látens változó különböző szintjeivel rendelkező kitöltők között, és a kérdőív megbízhatóan mér az átlaghoz viszonyított kétszeres szórástartományban. A kérdőív összpontszáma és alskáláinak pontszámai pozitív irányú összefüggést mutattak a szenzoros élménykereséssel, míg az összpontszám, az Erőszak és a Test megsértése alksálák pedig az undorérzékenységgel mutattak negatív irányú kapcsolatot.
Következtetések
Mindent összevetve eredményeink alapján a Morbid Kíváncsiság Skála magyar mintán is megbízható és érvényes kérdőív. A kérdőív releváns eszköz lehet kellemetlen vagy undorító tartalmakhoz való viszonyulás mérésére, a megközelítő-elkerülő viselkedéses rendszer vizsgálatára; mind kutatások, mind pedig terápiák során utánkövetésre.
