Compare and contrast your own food and eating ideas and behaviours with those of ONE other culture.

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Humans have an appetite for food, and anthropology as the study of human culture can discover a lot through the eating ideas and behaviours of various cultures. Throughout the world many different countries and different cultures have different dining etiquette and rules. This is something often taken for granted. From personal experience working on cruise ships, where many different cultures mix in a small environment, what seemed to stand out to me were the differences in dining etiquette. Unfortunately, to the point where some colleges preferred to eat in a separate dining area with members of similar cultures, as what was taken for granted by those with European dining etiquette was completely foreign to others, notably those with an Indian background, this was on occasion to the point of ridicule and scorn. The importance of food in understanding human culture rests in its vast changeability, a changeability that is not central for species survival. For survival needs, people everywhere could eat the same food, yet people of different cultural backgrounds eat differently.
An anthropological approach to the analysis of food in culture would be to isolate and identify the food variables, arrange these variables systematically, and explain why some of these variables go together or do not go together. Generally people who have the same culture share the same food habits, that is, they share the same assemblage of food variables. Most of the major cities in the world contain varied societies, encompassing of a wide range of individuals from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Ethnicity refers to a social group, which shares particular distinctive features, for instance; language, culture, physical appearance, religion, va...

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Siegel, B. (2010). Learning to Eat in a Capital City. Food, Culture & Society, 71-90.
Swarbrick, N. (2013, July 8). Manners and social behaviour - A guide to modern New Zealand manners. Retrieved from Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/manners-and-social-behaviour/page-7
Trollope-Kumar, K., & Last, J. M. (2002). Cultural Factors. Retrieved from Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health: http://www.answers.com/topic/cultural-factors
Zhang, X. (2013). Talking about Cultural Influence on Table Manners from Intercultural Adaptation - A Case Study of my Canadian Friend's Story. International Journal of Arts and Commerce, 156-162.

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