Food is in our everyday lives. Every day in America we eat something different and our diets tend to never stay the same. This bring up the thought, how has America developed this way of eating? Like all countries, our diets can be directly derived from our culture and our history. I am passionate about the culinary arts because of how it’s culture, diversity, and similarities between different regions affect our everyday lives no matter where we are. Food is important to us for the obvious health benefits of not dying, but also because it has a way of bringing people together and creating fond memories and new friends.
The culture of food can, at times, be obvious. Other times however, it is hard to imagine how or why someone would eat that.
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Next was Mexico. Similarities like this pop up all throughout history but so do differences. For instance in Belgium people tended to have meatier diets than people in Chad or Sierra Leone. There are many factors that can contribute to this. Preference, availability, and difficulty to name a few. Preference means what was preferred to eat at the time. People in developing Belgium probably wanted to eat meat more than whatever else was available. Availability and difficulty could go hand in hand but are not the same. Availability would mean what was around them, in terms of sustenance. Difficulty is the term used to describe how hard the food would be to obtain. In this era, a meal originally served on the other side of the world can be easily available to us. Today we have many ways of obtaining food and most all of them are nearly effortless. Since it is so easy to get a nutritious meal these days, why can’t everyone have it?
12.9 percent of our population is starving. Here in America, we have such an excess amount of food that we tend to forget just how important it is. We don’t appreciate every meal like a child in Africa would. We know what candy tastes like, unlike a grown adult in
Kingsolver desired to embrace “a genuine food culture” which is “an affinity between people and the land that feeds them” (Kingsolver 20). Having a true food culture can limit calorie intake and represent a cultural connection to the land that you live on. Kingsolver seeks to establish that a food culture is not just for the privileged, but rather is a result of cultural regulation of impulses (Kingsolver 16). A real food culture “arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging,” all of which mitigate the impulse to eat fats and sugar (Kingsolver 17, 15). Kingsolver then states that to live without these natural regulations of diet “would seem dangerous”, and that the United States has no food culture.
Pollan states that food is not just a necessity to survive, it has a greater meaning to life. Pollan explains how food can cause us happiness and health by connecting us to our family and culture. Warren Belasco, in “Why Study Food”, supports Pollan’s idea that food is something social and cultural. In Belasco’s description of a positive social encounter food is included, whether it involves a coffee date with a colleague or a dinner date with a loved one. Belasco states that food forms our identity and brings our society together.
Other countries rely on taste and what their mood is to decide what to eat. An example of this is when you look at the French eating habits. Pollan claims that we Americans refer to the French eating habits as the “French Paradox” (Our National Eating Disorder) but, we are the only ones that use this claim, if anything, we should be labeled as the American Paradox. The French eat in smaller portions, choose what they want to eat, and also make eating a gathering and an enjoyable event. The French are also overall thinner than Americans, have lower rates of heart disease and you could also say they enjoy the activity of eating more than Americans. It can be concluded that America's dietary exercises of choosing what to eat by the scientific information of the food is not working as well as the French way of eating, which is eating what they want. It can also be assumed that even though we Americans believe we are eating healthy, it actually negatively affects our health considering how obese America is compared to the
Meriam-Webster Dictionary defines food as “material taken into an organism and used for growth, repair, and vital processes as a source of energy” (Mish). Food is simple, yet humans have made it very complex. In the United States of America, food has become more of a hobby than a nutritional need. Every family gathering, holiday, and birthday celebration contains food of some sort. Types of food are customary at different times, like birthday cake at a birthday party, or stuffing at Thanksgiving. There is an entire holiday dedicated to dressing up and giving children candy (Halloween). One of the popular holiday foods is meat. An average of 10 million land animals (not including fish or other water dwelling organisms) are brutally slaughtered
Food is something that all people have always and will always need to consume in order
Nutritional anthropology applies the anthropological approach to nutritional disciplines by studying and understanding how the interactions of social and biological factors affect the nutritional status of individuals and populations. Dettwlyer conducted a medical anthropological research assessing the nutritional status of individuals living in a population in Mali, Africa. She defined it as to be a biocultural approach because the research did not only pertain to the biological system of the people but cultural dogmas, infant feeding practices, socio-economic status, political-ecological factors also contributed as much. Death rates and child malnutrition rates are very high in Mali, it being one of the poorest countries of the world. Therefore, Dettwlyer being a nutritional anthropologist extends her study to the children of Mali who are malnutritioned as a result of their birth in poor families; because their mothers have a low status in their prosperous extended family households; ethno-cultural tenets, etc.
When we think of our national health we wonder why Americans end up obese, heart disease filled, and diabetic. Michael Pollan’s “ Escape from the Western Diet” suggest that everything we eat has been processed some food to the point where most of could not tell what went into what we ate. Pollan thinks that if America thought more about our “Western diets” of constantly modified foods and begin to shift away from it to a more home grown of mostly plant based diet it could create a more pleasing eating culture. He calls for us to “Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.” However, Mary Maxfield’s “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating”, argues differently she has the point of view that people simply eat in the wrong amounts. She recommends for others to “Trust yourself. Trust your body. Meet your needs.” The skewed perception of eating will cause you all kinds of health issues, while not eating at all and going skinny will mean that you will remain healthy rather than be anorexic. Then, as Maxfield points out, “We hear go out and Cram your face with Twinkies!”(Maxfield 446) when all that was said was eating as much as you need.
We are a confused society not knowing what to eat. This why I have chosen to talk about my model on feeding America, so we can get our culture back.
In Michael Pollan’s “The End of Cooking” shares the message of what we are losing something important in this day and age because of all our pre-made and processed foods. This can be compared with Kothari’s “If You Are What You Eat, What Am I?” and her argument that food is part of one’s own identity. By using the examples from these two texts you can analyze the state of food and culture in the United States today. All of the processed and pre-made foods are causing people all across America to lose their sense of Culture. We no longer know what it’s like to make one of our cultures specialty dishes from scratch which can help people identify with their culture. This process helped newer generations see what it was like for those before them to cook on a daily basis and could help them identify your sense of culture.
If you are abreast with the history, some thousands of years ago, during the Paleolithic Age, cavemen had very few options for the foods that they could eat. As a result, their food intake was usually just restricted to fish, vegetables, nuts and the like.
Food is traditionally considered as a simple means of subsistence but has developed to become filled with cultural, psychological, religious, and emotional significance. Consequently, food is currently used as a means of defining shared identities and symbolizes religious and group customs. In the early 17th and 18th centuries, this mere means of subsistence was considered as a class maker but developed to become a symbol of national identity in the 19th centuries. In the United States, food has been influenced by various cultures such as Native American, Latin America, and Asian cultures. Consequently, Americans have constantly Americanized the foods of different cultures to become American foods. The process on how Americans have Americanized different cultures’ foods and reasons for the Americanization is an important topic of discussion.
Together with the accessibility of the food in the south of Benin and its affordability, my region’s diet is equal to the Mediterranean diet. The reason why it is not superior to the Mediterranean diet is that it does not contains enough nutrients to guarantee a long life expectancy.
Food is an important part of popular culture, and the beliefs, practices, and trends in a culture affect its eating practices. The proportion of money spent on food eaten away from home, as well as the number of restaurants, has been increasing since the second half of the twentieth century. People may dine at formal, sit-down restaurants, at fast-food eateries, at cafes, or they may purchase food from street vendors. There has been an “Americanization” of diets through the growth of fast-food restaurants.
Eating healthy is not easy for people because of the time. People living in the US go to work roughly 40 hours a week for a full time job. Working 40 hours a week means working five days a week and having two days of break. For example, if a person works 8 hours a day, he or she is going to be tired at the end of the day. This causes person to eat fast food or delivery food. Williams said, “Somewhere along the way, cooking went from being something that normal Americans just did, on a daily basis, to something we instead watch as a gladiator sport on television” (665). Williams also said, “We
Theses statement: Health status and nutrition are interrelated because a healthy diet is essential for sustaining a person’s wellbeing. Several factors influence individuals’ choices of diet. These factors such as family, friends, community, but also history, media, and geographical location have a direct contribution towards people’s health status.