Food appears to be intrinsically linked to culture. One’s culture determines what foods to consume, what foods to avoid, and the customs that come along with the consumption of food. Mary Roach, a humorous writer featured in various popular magazines, investigates the relationship between food and culture and concludes that culture writes the menu of a society, thus serving as the most important factor in influencing one’s food choices (Roach 121). She addresses the significant connection between culture and food by arguing that culture serves as a lifelong guideline in shaping people’s eating habits. But what about a society that lacks a strong food culture such as America? Roach regards America’s lack of a distinct culture as the reason why …show more content…
Product marketing involves the process of selling and promoting products to consumers. Since there is a lack of a dominant culture in America to influence our food choices, Americans experience the omnivore’s dilemma to a greater degree. This lack of culture is what leaves Americans vulnerable and is what allows the food industry and marketers to assert their influence and persuade consumers to buy their products. The confusion on what to eat prompts consumers to rely on food packaging, its claims and its presentation (Pollan 7). When presented with thousands of new processed food products every year, Americans are faced with the daunting task of selecting which food products to consume (Scholosser 24). In these situations, American consumers are easily persuaded to buy the product whose packaging appeals to them the most. This can be simply a matter of what the packaging claims. For example, food packaging with words that appeals to one’s value of health such as “natural”, “low-fat”, “gluten-free”, and “organic” are often enough to convince consumers (Pollan 7). Coming from experience, I also rely on the packaging to ease my decision making. The power of a product’s packaging is only so effective because of our lack of a strong culture to pass on knowledge of what to …show more content…
What we eat can be strongly tied to who we are and our identity. According to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a witty French writer, in his Aphorisms of the Professor he states “Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are” (Brillat-Savarin 68). Because culture, identity, and values are all related to food, based on what one eats, what one doesn’t eat, and how one eats, people will often make and can make assumptions about that person. These assumptions include, but are not limited to, one’s race, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, values, and beliefs. Roach mentions British explorers who refused to eat the foods of the natives (Roach 125). The British explorers would prefer to starve than consume the food of people whom they considered inferior. This highlights the hierarchical structure of our society based on power and the deeply ingrained prejudices of our society. Many foods are directly associated to a certain culture and in turn, certain people are expected to consume certain foods. This demonstrates how easily what foods we eat come to define our identity and why this so strongly influenced those explorers to prefer to starve rather than eat. The uniqueness of humans as omnivore’s without strong programmed survival instincts, as demonstrated by our reliance on culture to determine what to eat, allows us to
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.
Eating is an instinctual habit; however, what we decide to put in our body is a choice that will affect our way of living. In “The American Paradox,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at University of California, Berkeley, disapproves of the way Americans have been eating. The term “American paradox” describes the inverse correlation where we spend more of our time on nutrition, but it would only lead to our overall health deteriorating. According to Pollan, our way of eating that had been governed with culture, or our mother, was changed by the entities of food marketers and scientists, who set up nutritional guidelines that changed the way we think about food. Nutritional advice is inaccurate as it is never proven, and it is not beneficial
Section 1: Typically, we need a well-balanced meal to give us the energy to do day-to-day tasks and sometimes we aren’t able to get home cooked meals that are healthy and nutritious on a daily basis, due to the reasons of perhaps low income or your mom not being able to have the time to cook. People rely on fast food, because it’s quicker and always very convenient for full-time workers or anyone in general who just want a quick meal. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation argues that Americans should change their nutritional behaviors. In his book, Schlosser inspects the social and economic penalties of the processes of one specific section of the American food system: the fast food industry. Schlosser details the stages of the fast food production process, like the farms, the slaughterhouse and processing plant, and the fast food franchise itself. Schlosser uses his skill as a journalist to bring together appropriate historical developments and trends, illustrative statistics, and telling stories about the lives of industry participants. Schlosser is troubled by our nation’s fast-food habit and the reasons Schlosser sees fast food as a national plague have more to do with the pure presence of the stuff — the way it has penetrated almost every feature of our culture, altering “not only the American food, but also our landscape, economy, staff, and popular culture. This book is about fast food, the values it represents, and the world it has made," writes Eric Schlosser in the introduction of his book. His argument against fast food is based on the evidence that "the real price never appears on the menu." The "real price," according to Schlosser, varieties from destroying small business, scattering pathogenic germs, abusing wor...
In this book, Pollan focuses a lot on the culture that surrounds the eating habits of today’s society in America. He talks about how we come from a culture that was primarily dependent on the hunting and gathering of our food. Pollan explains that through the years, Americans have turned away from providing for themselves in exchange for quicker and more convenient meals. I believe that America has evolved into a fast paced way of living. This has inhibited today’s society from having optimal time to prepare and even sit down to enjoy their meals. These cultural changes have led to a higher consumption rate of processed and fast foods. Almost anywhere you go, you can find a find a fast food restaurant or chain. With all of these arising opportunities, today’s culture has created a very unhealthy nation filled with sickness and disease. Pollan states that three out of every five Americans are overweight and one out of every five is obese. When compared to American culture before processed and fast food were ever an option, issues and diseases related to weight were almost non-existent. The people that lived before our modernized culture had to expend a greater amount of energy on hunting and tracking their prey, sometimes even ending up empty handed. However, when compared to today’s culture a surplus of food is available to people in exchange for much smaller energy expenditures.
In Lavanya Ramanathan’s Washington Post article published in 2015 titled “Why everyone should stop calling immigrant food ‘ethnic’”, she discusses about people’s preconceptions on the type of food that should be labelled ethnic. Ashlie Stevens also touched on a similar topic in her Guardian article published in 2015 titled “Stop thinking and just eat: when ‘food adventuring’ trivializes culture”. She talks about how people assume that just by eating food from a certain culture, they are able relate to the culture as a whole. Both authors acknowledge the importance of appreciating authentic cuisines, but takes different approaches to convince the audience. Both authors establish credibility by using a wide range of substantiated evidences. While,
Unlike similar documentaries published, Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” effectively shows how the American diet has failed to produce good eating habits. As members of this modern culture we are exposed to all the wrong eating approaches. Michael pollan successfully convinces the viewer it can be simple. He conclusively defends food as it is intended to be eaten, and exhorts the viewer to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly
Michael Twitty is a food writer and culinary historian best known for preparing, preserving and promoting African American food ways and its origins in Africa. He emphasizes how African food culture has made a great impact on the American South. His cooking helped him to learn about his identity and culture. He describes “identity cooking” a way to better understand him and his culture as a Jewish-African American. A project he developed called “The Cooking Gene” is what he explains as a means of “exploring my family history through food, from Africa to America, from slavery to freedom.” Race, food and ethnicity all have a more complex and cultural meaning especially when fused together. Different
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.
We have to know the methods that the marketers use to attract us, and also the factors that make us very confident when buying a specific food product .The article by kim severson “Be It Ever So Homespun, There’s Nothing Like Spin,” Discusses the food packaging issues which I believe are strong ways in misleading people. At the begging of this article, Severson writes about her experience with food and our confusing attraction to the products by their packaging. The part when Severson writes “Something made me uneasy when I dropped a box of organic koala crisp cereal in my shopping cart.” When we think about it, why was it
In the writing “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” Geeta Kothari describes the differences in the American and Indian cultures through her unique description of the food differences. As a little Indian-American girl, Kothari curiously wanted to eat what of kids her age ate, tuna salad sandwich, hot dogs, and foods of such nature. Kothari describes her first encounter with a can of tuna fish as it looks “pink and shiny, like an internal organ” (947). As Kothari ages, it becomes clear that she sees American food much the way her parents saw it- “repugnant… meat byproducts… glued together by chemicals and fat” (947). Even though Kothari describes American food as strange, disgusting, and foreign; it was also “infidelity” to eat it (951).
Nutrition and health have become more popular in today 's society. Our generation is becoming more and more indebted to the idea of being healthy and eating nutritious meals. However, in “The American Paradox,” by Michael Pollan he argues that our unhealthy population is preoccupied with nutrition and the idea of eating healthy than their actual health. He also mentions the food industry, nutrition science and how culture affects the way we eat and make food choices. While Pollan is right about all these factor that affect our eating habits, there is more to it than that. Convenience, affordability and social influence also affects our food choices making them inadequate.
In the book Fast Food Nation: The Darks Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser claims that fast food impacts more than our eating habits, it impacts “…our economy, our culture, and our values”(3) . At the heart of Schlosser’s argument is that the entrepreneurial spirit —defined by hard work, innovation, and taking extraordinary risks— has nothing to do with the rise of the fast food empire and all its subsidiaries. In reality, the success of a fast food restaurant is contingent upon obtaining taxpayer money, avoiding government restraints, and indoctrinating its target audience from as young as possible. The resulting affordable, good-tasting, nostalgic, and addictive foods make it difficult to be reasonable about food choices, specifically in a fast food industry chiefly built by greedy executives.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.
It would not be a surprise that television, internet, and any other kinds of ads of big fast food companies such as McDonalds® or Subway® have successfully advance their ideas of healthy foods in many of Americans. Yet all of these wealthy corporations, along with many other smaller companies, have many ways to sell their products. These methods could be underhanded loaded with jargon. Information of simple knowledge overfilled with confusing and sometimes random information that otherwise will be too insignificant for people to put an effort to learning about. There are also times where information is overly simplified and have no real background to make a worthy judgment. Amidst all of the fallacies in the fast food industry, there exist reliable sources of information.
American culture is changing dramatically. In some areas it’s a good thing, but in other areas, like our food culture, it can have negative affects. It is almost as if our eating habits are devolving, from a moral and traditional point of view. The great America, the land of the free and brave. The land of great things and being successful, “living the good life.” These attributes highlight some irony, especially in our food culture. Is the American food culture successful? Does it coincide with “good living”? What about fast and processed foods? These industries are flourishing today, making record sales all over the globe. People keep going back for more, time after time. Why? The answer is interestingly simple. Time, or in other words, efficiency. As people are so caught up in their jobs, schooling, sports, or whatever it may be, the fast/processed food industries are rapidly taking over the American food culture, giving people the choice of hot