Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Factors influencing food habit
Reasons why people make food choices
Factors affecting eating habits
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Factors influencing food habit
Sleep, sex, and food are the three most important aspect of a human life. Each of them represents resting, reproducing, and surviving – essential elements that form the foundation of human culture and society. The status of these elements always represents the social stature and cultural ideology, of the desire or dislike of people. Some standards are universal, while some are uniquely formed through generations of different cultural traditions. Food in this case might be the most simple and yet the hardest ideology of desire for anthropologists to catch. Its meaning is never as plain as a recipe of a cooking book, but always attached with the cultural and psychological ideology that is connected with individual and cultural identities. This paper will look at how food is connecting with individuals and cultures, as an anthropological medium.
First, the connection between individual and food are the preference of individual and the potential meaning of food consume, which involve with biological, psychological, and cultural motivation and understanding. In the practice of food preference, though there are biological reasons for food choices, individual preference and avoidance are mainly based on psychological and social reasons. According to Paul Rozin (1987), he agreed that “genetically determined predispositions” which lead to certain food choice are true, and “the best-documented biological constraints are: an innate preference for sweet tastes and an avoidance of bitter taste or irritation of the oropharyngeal surface” (P.182.). He raised more examples of subconsciously preference of infants toward sweets and rats toward sodium salt (under the condition of sodium deficiency) to support this point of view (1987, P.182).
...
... middle of paper ...
... life, food is way beyond a plain representation of basic instincts, its meaning and interaction between individual and society will always be a primary object of study in Anthropology.
Works Cited
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs 1997. The Appetite as Voice. In Food and Culture: A reader. Counihan, Carole and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Pp 159-179. London: Routledge.
Douglas, Mary 1975 Deciphering a Meal. In Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. Pp: 249-275. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Harris, Marvin 1985. The Abominable Pig. In Good to Eat: riddles of food and culture. Pp. 67-81. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rozin, Paul 1987. Psychobiological perspectives on food preferences and avoidances. In Food and Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits. Marvin Harris and Eric B. Ross, eds. Pp.181-205, 605-606. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Norcross, Alastair. “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases.” Philosophical Perspectives 18, (2004): 229-245.
In the book published in 2006, the Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural history of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, is a non-fiction book about American eating habits and the food dilemma that many Americans are facing today. Pollan begins the book by discussing the dilemma of the omnivore like ourselves, a creature with many choices of food. Pollan decides to learn the root to the food dilemma by examining the three primary food chains: industrial food chain, the organic food chain, and the hunter-gathering food chain. His journey begins by first exploring the industrialized food industry. Pollan examines the industry by following both corn and cow from the beginning through the industrialized process. The work on the corn fields of George Naylor shows him that the industrial system has made corn appears nearly in all products in the supermarket (Pollan 33-37). Pollen then decides to purchase a steer which allows him to see the industrialized monoculture of beef production and how mass production produces food to serve the society. Following his journey, Pollan and his family eat a meal at McDonald's restaurant. Pollan realizes that he and very few people actually understand how such a meal is created. By examining the different food paths available to modern man and by analyzing those paths, Pollan argues that there is a basic relation between nature and the human. The food choice and what we eat represents a connection with our natural world. The industrial food ruins that ecological connections. In fact, the modern agribusiness has lost touch with the natural cycles of farming. Pollan presents the book with a question in the beginning: "What should we have for dinner?" (Pollan 1) This question posed a combination of p...
“Food as thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating,” is an article written by Mary Maxfield in response or reaction to Michael Pollan’s “Escape from the Western Diet”. Michael Pollan tried to enlighten the readers about what they should eat or not in order to stay healthy by offering and proposing a simple theory: “the elimination of processed foods” (443).
“What should we have for dinner?” (Pollan 1). Michael Pollan, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals shows how omnivores, humans, are faced with a wide variety of food choices, therefore resulting in a dilemma. Pollan shows how with new technology and food advancement the choice has become harder because all these foods are available at all times of the year. Pollan portrays to his audience this problem by following food from the food chain, to industrial food, organic food, and food we forage ourselves; from the source to a final meal and, lastly he critiques the American way of eating. Non-fiction books should meet certain criterions in order to be successful. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan is able to craft an ineffective piece of non-argumentative non-fiction due to a lack of a clear purpose stated at the outset of the book, as well as an inability to engage the reader in the book due to the over-excessive use of technical jargon as well as bombarding the reader with facts.
Have you ever stopped and asked yourself: am I really eating healthy? Recently, I’ve come to the realization of what I’m eating on a daily basis isn’t entirely healthy for me. Michael Pollan, who is author of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has opened my mind. While reading the first couple of chapters of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve realized that I don’t know much about the food that I am eating. For example, I didn’t know that farmers not only feed their animals, corn but they also feed them antibiotics (Walsh 34). In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan makes a strange statement, “You are what what you eat eats, too” (Pollan 84). Pollan continuously emphasizes this remark through various examples, and he’s right because strangely enough the food
Kass, Leon. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. New York: Free Press ;, 1994. Print.
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. Print.
Scholars with a more anthropological twist have written about the different social perceptions of obesity, e.g. the positive view of fatness among some indigenous peoples (Swinburne et al. 1996). In an article entitled, “An anthropological Perspective on Obesity “ (Brown and Konner 1987), the authors found that “cross cultural data about body preferences for women reveal that over 80% of cultures for which shape preference data are available, people prefer a plump shape” (cited in Sobal 2004, 383).
All in all, this book is a great read for those seeking to learn more about food and how it relates to all aspects of life and history as well as find that extra push in taking the initiative in improving one’s eating habits and lifestyle. It serves as an easy to follow introduction into a healthy relationship with food including with simple guidelines that are not too forceful or complex to understand.
Narrowly escaping the attack of the coast guard on the Vietnamese refugees, the refugees were stranded on an island and unable to escape starvation. Some of the survivors had to turn to “human flesh as a source of food” in order to avoid imminent death (par. 3). The limitation on food was the cause that led to the people participating in survival cannibalism. The effect was that “there was only one survivor” who was found (par. 4). When faced with death, people adopted unorthodox behaviors to increase their likelihood of existence. This example of cause and effect emphasized that cannibalism is not always a choice, but sometimes a necessity. Such a situation could theoretically happen to anyone, if placed under certain circumstances. Once having to put themselves into that place, people truly realize that cannibalism isn’t only a myth, but a possible survival
Learning to eat differently is no easy task for, especially when someone has eaten the same foods their whole life. It is even harder when the food you are transitioning to is not that appetizing. My uncle was now part of what author Michael Pollan calls the “omnivore’s dilemma.” My uncle knew he needed to eat healthy, but was left w...
Gonzalez, Julina Roel. ""The Philosophy of Food," Edited by David M. Kaplan." Ed. Michael Goldman. Teaching Philosophy 36.2 (2013): 181-82. Print.
Scholliers P (2001) Meals, Food Narratives and Sentiments of Belonging in Past and Present and Chapter Two Commensality and Social Morphology: An Essay of Typology Claude Grignon in Food, Drink and Identity Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the middle Ages by Berg in New York, America
In her book Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz describes the wide use of food as signs, and also as social codes. The reason foods are so useful as signs and social codes is because they are separable, easily adaptive to new environments, and it is not difficult to cook, or eat for that matter. Food is a major part of our daily lives, Not only for survival, but it plays a substantial social role in our lives. We will look deeper into the semiotics of food, how food is used as identity markers, and also the role that foods play in social change in our lives. First let us start with the semiotics of food.
One of the reason’s why I felt my nutrition needed to changes is because nutrition is a huge part of a healthy lifestyle, the way that we eat and what foods we consume can have a huge impact on our everyday lives. Nutrition plays a huge role in multiple facets of a person’s life energy, health, skin, weight, confidence, and more making having a good control on your eating habits extremely important. How we eat over the years and what foods we routinely choose to eat can eventually have a lasting effect on use and what we consider to be most appealing and appetizing at any given moment. Having these craving and routine habits makes eating, diet, and nutrition both a behavior and a lifestyle choice that can be changed over time with help from the theories learned in this class.