EE1

Nick Young

April 30^th, 2012

Writ 1133

How Culture Changes Food

Growing up in a small upper middle class town, one does not really think about how other people eat. Personally, I thought everyone had their mom make them breakfast before a long day of 3^rd grade, then have a nice lunchable packed in your lunch box. Finally, you got to sit down with your whole family and tell them how you can name every state capital.

As I started to grow up and became devoted to sports and in more complicated academics, it was not very easy for my whole family to sit down for a meal. In the mornings I would leave my house at about 530 and grab whatever I could for food. Get to school and have cross-country practice, and struggle for four periods of school to get to lunch. Finally I would be able to scarf down as much food as I could get in my 25 minutes to eat. The last bell would right and I would be off to my second cross-country practice of the day. Getting out at 5:30 from practice I would race to my car while calling my mom to start dinner, then I would run into the house and eat what ever she had waiting as I started my AP Physics homework. I would finish my food and run upstairs to hop on my computer to check Facebook and check my grades online so I would know how much I would be getting yelled at that night. By the time I finished my nightly tasks, I would get a call for my coach making sure I would be at practice so the coaches could meet with other captains and I and tell us how much the team sucked and how it was all our fault. Finally, on the ice at 8:30 off at 11pm, running into my house showering then passing out in my bed to start it all over again.

So how does this have anything to do with the culture of people and what they eat? Most young kids have very basic lives, and then they progressively get more and more complicated. This is much like how culture has changed and how it effects people’s eating habits. Many years ago, everything was very basic, it was a shame to miss a family dinner. Now, it is rare to find a family that eats more than three meals together a week.

Food used to be the way people lived. Everyone was self sufficient with his or her food and making dinner was a family wide task. When a family’s farm could not sustain them anymore they would move. Then, once time went on, more and more things did not have to be done to get dinner on the table. No one has to grow their own food if they do not want too. You can go to the store to pick up Hamburger Helper. This is a lot like how people’s food culture changes, at first you have very simple planned meals from your parents. However by the time you are in high school your meals turn into tasks that you have to squeeze in;

The native people of North America had a simple solution: abandonment [3]. No fertilizer was used, except for the ashes from burned undergrowth and corn stalks. As a result, the soil became exhausted after a few years, so the fields were abandoned and new ones were dug. Primitive agriculture in many other parts of the world has been similar, and sometimes such a technique is called “slash-and-burn.” (Goodchild 1)

It was incredible how people were back then because they were completely able to make with what they had. If they did not have enough for their families, they would not call TruGreen to replenish their land, they would move to find land that could sustain their family. This is so compairable because one does not make use of everything anymore and as the person grows up, much like the nation, everything gets a lot easier and it is less of an event. “The “miracle” of growing so much food on so little land was largely due, therefore, to neither technology nor topography, but to the fact that starvation was the only alternative,” (Goodchild 2) the fact is people had to find food at this point in time and this clearly shows how much different things are than they are today. In the current time, people assume that it is other peoples responsibility to get food and the person that makes dinner can run to the store and grab whatever they need. Once they have that, they can make dinner in minutes and serve it to whoever need to eat before they go to practice or start on work they need to do.

Just looking at this change shows that hundreds of years ago, everyone in the family needed to bring something to the table for the family to eat. Now, dinner can be made as everyone is watching the Blackhawks game. This point alone shows how eating is much less of an event and more of a task; "Looking at screens while eating, rather than at other people, has become more commonplace since those first tv dinners, at home, at work, and beyond. Eating in front of tvs is ubiquitous in public spaces such as airports, hospitals, and sports bars, as well as in more sequestered niches" (Horwitz 44). This proves that meals are not what they used to be. So, does watching TV with your family really add to the situation or does it make your not pay attention to the others and just look at the TV. When I think of food adding to a situation, I think about how whenever my friends and I would watch a Blackhawks game, we would get food. Some of the people, who were not as big of fans as me, would be more focused on the food then they would be on the game. So, some people thought the food of a way to bring us together and watch the game and others used it as a distraction from the game. Also, people set there own eating cycles, so like in college people eat whenever it is easiest for them, which is when every they turn on their microwaves (Horwitz).

This covers how the entire world has changed their ways of eating since the beginning of time, but there are many cases that places and people have to change their eating habits due to where they live or how they have to live.

Imagine how people who have to work very stressful jobs that force them to eat diffrerntly than they many want to. A great example of this is 60 miles south of Denver. In Colorado Springs, there are thousands of people that are working in the Air Force that have adapted to the Fast Food lifestyle.

The extraordinary growth of Colorado Springs neatly parallels that of the fast food industry: during the last few decades, the city’s population has more than doubled. Subdivisions, shopping malls, and chain restaurants are appearing in the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain and the plains rolling to the east. The Rocky Mountain region as a whole has the fastest-growing economy in the United States, mixing high-tech and service industries in a way that may define America’s workforce for years to come. And new restaurants are opening there at a faster pace than anywhere else in the nation. (Schlosser 1)

It is incredible how much things can be compared to how food is changing the culture. In the Springs, as the town got larger, the more the people moved into the city, the more the fast food industry took over. There are even fast food places in the smallest of towns. In my town of 10000, there are 3 McDonalds along with all the other restaurants. All the time you see families grabbing a quick bit on their way to wherever they have to be. Food has completely changed from a way for families to connect after a long day at work to a drive thru window on the way to taking Susie to soccer practice and Alex to violin lessons.

Lastly, some people have to change their food culture because of health problems. Diabetes is a very common health problem for the human race, but it is very interesting that each culture has a different way changing their diets according to the ways they would eat their cuisine. “The American diet is a combination of many cultures and cuisines. To understand it, one must not only study the traditional foods and food habits of the many minority groups, but also the interaction between the majority culture and the cultures of these smaller groups,” (Kulkarni 1), in America, everyone has their own ties to home, which is a way to keep their culture in tack. However, with diabetes, they need to adjust their ways of eating while still keeping their connection with their families together. “Helping patients modify recipes for foods they typically eat is valuable in achieving and maintaining adherence to recommended dietary changes. A study at the diabetes clinic of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Ga., found that the primary reason for patients not following food recommendations was that the recommended diet was not familiar to them and contained unfamiliar food choices,” (Kulkarni 1), this is a great example of how food has to be changed for health reason and people do not like it because it changing their usual diet. People who move to America do not have many ties to their homeland because of how different everything is in America. Food is one of the few things a family can keep within their lives because of the passing down of recipes. With health problems like this, it is hard to find a way to make the soul food everyone loves without the carbs that would make these peoples insulin spike

Works Cited

Goodchild, Peter. "Food and America." Culturechange.org. Culture Change, 01 Feb. 2010. Web. 30 Apr. 2012.

Horwitz, Jamie. "Eating at the Edge." University of California Press. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2009.9.3.42 .>.

Kulkarni, Karmeen D. "Food and Diabetes." Food, Culture, and Diabetes in the United States. Print.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.