Essay: Food in society and culture

Eating is the most important thing that people do everyday. Eating brings people together and give people satisfaction by getting away from the hunger. Every living creature will eat, but human are the only one who will cook the food. Being able to cook make the food become one of the most important cultural identification to the people that are from different countries. When people think about eating food, most will be saying that it is just the tool that helps people to get away from hunger. But food is more than you think, it can be the representation of yourself and your culture. It is just like language, music and people’s look. The food can help to bring back people’s memory, help to bring people together, and help to identify the culture between different countries.
Unlike in the past, there are a lot of foreign restaurants that are opened around the world. Because how easily people can travel around the world, there are more and more immigrants who will stay in the foreign country and opening a restaurant in order to survive in the country. According to the TED talk author, Amy’s. Choi she said in her article, “Chinese food in America, for example, is Darwinian, says Lee. It was a way for Chinese cooks to survive in America and earn a living” (Amy S. Choi, 2014). By opening the restaurant, it helps to introduce foreign food to others. But that also lead to an issue of how the cook started to change the traditional taste of the food. In the article “Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective”, the author Robin Fox inform to the reader that “The American melting pot is almost literally that: the food preference of dozens of nations are put side by side, and there cannot help but be overlap and mixing” (pg. 2). For example, in America, which is a melting pot of different cultures people lived in this country. There are lots of restaurant that is named as the food from other countries, but the food in the restaurant taste totally different with the traditional taste. Because foreign people have a different preferred taste to their food. So the restaurant have to change their dish to a different taste in order to attract other people to come to the restaurant in order to survive.
Food is like a landscape photo. When you compare every landscape photos together. They are similar between each other because most of them will include the mountains, waters, and a blue sky. But it is also unique because the only way you can take that photo is to go visit that certain place. It is also true for food. For example, when you want to get some Chinese food outside of China, it will still be Chinese food, but it will be really difficult to have the same traditional taste compare to the food you eat in China. Each country will have its own unique taste and choice of food for their home meal and for celebrating the traditional festival.
Although different people are eating differently in different countries, we can still see some of the similarities between them. When you think carefully, why do most of the Asian people choose rice as their staple food, but not the bread potato, or beans? The relationship between you and what food you eat is depending on the culture that was created by the ancestor a long time ago and also where those people are geographically located. There are also lots of different kinds of staple foods around the world too according to National Geographic, “There are more than 50,000 edible plants in the world, but just 15 of them provide 90 percent of the world’s food energy intake. Rice, corn, and wheat make up two-thirds of this” (National Geographic, 2018). “Food staples traditionally depend on what plants are native to a region” (National Geographic, 2018). People can use the food to see the culture of two different countries and how they are different with each other. Like Japan and China, you might think the way that both of the country will eat similar because they are geographically close together. But if you have the opportunity to visit restaurants from these two different countries, you can feel the food culture between the two countries are really different if we try to compare them together. In the article Difference between Japanese and Chinese Food, the author said the key difference is “Japanese cuisine is the food and the way of eating in Japan. Chinese cuisine includes the cooking styles originating from the diverse regions of China and its people in other parts of the world” (pg. 1).
Not only the food people eat can show the culture identification, the table manners is also another thing that people can learn from other countries tradition. Every countries will have different table manners and traditions. In the past, people distinguish the difference between a higher class and a lower class people using a different time for eating. “In the past, as in the novels of Jane Austen, for example, the upper classes breakfasted late about ten o’clock, as befitted their leisure status” (Robin Fox, pg 3). But nowadays, we can learn other countries’ culture through the eating manners. The tools that different people use to eat are also different. When you go to an Asian restaurant, people can be practicing eating with the chopstick, the menu you see will also have the different language that written on, and the waiters that serve you will also treat you differently. Maybe there will be tea instead of ice water served to you at first. The traditions when eating on the dinner table is also different from each different countries. In China, usually when there is a guest came to the home for a visit. The master of the house will have great manners for eating will be changed. On the dining table, The master of the family will greet the guest respect the old people and bless the young people around the table with the wine for the adults, and the soft drinks for the young people. Everyone needs to wait for the master to start eating and then they can eat. Or it will be disrespect to the master. From those different traditions and manners on the dining table. It shows how different country will have a different culture to treat others. People can learn a lot about the old Chinese culture from table manners.
Food is the tool that brings people together. If we are happy, we will eat; and if we are sad, we will still eat for getting away from the depression. When people take a food picture and share it on to their social media, it is also the other way that food can bring people together. “Even waiting in line is part of the event. People may scoff at the idea of waiting two hours in line to eat in a trendy restaurant, says Mo, but waiting in line for a restaurant with your friends is an extension of your experience eating with them” (Amy S. Choi, 2014). Waiting in line at the restaurant sounds really boring, but it is the extra time that we can communicate with friends or family. When there is a festival, people will use food to celebrate. Because of different culture that each countries have, when there is a festival, people will celebrate it differently. In the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, food plays a big role during the celebration. People will make the sweet mooncake that offers to the goddess of the moon chang’e. There are lots of different flavors for the mooncake, such as the red bean paste and the lotus seed paste. I still remember the time when I celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival with my family in China. My grandparents will always prepare a big dinner and invite other relatives to come to our home to celebrate the festival together. After the dinner we will eat the mooncake and enjoying the moon together. Because during that day, the moon is the brightest and roundest. In China, people also define the full moon as the symbol of the family reunion.
Food is also an important tool that brings backs individual’s memory. When you eat something that you don’t like at your young age. You probably won’t enjoy that food today. The memory of the food brings is also really powerful. When people had the food that they liked, they might go out and purchase the food again or travel in a distance to get the food. According to the article Food and Memory, the author John S. Allen discussed about how food trigger people’s memory. “We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting” (pg. 2).
But sometimes using food as the identification for a group of people is not in a good way. There are some people that use food to stereotyping some religious group. For example, in the past, people used to called African American as the watermelon or fried chicken. The fried chicken started because of Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film on the founding of Ku Klux Klan. In one scene: A group of actors portraying shiftless black elected officials acting rowdy and crudely in a legislative hall. Some of the legislators are shown drinking. Others had their feet kicked up on their desks. And one of them was very ostentatiously eating fried chicken. “That image really solidified the way white people thought of black people and fried chicken,”