Food and Identity

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

Jia Yin Lindsay Simpson English 105- Composition 1

Part 1 What to Eat Is there anything that makes us more squeamish than unusual foods? When we were children, dishes others families ate were “weird.” As our taste buds matured, we added more “gross” foods to our diets, but our culture tended to set the boundaries. Most Chinese find cheese repugnant, for example, and rare is the American who relishes the thought of devouring duck’s feet, a delicacy in China. The reason why people around the world treat food different is because we have different eating habits. We choose different food because different people have different characteristics. Simply saying, we are what we eat. “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” This is a famous statement said by Brillat Savarin. Do you agree with it? I doubted it at the first time. I wondered that some people did not have a shopping list, ate different things every day at different restaurant, and when they were going to grocery store, they just pick food randomly. Can you still tell what they are according to what they eat? The answer to this question is yes. People choose things for a reason. If the person prefers to choose fancy cover things and do not care about the price, he/she is probably outgoing, was born in a wealthy family, and parties a lot. That’s how we could tell a person through what he/she eats every day.

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

I usually do not have time for breakfast, eat at dining center for lunch, and eat at Chinese restaurant for dinner for weekdays. At weekends, I sometimes will seek for delicious Chinese food driving to big cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and so on. Sometimes I will drive to HyVee, and the Asian Store near HyVee to buy some food and cook a meal just for myself. I have to admit that I am a lazy person for not eating breakfast, but I still not that lazy since I do things carefully and never intend to avoid any chaos. I do not think people could be described through several worlds. However, you apparently could know a person through what he eats every day. For me, I like homemade food, but I do not have time to make food by myself everyday so that I choose to eat out in weekdays. Since I have been dating with my current boyfriend, he told me that eating out is not that good than you think. While eating in restaurants is fast, the money you spend can add up. When I have dinner at a restaurant with a friend, the bill is usually over twenty dollars. I can buy a lot of groceries with that much money. Even lunch at a fast-food stand usually costs five or six dollars for one person. That’s enough to feed the whole family at home. Eating at home is better because meals at restaurants are often high in fat and calories, and they serve big plates of food-much more food-than you need to eat at one meal. If you cook food at home, you have more control over the ingredients. You can use margarine instead of butter on your potatoes, or not put so much cheese on top of your pizza. At home, you can control your portion size. You can serve yourself as little as you want. In a restaurant, you may eat a full plate of food "because you paid for it." It’s true that eating out is convenient. You don’t have to shop, or cook, or clean up. But real home cooking doesn’t have to take up a lot of time. There are lots of simple meals that don’t

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

take long to make. In fact, they’re faster than eating out, especially if you think of the time you spend driving to a restaurant, parking, waiting for a table, waiting for service, and driving home. He always encourages me to eat at home and cook for me, so that recently, I eat at home mostly. And then I found another problem about preparing food. Technology today has given us more choices. Today, we could buy frozen foods in walmart and just prepare it in a couple of minutes, whereas before it could have taken us maybe hours to prepare this kind of meals. I could accept this so-called improvement has changed our lives, but I believe that there are some drawbacks as well. It is true that these kinds of food do not involve hard work to prepare, but food that is easy to prepare generally has some artificial ingredients mixed in it that makes it "easy-to-cook". If we take time to read the ingredients, we would definitely come across words like preservatives or artificial flavorings. It was just a couple of days ago that I came across a newspaper article which stated that someone was poisoned because he ate this type of food. He was hospitalized for almost a month. Not having time to cook has also taken the fun out of cooking. Cooking is an art, but in today’s world, this is no longer true. People are so busy with their work that they just rely on these simple foods. “Nevertheless many Americans began applying the word ‘cooking’ to the act of defrosting and heating mass-produced frozen food in a microwave oven.” From Mark Bittman, we could see a healthy cooking trend is getting more and more popular. Moreover, “Many more Americans are seeing food as more than a necessary fuel whose only requirement is that it can be obtained and consumed without much difficulty or cost”, which is absolutely on the right track of the attitude towards food.

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

The invention and production of these foods have made people lazy not only for cooking but also for a well family get-together. It was not like former times when families would sit together and eat freshly baked food. Instead, they are getting these artificial things with minimal nutrients in them. Cooking in the yesteryears was much better than today’s. People would spend more time in the kitchen, preparing the food in the way that they liked it. This brought families closer together and also contributed to the high quality and nutrition of the food. Granted, people are busier nowadays and do not have as much time as they did in the past, but I believe that people have forgotten the importance of healthy, fresh food and of the time a family spends together.

What I ate for the day 1. Milk 2. Soymilk 3. Butter Cake 4. Onion rings 5. Panda Express (Fried rice with Broccoli Beef and Honey Walnut Shrimp) 6. May House(Steamed rice with YuXiang Chicken)

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

Part 2

I choose this grocery list because it’s cute. The handwriting is clear and I guess the owner of this is a girl because of the handwriting and “12-pk girly beer”. The funny part of this is that we could see all the things she listed are all for human use, but she use a memo that shows “Pet Basket”. Like a sentence said by Leigh Belanger, “Our refrigerators tell a lot about ourselves”, a shopping list also tells a lot about its owner. From everything she listed, I think her occupation might be a university student and it presented everyday shopping rather than a special occasion because we got “1 gal Milk, Ham (lunch meat), Bread, Hog Dog Buns, Tomatos, Onion, Bacon,

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

Hot Dogs, Sliced Cheese, Grapes, Banannas, Avacados, Eggs, Cream Cheese, Begels, Soda (Pepsi, Mt Dew)” all these stuff. She might be a person who cares about her health because she intended to buy meat, vegetables, and fruit, which is a variety of food. I imagine her normal day will be like this: woke up, got dressed, and prepared herself a breakfast which including a glass of milk, two slice of bread, some grapes, an egg and two bagels. Then she went to class with packed sandwiches. At lunch time, she took her lunchbox from backpack, and ate the sandwiches, one was made with two slice of bread, one slice of tomato, some onion, one slice of cheese and two slice of bacon, the other was made with hot dog buns, and the same. Then, she continued to study with some fruit like bananas and avocados. After she finished her class, she went back home, took a can of Pepsi from fridge, and began to think what to eat for tonight. “Maybe some pre-cooked shrimp?” Then, she took the shrimp out of fridge, put them in boiling water, and cook them with broccolis. That’s might be her normal day. In my opinion, she is not a person who has serious attitude with food, but she considers her appearance as important. From her list, we could only see brands appear after shampoo and body wash. She also parties a lot. We could see 12-pk beer and 12-pk girly beer appearing in her list. Again, she is a girl who cares about what kinds of beer to drink more than what kinds of food to eat. Amanda Hesser once said, “If you are what to eat, then you are also what you buy to eat.” I could not agree more on this point. I have a part-time job in a dining center of my university, and I am the counter of hamburger part. I take orders almost every day and I concluded three kinds of people who will order veggie burger when they are ordering. How can I get a conclusion like this? Main reason would probably be that you could see a person from

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

what you buy to eat. From the shopping list and also the burger order diversity we could conclude that you are what you eat.

Jia Yin

Assignment two

3/16/2013

Work cited Jean Antheleme Brillat-Savarin. “You are what you eat: How to win and keep health with diet” The Physiology of Taste Bittman, Mark. “Why take food seriously?” The way we live now (10-12-08). NYTimes.com Leigh, Belanger. “What’s in your fridge?” The Boston Globe (February 28,2007). Amanda, Hesser. “Shop Write” The New York Times Magazines (October 10,2004)