Food Culture

Factors Influencing Food Habits and Culture

Eating food is essential for all of us, it keep us alive and also gives us enjoyment at the same time. Food can be defined as any substance that can be metabolized by an animal to give energy and build tissue. (ilearn) In ancient time, when people feel hungry, they eat. However, as human history keep developing and evolving, we have a higher standard on choosing food that we like to eat nowadays. In this paper, we are going to evaluate factors that are influencing our food habits and food culture. Those factors can be divided into two main categories, internal factors (individual preference and values) and external factors (geographical, religion, social, economic and political). Internal factors are the factors that is not influenced by others or the outside world but individual. Individual preferences is considered a most important factors among the other factors because it is a choice of oneself and we as human are suppose to enjoy the freedom of choice in our own will. Each individual have their own unique taste of food, such as some like spicy, some don’t. Taste is very subjective, everyone is having different tastes, and sometimes there is no explanation. In terms of food habit, Individual values can be explained by different reasons. For example, being fat and short is considered as not looking good, and being slender and tall is considered as the best body shape for female in today social norms. This concept will installed to an individual values, then he or she will choose the food that they think would help them to look better. Fat people will tend to choose low calories food to control their weight. There are different kind of external factors influencing food habits and food culture. Geographical factor is one of those. People who live in different location will have different food habits and food culture. For example, people who live in cold region will tend to eat food that will keep them warm,