Blog #6

In thinking about food and how our ideas of food are shaped by culture, I keep coming back to the idea of tradition. The way people eat is so closely tied to the way in which their parents ate, and their parents before them and so on. I remember growing up eating a lot of casseroles, pasta, chicken, and a few other things. It was a rotation of maybe twenty five meals that repeated throughout my entire childhood. Recently I went through my mom's recipe box and found that nearly everything I grew up eating was a recipe from my grandmother that my mom also ate as a kid. Today, I still feel most comfortable eating things that are similar to those I ate as a child. In a way, I am eating my own family history. I think that tradition is its own kind of nutrition, and it can be very hard to break out of childhood eating patterns, whatever they may be. I was lucky to have a pretty healthy culture around food, but I find it especially interesting to see how generations slowly change their eating habits while still hanging onto their tradition.

When I went through those recipes, I saw a few ingredients repeated over and over--margarine was the most common--and yet my mom never cooked with it. My grandmother lived in a time where synthetic food was all the rage, and that cultural marker showed through in her recipes. My mom put her own stamp on it by substituting some more real ingredients and adding some more southern influence to the recipes when she changed states. Now as I cook the same recipes, I see the marks of my own generation changing them once more--I use fresh vegetables instead of canned, try to stick to more chicken and less red meat, and I've learned I can generally half the amount of butter in any given recipe and be just fine. The changes I make to the recipes reflect on the culture of my generation and my location (I'm the only city dweller in my family), just as the changes my mom and grandmom made before me reflected their own places in time. My family recipes serve as a sort of cultural history of each generation, showing how much the culture around us has affected what we value in our food choices. These changes in taste can be largely liked to advertisement, as Goodwin showed in our reading. Advertisement tells us what we need, what is healthy and right, whether that be margarine or the all-natural diets of today, and these changes leave behind artifacts of cultural values of the past as time goes on.