Final Essay

Food is an important component in the lives of every individual because it is a basic human need that we cannot live without. Reflecting upon food production and consumption, these processes represent aspects of an individuals identity based on the choices they make surrounding food. On a daily basis we are forced to make decisions based on what we eat, who eat with, where we eat, where we choose to buy our food from and so forth. We as consumers are apart of the global food system and the relationship that we have with our food affects every aspect of this system. Many individuals often do not take into consideration the impacts that their relationship to food has on the issues that our society faces. Although it is difficult to understand

She mentions that she was never taught in school about nutrition or how to eat healthy (Almeida, 2016). I think it is important to recognize this difference because it makes me question the access that I have to this information. Since we live in a world where our food has become processed, high in fat, and high in sugar, we need access to information surrounding health because our food is no longer seen as “natural”. We also do not have knowledge on all of the various processes that go into our food anymore, which is extremely different from my grandmother’s knowledge. Many would consider that having this access to information is an advance in our food system however by examining the two different food worlds, I am convinced this only occurs because our food culture has put us in this position where we need to worry about what is going into our food. As Scrinis (2008) mentions the ideology of nutritionism this helps to demonstrate where our relationship to food has taken us because of the shift from being in a country where access to food was simplistic versus the complexity we have in the western way of

My grandmother mentions that it was much cheaper to buy things such as rice, oils, salt and pasta compared to the prices of these products where we live today. I think it is also important to recognize that you are ultimately paying for your priorities. For instance, because of where we live in our western society, we pay for convince and efficacy whereas my grandmothers family paid for simplicity and merely just trying to eat as a necessity in order to survive. We often take advantage of our relationship to food because we spend money on certain things such as fast food since we think that this is cheap and easy. Where my grandmother lived, fast food chains were not present and she mentions that even if they were her family would have much rather spent money buying olive oil than purchasing fries and hamburgers. I have begun to understand that affordability can be related to certain boundaries that we create for ourselves based on our priorities. As Johnston et al (2011) mention, there are specific boundaries surrounding our food choices (p. 308), and the boundaries my grandmothers had are much different from my own based on the difference in time and