Meaning of Food
Consuming food is not only getting nutrients but also gaining symbols and meanings of foods. In Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's "Aphorisms of the Professor," he said "tell me what food you eat and I will know what kind of person you are" (Bauer 68). This means that food culture is what we eat, how we eat and why we eat it, and we can find those through what type of food they eat. Food is a factor that can describe us and the food we eat determines who we are as a person. Our food choices can be define with these factors such as identity, survival, status and humanity.
In the article, “What Americans Can Learn form Other Food Cultures” by Amy S. Choi, she divides into different types of factors that affects the food choices of people and explains the factors for us to understand. Choi’s factor is “food as identity.” The food tells us who we are and where we are from. Each country and each region has its own characteristics. Based on the different characteristics of each country and each region, specific foods grow in each place, and their own food culture is developed using the ingredients they produce. For example,
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The book, “Liver and Opinions: Why We Eat What We Eat and Despise the Rest” by Mary Roach, is about the experience of challenging his Inuit food which is new food culture and people's food preferences and why and how people’s food preferences develop and why they do not change their food preferences and how people can change their food preferences. The factors of food as identity, survival, status and humanity that Choi mentioned in her article are also mentioned in Roach's book. As each country has its own food culture, the Northern countries have a food culture that “eats organs” (119). In Northern, their ingredients were so high due to the lack of plants to eat, so the Inuit, who could not afford food, filled up vitamins by eating organs. Now, Inuit’s food is an identity that means it is