Essay Assignment
Write a 8-9 pages essay about How does food shape our identity?
Outline
Introduction
- Food is an integral part of culture. Identities of people emanate from cultural influences which consist in their background, practices and upbringing.
- What one eats defines a person's personality and cultural perception as much as what they do not eat.
- The packaged food product has ideological or cultural reflections on what informs a person's choices and preferences.
- Eating habits can be observed unawares and hence their mechanism of influencing the construction of a person's identity may not be realized.
Thesis
• Food is a social construct that among other factors communicates the mechanism by which personalities of people are created, ideologies and beliefs reinforced.
Body Paragraphs
Paragraph 1
- Food reflects a structural phenomenon that a person subscribes to and which they cannot change.
- Once a person buys packaged food product, they cannot manipulate it. The drive to buy a product is a reflection of an inner vulnerability to influence on the outside. Supported by Caplan (1997).
- One buys a product because they subscribe to the notion of healthy eating, they embrace the vegetarian ideology or they find the fast-foods lifestyle exciting.
- They therefore render themselves vulnerable to the power that the food product has which impacts on a person's identity.
Paragraph 2
- Food can express class, or status aspirations of a person.
- There are foods that are associated with people of a the anthropological basis for the existence of taboos. Supported by Bodoma & Ma (2012)
- Because it was recognized that a person is what they eat, they could not eat anything.
- They eat what is appropriate to conventions, ethics and health.
Paragraph 5
- Food has been a characteristic of labeling groups or people and societies.
- People in countries have been stereotyped based on what they consume as is explained by Cwiertka (2006).
- Mexicans for instance have been labeled "beaners" while Germans called "Krauts".
- As part of shaping identity, food has become a subject of geopolitics of consumption.
Conclusion
- Regardless of whether dietary practices are conscious or unconscious, the fact of their power to impact on how a person perceives the world, responds to other people's choices and how one is also seen by other people.