Stephanie Beland, Patrick Buono, Miranda Lauzon & Jessie Melincoff
Food and Identity
Food, Identity and Family Ancestry - Miranda
Identity is something that all humans have in common. Although our identities may differ greatly, the fact that we each obtain a distinctive identity connects us all. The specific features of our identities connect some more than others, and on deeper interpersonal levels. For example, a group of individuals who like the same sports team, or share similar hobbies are instantly connected through mutual interests. Food is a prominent interest in connecting through personal identity, even more so than trivial interests such as sports teams or hobbies. Food connects us on a biological level; everyone must eat to sustain (a healthy) life. Throughout this blog, we explored four different ways that food and identity intersect. From the start, there were assumptions and understandings of how food and identity play a role in our lives. As we further explored the ways in which we identify ourselves through food, we understand there to be a few different aspects of our identities that play a role in it; family ancestry, gender, location, and education. Throughout this blog, we explored these four sub categories in depth to understand how they are influenced and affected by the food and foodways, with a particular eye on our local community of Burlington, Vermont.
When considering aspects of food and identity, ancestry is a topic that will frequently arise; family ancestry makes up a large portion of how the majority of us would identify ourselves. My first blog entry consists of an exploration of my personal experiences and connections with food, identity and family ancestry. Additionally I explored the experiences of a Spanish-American woman whose family settled in my hometown of Barre, Vermont in the early twentieth century. It was interesting to see how much our experiences with food and identity differed even though we are originally from the same small town. This woman, Elisabeth Ramon-Bacon, and her family often did not have access to traditional Spanish ingredients that were crucial components in many conventional recipes. They were forced to improvise, and this improvisation changed their recipes as well as their identities, causing them to Americanize. Ramon-Bacon’s family immigrated to the United States, and their migration contributes to the phenomena of globalization.
Connecting These Themes to Globalization - Miranda
In my second and third blog entries I explored trends and patterns of globalization and how these theories and interpretations connect to food, identity and family ancestry. Globalization alters the identities of individuals, states and nations through the rapid movement and integration of people and ideas. As globalization advances, the influx of ethnic food, markets and restaurants also increases; globally, access to traditional ingredients is becoming easier. As stated in my second blog entry, “From 2010 to 2012, sales in ethnic foods rose by 4.5 percent, or nearly $9 billion, according to the Mintel Group, an international market research firm.” Through this course and research for this project, I have gained a greater understanding of how foodways, food systems and globalization function in relation to one another.
Throughout this course, I have often, and deeply, pondered what our food choices and preferences say about the identities that we are trying to achieve, maintain and project? Ancestry and globalization greatly influence our identities and lifestyles because they assist in shaping our options, inclinations and choices of the food that we consume, making food a large part of individual, national and global identities. Additionally, globalization makes way for greater acceptance of diversity and culture. Ethnic foods that were once considered to be inferior, strange and distasteful are now widely accepted and sought after and exotic cuisine is often preferred.
Gender Identity and Food - Jessie
I started off this blog with the hopes to better understand and explore the ways in which food contributes and influences to the identity of the female gender. As I began researching the impact food has on the lives of women, it was clear how significant food truly is to all humans, besides our basic need for caloric consumption. My first blog post explores the ability of food to establish social value for women and improve their relationship with food and their place in society. I had not realized how much of an impact gaining the knowledge and skills to not only cook for oneself and family but also the ability to create a healthy lifestyle truly is. Organizations, such as Vermont Works For Women, take these skills and knowledge and allows women to get out into the workforce with them. In these cases, food has the ability to improve the livelihood and confidence of women who face many struggles in their lives.
My second entry further explored how food can place women in our society, but focusing on some of the negative relationships we form with food. Just as food can help us improve our economic and social status, it can also be used against us in ways that we are seeing become more prominent, such as body image insecurities. We have begun to seen an increase in eating disorders and body image insecurities, especially among younger girls as our society places more and more pressures on what women should look like. Our society has created an unsteady relationship between how young girls and women perceive themselves and the food they put in their bodies. Unfortunately, these societal pressures are making women look at food as an “evil” when really it is just the relationship we’ve formed with it. Food is not only good for us and great tasting, but it is also necessary to live. It is sad that society can make food a negative part of how we view ourselves in comparison to what society wants from us.
Lastly, I discussed how, overtime, food and reproductive labor have become an integral part of the female identity. When my grandparents were young, women cooked and baked for her family, which was something that was never questioned. Now, as I cook for myself, not only are women becoming less integrated into reproductive labor, but cooking has become more standardized, fast, and efficient. Among younger generations, we are seeing less value being placed on home-cooked meals and a shift towards fast and easy meal preparation. Despite this shift, I believe there is still an importance in cooking and baking from scratch and the recipes that get passed down through female generations. Whether it is the actual process of cooking meals, the eating of the meals, or just the event itself, these memories provide us with ways to identify moments in our lives that stand out to us and create meaning. These memories help create who we are and how we identify ourselves.
Location and Identity - Patrick
At the outset, I began my individual blog posts with an emphasis on the relationship between where one lives and what one eats. It quickly became clear that factors such as accessibility, food movements, globalization, and more play into how people build their identities through cuisine. My findings across each blog reinforce this idea. By examining Burlington’s local food scene, impacts of globalization of food, and Vermont’s regional specialties (maple syrup) each provide context for understanding how food is completely intertwined in social interactions and rituals across cultures. Since food is consumed so regularly, and is in fact necessary for survival, the result is one of the most powerful ways that people come to express themselves, be it knowingly or not. Since much food is consumed in the public sector, immense value is placed upon it. People also have strong connections to their homes, and in this way, a symbiotic relationship seems to exist between one’s location and one’s identity through food. Removal of someone from their comfortable foodways can cause immense stress, paralleling the struggle that relocating to a new place can be. Overall, my topic aligned with the group’s original research questions in showing how people are constantly shaping their own identities through the foods that they eat in their respective locations.
Education and Food- Stephanie
I began writing about educational identity and food in hopes of making a connection between how education levels affect the way people eat. While researching for my first blog entry on food and education I found that the amount of education a person has truly does affect the way that he or she eats. The level of one's education significantly affects the salary that a person will receive throughout a lifetime. Salary and education are directly correlated. According to studies, people of a higher socioeconomic status tend to buy healthier, organic, and local foods, while people of a lower socioeconomic class tend to eat more accessible, processed foods that tend to be bad for their health. I found that levels of education also affect the knowledge that people have of nutrition. Higher educated people tend to have access to healthier diets.
While writing my second blog I focused on how children in schools identify with what they eat. Hot lunch that is provided by schools does not often hold much nutritional value and rarely offers students choice. Another big problem with school lunch is the stigma that comes with it. A lot of students who receive free or reduced lunch are noticed by other students as being the “less fortunate” or “poor”. For many students, the one free lunch that they are receiving at school is the only meal that they will have all day. This one meal is hardly ideal for most people. Children are not creating an identity with their food when they are not receiving any sort of choice.
In a world where getting a decent job no matter means having a high school diploma, but also a college degree, we are identifying more and more with the education that we have. Education is used as a measure of how successful someone is. An academic holds him or herself to high standard in all aspects, including the foods that he or she is choosing to eat. When it comes down to it, we really are what we eat. People who can afford to eat luxurious foods do so because they have the means to buy it, but for the people who never had the chance to go to school and therefore never got a decent job, there is not much choice in the foods that they are eating.
Group Consensus
Across the scope of this entire blog, each subtopic has yielded interesting points on how individuals as well as entire cultures can define themselves through food. These smaller themes, food/location, food/ancestry, gender identity and food, and food in educational systems, can provide differing perspectives on how exactly identity can be formed through what we eat.It is clear, however, that regardless of the respective lens that each author used people are both united and divided from one another through cuisine. We have raised and addressed questions regarding individual choices, geographic area, accessibility, societal expectations, gendered roles, traditions, systemic issues, and more. As one of life’s most basic necessities, food provides nourishment and allows us to continue to live. Nonetheless, it is so much more than just that. For a simple example, consider the immense value placed upon shared meals in many spheres: political, social, familial, etc. Undoubtedly, food will continue to carry with it enormous meaning as long as people are eating it.
Tomato photo: https://ediblematters.wordpress.com/
Venn Diagram: Made by Miranda
Photo of woman reading: https://ediblematters.wordpress.com/
