You Are What You Eat?
Our refrigerators have the potential to reveal who we are by the kinds of food we keep. The refrigerator shown is that of a single, 43-year-old woman with a 3-year-old daughter. Her lifestyle is heavily reflected in the kinds of foods that I saw in her fridge. For example, she had many packaged and frozen foods which is not atypical for a working mother with a small child. In Lauren Shapiro's "Something from the Oven," she speaks about the gradual shift from strictly homemade foods to the introduction of packaged foods as a means for convenience for the working mother. The woman told me that between her career and her daughter, she barely makes time to cook which bothers her because growing up, her parents made sure to cook something every night. Foods such as yogurt and juice boxes are readily available for a snack to give her daughter when she's on the run. The McDonald's cup showed evidence of fast food runs and when asked, she admitted to making frequent trips to McDonald's because her daughter loves "the french fry store."
Another thing that I noticed was that her fridge wasn't completely full. I took the empty shelf space to mean she had a greater food supply in her pantry. I asked to take a look inside and discovered a variety of processed foods ranging from granola bars, to family-sized bags of chips. Only two people live in the house so it is not surprising that she would choose these foods with a longer shelf life. I commented on the multiple bags of Cheetos and she told me that they were her daughter's favorite and that, although she's only 3, she can finish an entire bag in a day if she's not monitored.I immediately thought of "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" and the concept of vanishing caloric density-Cheetos fit the criteria for it perfectly because a person eating them has the potential to consume many empty calories without even realizing it.
Of the traditional food groups, the element that was lacking the most was meat. She told me that growing up, her parents stopped feeding her beef and pork after finding out about natural colonics and learning how long it took to process those types of meat through our systems. When her sister became an adult. she began to eat those meats again but the woman said that when she tried, it made her sick. She still only eats and feeds her daughter chicken because she believes it's healthier but the leftover boxes of Lee's Chicken told a story of chicken that was far from what would be considered a healthier choice.
This was a great learning experience. I continue to challenge myself to get past what I would deem as "normal" diet because, really, there is no such thing. Many factors ranging from income level, to culture to even location have effects on the way people eat. In class, we viewed images from a project called "Hungry Planet." The work was from a photographer and writer's book called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, in which they documented the foods an average family consumes and its cost in an ordinary week in 24 different countries. From this, I gained a better understanding of how different cultures play a large part in the kinds of food people consume and how much of their income goes towards feeding their families. The photo I took was of a fridge of a single parent with a young child, and I would say that her refrigerator reflected that lifestyle-a lifestyle of convenient food.
I could not help but to think of the 3-year-old and how this food would come to affect her in her future. With a mother who cooks little to zero percent of the time, there was a chance the child would be subjected to many meals filled with processed foods in the future, and it is highly likely that the cooking habits of her mother would translate on to her. As read in Pandora's Lunchbox, processed foods are an almost unavoidable part of modern human's diet. They are hard to escape and even harder to quit. Melanie Warner states that the key to overcoming the dangers of these foods can be heavily linked to cooking because it really does matter. My hope for this family would be that the child would not grow up to be a part of the generation of the kitchen illiterate, and would instead begin to take steps to think more deeply about the kinds of foods she eats. Changes can be made one step at a time.
Another thing that I noticed was that her fridge wasn't completely full. I took the empty shelf space to mean she had a greater food supply in her pantry. I asked to take a look inside and discovered a variety of processed foods ranging from granola bars, to family-sized bags of chips. Only two people live in the house so it is not surprising that she would choose these foods with a longer shelf life. I commented on the multiple bags of Cheetos and she told me that they were her daughter's favorite and that, although she's only 3, she can finish an entire bag in a day if she's not monitored.I immediately thought of "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" and the concept of vanishing caloric density-Cheetos fit the criteria for it perfectly because a person eating them has the potential to consume many empty calories without even realizing it.
Of the traditional food groups, the element that was lacking the most was meat. She told me that growing up, her parents stopped feeding her beef and pork after finding out about natural colonics and learning how long it took to process those types of meat through our systems. When her sister became an adult. she began to eat those meats again but the woman said that when she tried, it made her sick. She still only eats and feeds her daughter chicken because she believes it's healthier but the leftover boxes of Lee's Chicken told a story of chicken that was far from what would be considered a healthier choice.
This was a great learning experience. I continue to challenge myself to get past what I would deem as "normal" diet because, really, there is no such thing. Many factors ranging from income level, to culture to even location have effects on the way people eat. In class, we viewed images from a project called "Hungry Planet." The work was from a photographer and writer's book called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, in which they documented the foods an average family consumes and its cost in an ordinary week in 24 different countries. From this, I gained a better understanding of how different cultures play a large part in the kinds of food people consume and how much of their income goes towards feeding their families. The photo I took was of a fridge of a single parent with a young child, and I would say that her refrigerator reflected that lifestyle-a lifestyle of convenient food.
I could not help but to think of the 3-year-old and how this food would come to affect her in her future. With a mother who cooks little to zero percent of the time, there was a chance the child would be subjected to many meals filled with processed foods in the future, and it is highly likely that the cooking habits of her mother would translate on to her. As read in Pandora's Lunchbox, processed foods are an almost unavoidable part of modern human's diet. They are hard to escape and even harder to quit. Melanie Warner states that the key to overcoming the dangers of these foods can be heavily linked to cooking because it really does matter. My hope for this family would be that the child would not grow up to be a part of the generation of the kitchen illiterate, and would instead begin to take steps to think more deeply about the kinds of foods she eats. Changes can be made one step at a time.