Katie Lamp- Food for thought

Yes, the title is very cliched, but I think it is appropriate because I have often stopped to think about food. You know, what we eat, when we eat, why we eat what we eat, and all of that. After yesterday's video on food and how it contributes to emotional occassions and connections, I thought about food even more. In recent years, one of the hot topics has been food, including a focus on dieting and just where the food we eat comes from. It's almost like people are obsessed with having the most natural foods, eating exactly the right proportions, and eating only the best foods available. For a long time, food hasn't just been about nutritional value and survival. Non-human animals eat for survival and they eat to make up the caloric expenditure of foraging. Humans eat at parties, restaurants, weddings, family celebrations and many other occassions. Yes, people have to eat in order to survive and nutrition is very important in maintaining a healthy body, but there are so many other reasons people eat. If people ate simply to survive, there wouldn't be a problem with obesity, there wouldn't be eating disorders, and there wouldnt be as many brands and varieties of food available as there are today. The are as many reasons people eat as things they can choose to eat, and this is what is interesting to me. When someone is planning a party, food is important. A wedding- once again, food is very important. The restaurant business has thrived because people associate food with social settings. Most people have a favorite food or foods, and maybe this is just because I'm in college, but I know that I myself and other people get very excited about good food and going out to eat at restaurants that we like. If eating was not a highly social event, the catering business wouldn't exist, and I really don't think food just wouldn't be as interesting anymore. Anthropomorphism aside, animals only have "favorite" foods based on biological needs, not based on what they had at their birthday or what their parents fed them growing up.
Something else I have considered is how the creation of grocery stores and restaurants has made us stop thinking about what's in our food and where our food comes from. We are told from a young age to not put things in our mouths that aren't food, but parents and caregivers rarely explain all of the ingredients in the food they do allow their children to put in their mouths. When I ate my yogurt this morning, I didn't even think about the process by which that yogurt was made and how it ended up in the container with a Yoplait label on it, but maybe I should have given that a second thought. When we get food at the dining hall or at a restaurant, we usually do not know how it was prepared or where the ingredients came from. Most processed foods have ingredients that the average person can't even pronounce. What does this say? In our fast-paced society, we haven't stopped to slow down and really examine what we're putting our bodies. While I know I'm not going to do this all the time, and I will continue to put processed foods in my body without looking at the ingredients because I trust health inspectors to make sure my food is okay, it's definitely something I wish everyone thought about more often.