Eating Habits

I would change Brofenbrenner's model just a little bit in order to map the cultural influences of what we eat.  I would make sure that parents have their own category and were clearly exerting the most influence of anything else on what the individual child was eating.  It needs to be clear that parents and school are the number one things that govern what a child eats.  I am sure many of us still eat in certain ways or eat certain things that we learned from our parents that we picked up and may not even realize it.  Even if you think you've totally changed since you were young and have such an eclectic pallet and are not a picky eater anymore, there is always something you can find about what you eat or the way your prepare something that you can attribute back to how your parents did it.  For me, I know sometimes I will fry up two eggs and put it on toast with ketchup and make a fried egg sandwich once in a while.  I don't do this because I like ketchup or eggs particularly, but I just do it because I learned that that sandwich is an option for lunch sometimes.  I don't even like it that much, but when I am sick of having whatever I usually have  I will have that and then when I take the first bite I don't understand why I even made it.  I was never forced to consume it, but just having it around so much when I was younger made me grow to not like it as much, although it is still ingrained in my habits.  Habits are a very strong thing to break, especially when you are not even thinking about them.