Sunday, October 4, 2015

Food Habits and Forced Consumption

From a young age we are conditioned to like certain foods, not like others and our general "sense" of food is formed. From everything we've read this year you can tell that our society is very specific about what it deems to be acceptable: by race, gender, income, etc. Women are much more often vegetarians and are often still in the homemaker position shopping for and making home meals. They feel a responsibility to get food on the table. Men on the other hand, generally think less about what they're eating, eat more fast food and think of food as "family time".

Early on who is in the kitchen, what they make, what we eat at other places, how are parents and peers act around food all shape how we'll interact with it. Parents often try and "condition" or at least teach good table manners to their children not always because they want their child to be well behaved but because they want others to think that since their children are well-behaved they are good parents and therefor a good person, at least to some extent.

This brings us to forced consumption and the Batsell et al. article's take on adults (usually primary caregivers, i.e. parents) forcing our young ones to eat things that most of society tells them people don't usually like; vegetables, fruits, "healthy things", etc. My dad isn't a big vegetable person but my mom is and at home growing up I was always encouraged (even a little forcefully) to try everything my mom, dad or anyone else ever cooked. I took to this because I wanted to fit in and because I liked most foods. My brothers on the other hand did not.

We never had real "proper" dinners and my parents never made us sit at the table for a certain amount of time, stay if we were finished or even eat anything we didn't want to. And at a young age my brothers refused to eat nearly everything, we joke in our family that they survived on bread and water. This was really important to our upbringing because of how lax our parents were compared to our peers'. My parents however started to get frustrated with my brothers enthusiasm on trying new foods because it meant they often had to prepare many different dishes, portions and meals. This got old after some time and it started to even bother me. Why were we making all these different things for my brothers when what the rest of us ate was perfectly good?

Thinking back after reading the articles makes me think we went about it the right way. Hindsight is nice right now for comparing. My older brother now eats as much of a variety as I do and my little brother is working on branching out and eating less refined foods and sugar. My parents never "forcing" us to do much of anything (food or otherwise) let us decide what was important to us and what we wanted to eat. And eventually we found our way to eating what they eat now and we all enjoy pretty much the same foods interestingly enough.

This fits in with the articles because clearly forcing people to eat certain things and forcing in general just made children adverse to certain things anyways. Giving people time to pick and choose what they like and eat how they want leaves the door open to trying everything and enjoying it later in life. For the Bronfenbrenner's model, I'd say that the important parts here are the microsystem and the exosystem because personal experiences are so vivid in peoples minds and the most important interactions you have growing up. Children's society is usually family based and young ages are where many of these important encounters occur.

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