Food Journal, Essay Example

My final journal entry provides an opportunity for me both to reflect back on the different themes I treated in previous entries and also to summarize some of the theoretical issues that have been raised in the various assigned readings. I think the primary recurring theme that I have mentioned is that of the relationship between food, society, and politics. Particularly, I have discussed the way in which society and politics can inform one’s food practice. The underlying idea of my writing has been to think about the way society and politics provides a certain framework that makes various food practices possible: in other words, this framework is the pre-condition for specific types of food practice. Political and social decisions can often eliminate access to specific types of food products according to, for example, the greater societal emphasis on industrial produced food. Therefore, my main thesis can be basically defined in terms of its opposition to Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which the author suggests we are overwhelmed by choices in food practice according to the dynamic nature of capitalist society. For Pollan, this particular societal structure provides an apparently unlimited number of available products. My main idea has been essentially a total reversal of Pollan’s thesis: that this is really an illusory choice, a false choice, and we are quite limited in food practices. This idea can be demonstrated in anything from the increased fast food consumption that is caused by poor economic situations, to visiting a supermarket whose shelves are only stocked with mass-produced items. While Pollan’s key argument is to emphasize that we are omnivores, and therefore the notion that we will eat anything, what current society demonstrates is that this omnivore status is subjugated to other factors. One has to go to a supermarket to get food; one has to go to certain restaurants because of economic situations; this forced choice is clearly a product of society and economics, and not reflective of an omnivore’s wish to eat anything. Food practice is a sector of society, which is equivalent to any other sector of society, such as educational options, or any other sector of the economy, such as housing. This is not to say that there are not alternatives, such as food coops, but such coops are certainly outside of the mainstream.

This idea has been reflected in my journal entries, in which I chronicled my own individual food practices. In other words, these macro-level divisions reflect themselves clearly on the micro-level of everyday individual life. One of the key points of these entries was that I was always pressed for time. This can definitely be attributed to various economic and social realities, such as needing to work or needing to study. These obligations and commitments can have very basic repercussions in everyday life, such as the lack of time to prepare a long and detailed meal or even to enjoy any meal whatsoever. Certainly, I mentioned some trips to restaurants with friends, but such happenings were few and far between. There is a certain temporal structuring of my own free time that is a product of these very demands, which I think is directly manifested in, for example, the increased reliance on fast food restaurants.

Of course, although I have emphasized the link between society and food, I do not want to imply some total reduction of food practice to societal, political and economic factors. Certainly, some of the readings have emphasized the aesthetic dimension of food with vivid descriptions. The traditional dimension of food has been found in other readings, which link food practice closely to the family unit and cultural practice. Although such traditional approaches to food practice could also be viewed in terms of a particular social construct and the particular social phenomenon of the family, I think these can be identified as positive manifestations of how social organizations structure food practice, to the extent that food becomes a way for positive forms of relationships to become established. The link between society, politics, economics and food is an area that I would still like to examine more closely, for example, by considering non-American examples of food practices in order to gauge their differences.