How Food Impacts Culture
When you think of culture, what comes to mind? Maybe the colors of a nation’s flag, the style of clothes worn, or certain traditions. Often, I think we tend to underestimate the impact daily cuisine has on cultures around the world and in our own homes. What we eat is a decision we make several times a day. It may not feel like a decision with great weight. In reality, it effects not only your health and well-being, but it’s also a way in which you express yourself through your culture. This blog post will explore what we eat and how we eat relative to pace of life and overall culture in Western and nonwestern cultures. It will also explore how living and traveling to different countries affects how we perceive food and culture and how it can change our own personal culture.
What we eat
Have you ever kept a food journal or kept track of what you ate in a day? Let me tell you, its eye opening all the food we put into our bodies and don’t give a second thought. When I lived in Uganda growing up, I remember the typical diet in which I ate each day. For breakfast, usually toast and eggs. For lunch, rice and beans or matoke and groundnut sauce. Dinner would vary, as we tried to cook a little more American style, but a couple of our favorites were chicken and rice or pasta. For snacks and dessert, we often had the many tropical fruits we bought locally, such as pineapple, watermelon, and mango.
When I moved back to America in 2019, I realized how much I had missed American food. I began to eat more sweets, especially in the mornings and after dinner. More and more food was prepared in the microwave and I found myself eating a lot of takeout. Now in my twenties, I have begun to eat cleaner, but I still struggle with maintaining healthy eating habits. I am not saying that it’s all because of where I am and has nothing to do with my own discipline. But I am saying that the culture we are in highly dictates what we put into our bodies. As I’ve been taking this food rhetoric class, I have begun to analyze more deeply why my eating habits have changed so drastically from my time in Uganda to my time in America. One significant cause I have studied has to do with the pace of life of each culture.
Pace of life
Pace of life can be defined according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary as the “speed at which changes and events occur.” Cultures can be defined by being fast-paced or slow-paced. A prime example of a primarily fast-paced culture is the United States. We live in a culture that is always rushing to do the next thing. There is a need to always be on the go and do all the things. On the bright side, there is a slow movement occuring in America. The coronavirus pandemic practically forced the country, and even the world, to press pause and slow down. According to Cable Neuhaus (2020), this has been a movement since the 1980's, but the pandemic accelerated the trend.
On the other side of the world, Uganda is a perfect example of how everyday life moves at a slower pace. Carl Honoré (2023) says it like this: “Instead of striving to do things faster, the slow movement focuses on doing things better. Often, that means slowing down, doing less, and prioritizing spending the right amount of time on the things that matter most to you.” For many Ugandans, family is what matters most. A common way they get time in with family every day is through meals together.
How we eat
Ugandans value the family unit above all else. A way in which they show this is by being intentional about eating together at the end of every day. They not only eat together, but they also cook together. It is common for the women and children of the household to spend much of the afternoon preparing dinner, which is often not eaten until between 8:00-10:00 p.m. This long process of cooking is almost unheard of in the United States, where we have so many short-cuts and every moment is considered time sensitive. But in the collectivist culture of Uganda, priorities are geared more toward family and community life rather than occupations or individual needs.
The United States, on the other hand, has made mealtime a sport. Meals are often eaten quickly so you can get back to whatever it was you were doing before. Americans work so much that when we get home, we often do not have the energy to put together a nice meal. So, we either find time to meal prep at the beginning of the week (which is a good alternative), or we take shortcuts, like grabbing takeout or stocking up on microwave dinners. In the individualist culture of the United States, we often care more about meeting our own needs and making sure we are productive rather than sitting down at the table with our families and asking how they are. However, not everyone is the same, no matter what culture you are a part of.
Making your own culture
As someone who was born in the United States and raised in Uganda, people have often called me a third culture kid. Interaction International (2022) defines this term as “a person who has spent a significant part of his/her developmental years outside of the parents culture.” A big part of how this third culture is formed has to do with food. A study done by Geetha Reddy and Rob M. van Dam (2020) shares that “Food is also used to assign meaning to oneself (Fischler, 1988), making food practices not only a practical decision influenced by access, environment, and nutritional needs but also one that is fundamentally social, cultural, and psychological (Rozin, 1980).” Therefore, when we spend significant amounts of time in different cultures, we seek to maintain our identify through cooking food similar to our home culture, but we also adapt to the culture we are in. This creates a unique cuisine that expresses our own way of life.
