The ability to navigate a culinary environment with moderate ease is a skill most often associated with those of the female persuasion. By the time a young girl enters the daunting world that is adolescence, she is faced with some expectations. One of these being, learning most, if not all, the skills associated with cookery. However, gone are the years where education was reserved only for those with testosterone while the girls sat idly by, tending to the home and preparing meals for the husband. The stereotypes set in place by the cultural norms of earlier decades have begun to fissure, as more and more women find themselves immersed in the dog-eat-dog world of business. In my personal opinion, I strongly believe with this newfound equality between the forces of testosterone and estrogen, it is imperative that boys and men alike learn how to cook for themselves. The ability to navigate a culinary environment is one of the most important skills any individual, regardless of gender, can possess, because it nurtures an invaluable independence in the individual, ensuring their success as they leave the nest of their parents and enter the real world for the first time.
Nowadays, boys are often dependent on their mothers, older sisters and later on, if they choose to get married, their wives, to cook for them. They grow accustomed to having food readily made for whenever they are hungry and if their meal is a delayed or they happen to miss it, they can get cranky and irritable. A personal example of this occurrence is found in my brother. If more boys were to learn how to cook for themselves, beyond the standard of scrambling eggs and toasting bread, they would not have to endure the wait for their food to be made, as they would be ...
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...to cook is an important ability, regardless of gender, because food tastes better when made by skillful hands, and food does not know nor care if the hand preparing it is male or female.
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Richard Balko and Mary Maxfield discuss personal responsibility, and choices in one’s health in their essays “What You Eat Is Your Business,” and “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating” respectively. Balko feels the government should not intervene in people’s food intake because it is an individual preference. Instead, Balko asserts that the government should foster a program to assist the American people to take on personal responsibility and ownership of their own health. Similarly, Maxfield paints the same picture that our culture now finds it immoral to eat what our body needs, therefore believing in the idea of eating less is healthier. Maxfield points out the multi-billion dollar campaign of corporations into advertising false hope into consumers by buying into eradication of fatness. Why has food have suddenly become a risky subject at the dinner table? And who is to blame? Is it everyone else or do we blame ourselves?
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For some time, scholars and writers have continuously debated as to what constitutes or defines the idea of healthy eating, mainly because of the increase in the number of people diagnosed with ailments associated with bad eating habits. It has quickly become the forefront of issue, particularly in the United States. In recognition of this on-going debate, this composition seeks to compare and contrast two well-known authors concerning how we think about and consume food. In Michael Pollan’s discussion, “Escape from the Western Diet,” he discusses the negative sides of nutrition science, including conflicting theories surrounding the elements of healthy food consumption and why solutions are essential for the Western diet and lifestyle. “Escape from the Western Diet,’’ is among the articles that talks about the eating habits of individuals in the society. In the article, Pollan points out not only the numerous conflicts concerning what types of diets – including carbohydrate-based, the inclusion of omega-3s, other nutrition-specific needs - that are believed to directly affect general health or specific illnesses, but also how western nutritionism compares to other countries diets affect longevity outcomes. In the end, Pollan suggests that the United States must seek solutions that move towards more natural, unprocessed, plant-based lifestyles that ensure that individuals are making what they consume a primary
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When Alex Guarnaschelli was in a restaurant in Paris, one male co-worker even said to her,” You suck, you’re a girl, I hate you.” (pg 431, para 2). This could have been a perfectly reasonable opinion, had it not been for the sole fact that she was a woman. All she wanted to do was cook bass, which she inevitably burned, but the co-worker wanted nothing to do with her in the kitchen. This view is furthered when Rebecca Charles tells of how even though she is the chef of the kitchen, delivery men will ignore her and ask her male sous chef for a signature when making a delivery. Some people go as far as to completely ignore the fact that women are great cooks, even ignoring them in their own kitchens. If a female chef happens to be over-enthusiastic she is seen as an immature school girl. The reporter makes sure to structure the questions in order to get the women to tell of the worst situations they had been forced to endure due to their
In our fast pace society, we base everything on time and money. This need to save money and time has transformed the way we see food and purchase food. Food is an essential part of all cultures. It plays a role in every person’s life. The population has the power to choose what we eat and how the food industry is shaped. There are many important questions that we need to ask ourselves in order to keep the food industry in check. These questions are: How do we know our food is safe? What should we eat? How should food be distributed? What is good food? These are simple yet difficult questions.
one point or another, many have heard the saying “women belong in the kitchen”; nowadays,
“Food as thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating,” is an article written by Mary Maxfield in response or reaction to Michael Pollan’s “Escape from the Western Diet”. Michael Pollan tried to enlighten the readers about what they should eat or not in order to stay healthy by offering and proposing a simple theory: “the elimination of processed foods” (443).
In his article “What You Eat Is Your Business,” Radley Balko emphasizes that we ought to be accountable with what we eat, and the government should not interfere with that. He declares that the state legislature and school boards are already banning snacks and soda at school campuses across the country to help out the “anti-obesity” measure. Radley claims that each individual’s health is becoming “public health” instead of it being their own problem. Balko also states, “We’re becoming less responsible for our own health, and more responsible for everyone else’s.” For instance, a couple of new laws have been passed for people to pay for others’ medicine. There is no incentive to eat right and healthy, if other people are paying for the doctor
Eating is an instinctual habit; however, what we decide to put in our body is a choice that will affect our way of living. In “The American Paradox,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at University of California, Berkeley, disapproves of the way Americans have been eating. The term “American paradox” describes the inverse correlation where we spend more of our time on nutrition, but it would only lead to our overall health deteriorating. According to Pollan, our way of eating that had been governed with culture, or our mother, was changed by the entities of food marketers and scientists, who set up nutritional guidelines that changed the way we think about food. Nutritional advice is inaccurate as it is never proven, and it is not beneficial
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Cookbooks during this time period in the 1950’s had a significant role in society in which it impacted and influenced the domestic ideology of postwar America. Many cookbooks were created to advise women and mainly newly-weds in the culinary arts to reassure that their skills in the kitchen would ensure happy marriages. These cookbooks helped to limit women’s role to those of wives, mothers, and homemakers. They are a reflection of the 1950’s popular culture which emphasized conformity, a gender-based society, and gender norms, in which gender roles were very distinct and rigid. They are similar to television in that they can be seen as teachers because they have instructional texts “given detailed account of the correct gender specific way to undertake the activity of cooking” in which their students are mainly women pressuring them to identify themselves as solely housewives and mothers (“The Way to a Man’s Heart”, pg. 531). Because of cookbooks and its reflection on popular culture, there was a heightened emphasis during this time period on the woman’s role in feeding the family. The 1940s cookbooks emphasized more on rationing food and helping the war effort by not wasting any food and being creative of limited sources of food. However, although the concept of food is different, the domestic ideology was still the same in that these
American culture is changing dramatically. In some areas it’s a good thing, but in other areas, like our food culture, it can have negative affects. It is almost as if our eating habits are devolving, from a moral and traditional point of view. The great America, the land of the free and brave. The land of great things and being successful, “living the good life.” These attributes highlight some irony, especially in our food culture. Is the American food culture successful? Does it coincide with “good living”? What about fast and processed foods? These industries are flourishing today, making record sales all over the globe. People keep going back for more, time after time. Why? The answer is interestingly simple. Time, or in other words, efficiency. As people are so caught up in their jobs, schooling, sports, or whatever it may be, the fast/processed food industries are rapidly taking over the American food culture, giving people the choice of hot
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