Food Politics In The Food Industry

The food industry is a collective term for beverages and food companies across the entire food system. The industry is large enough to generate over a trillion dollars up to date. However, while the industry enables distribution, and process it also involves matters of food from different perspectives. Food is political because of these different outlooks, and therefore create a path that helps others understand the choices, cultural backgrounds, and explanations of things amongst a community. Internationally, the food system generates statements that reflects individual nutritional standards. In this paper I will explain several concepts that I have learned over the course of Food Politics that have allowed myself as a scholar to understand

It radiates cultural identity amongst individual and communities that bring people together because of the unspoken understanding of an entire set of rules and habits that are unique to individual ways of life. Consequently, this system of understanding is attached to different practices like religion that are expressed within food. Different religions for instance do not eat meat while others like the Christian faith began the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. Another detail that can be examined by food are cultural trends. As mentioned, these rituals create traditions (either religious or cultural) through time, and offer the history behind many cultural trends. Traditionally and historically, food choices are especially reflective amongst women. Women in America are known to eat small meals in order to seem poised. The women will usually be socially expected to eat a salad whereas a steak is manly making an assertive statement. Today, the rapid modernizations and changing cultural trends allow women to make these assertive statements by ditching the salad and grabbing that

Therefore, I argue that food marketing is an imperative element that lends the politics in food to a sociological game. Typically, any excursion into a grocery store takes you to aisles filled with food products loaded with sugars, fats, salts and calories that are ironically heavily promoted, making sellers large sums of money. The trick behind retailers is that they give you what you want, ready to make, tasty food. What many fail to recognize is the quality of these foods. As described in Eat Drink Vote, most of these products are processed foods with minimal nutritional value – “junk food”- filled with texturizers, colors, and flavors designed to make them look and taste like “real” foods (Nestle 136). Once producers use imagination as a skill, the influence on sales is astronomical rather than marketing the truth. Thus, researchers find for example, that emphasizing the positive (such as taste) attributes is often more effective than focusing on the negative- the bad things food might do to you. The real problem in the food system lies when the consumer claim they want to eat healthfully, but in truth, many are confused by nutrition advice and complicated ingredient lists. As a result, this is then the gap where marketers take advantage of the confusion by responding to rising ingredient costs that do not involve an increase in price. A common example is the bagel.