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Forkways #30:




Why does food mater? It is a simple and complex question at the same time. Food connects with basic human needs along with deep longings and desires. Food is bound up with survival and self worth. Food can help us identify who we are and where we stand in our community. Food can be an obstacle and a vehicle. Food forms you and has the ability to transform you. Food has the ability to transport you. Food may be one of the most universal concepts in human history and human culture. It can define your class, social status, location in the world, ethnicity, and religious associations. 


Food production can have an impact on food security and deeply ecological implications. The ethical and ecological impacts of agriculture are important to consider and contrast to the nutritional needs and food availability to various populations in the world. Self sufficiency and the ability to see and connect with the food that you eat has also become an important trend in American society. 
Ever since people first came to the land of North America the fertile soil had been a primary focus of attention and agriculture. For many the journey across the United States has been a chance to reclaim the Garden of Eden. Many quests to North America were the result of a Utopian project for various religious beliefs and freedoms. The vast land available was ripe for both fertile crop production and utopian city planning. We believe in the promise of the hopes that only the American land can fulfill, but we no longer can connect those hopes with promises. We want a life that is authentic, vibrant, and pure but we have forgotten to also require this of the food we put into our bodies. Doc and Welsh identify four major tendencies for immigrant identity and foodways and because the American culture is primality based on a tradition of immigration, these insights may be helpful in understanding the American cultural body. These four tendencies are adaptation, diversity, identification, and integration.

A lifetime of work can be done on a single ingredient. It can be a challenge to look a the broad strokes of food and foodways in American society. Food as status, food as pleasure, food as community, and food as a defining factor of continuing the American legacy all weave together into the contemporary landscape of food and food choice in America. These choice are made in homes and schools and even on the streets of the smallest towns. Corn, for instance, may be on of the most American ingredient in the world. Countless books have been written on the subject from history to chemical makeup and countless articles, each of these titles only give a small fraction of understanding about the ecology (both actual and metaphorical) of American food production and consumption.

The problem with food isn’t that it is so little. All the books suggests that food research has been overlooked because it is so mundane. The problem with food is that it is so much. It carries so much meaning in one bite. History, gender roles, socioeconomic implications, international trade, tradition, and more in one single bite. And it is up to us to unpack that bite and each and every bite for significance and relativism.

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