Food Culture

Since having watched “Food, Inc,” my attention toward my own eating habits has increased exponentially. It had already been on the rise after my mother asked me what my diet consisted of through the past few years. Extremely biased but nostalgic nonetheless on my part but there is no finer cook in this world than my mother. I relied on her for at least that much, to sustain my life with strong hearty meals until I left for college. Redundant as the saying is, college is expensive and severely time consuming. Tuition, classes, books, rent, bills…food. After the first five are spent what’s left goes to that which is necessary to sustain our lives. There-in lies the problem, that time is always against us. I don’t have the time or substantial funds to go to a nice sit-down restaurant and receive a decent, heart-healthy meal. I make do with what I have and that is just enough to get me through the week on Jimmy Johns and campus food. Quick and cheap but by no means healthy. This documentary and others like it have really paved the way for people like me to open their eyes about what they are consuming. We may be saving on our wallet’s budget with a trip to McDonalds, but it’s costing our bodies’ much more. The main problem with this is that in our rapidly evolving, capitalistic society we are made to think through media that our time and money are precious. Mainly through clever advertising within popular media outlets is where they get the highest impact on the common person. “Hey, your favorite fast food chain just incorporated a drive through dollar menu!” This major convenience is making it too easy for us to become less healthy. Patience is a lost virtue not by every person, but a fair majority. We all have to eat in order to survive so by all these elements combined we must have our food quick and cheap so that the rest of our lives can focus on “more important” issues. The most important issue to any of us is to survive and to do this we need healthy food. This makes for a rather difficult and terrifying dilemma for those of us who don’t have adequate funds or time to spend on receiving such meals.