Eating and feeling, society and food.

Everyone needs food in their life to survive. Eating is a simple checkpoint that each individual must pass through to live a happy healthy lifestyle. Regardless of its utter necessity, people enjoy eating, making meals in our world being something that is heralded upmost with the upmost importance and being something that is used to celebrate and commemorate.

The social significance of food runs incredibly deep, intertwined with cultural traditions, expectations, and identities. Because of this, one can tell a lot about a culture based off of how they experience their meals, who they eat with, and what specially they eat.

In two reflections on the connection between culture and food, one in prisons and one in post-Mao China, authors O’Donnell and Cate explore how social divisions can be mapped through food. In Cate’s piece on prisons she discusses how inmates who share their, “spreads”, (a low budget casserole that can be prepared with hot water and a microwave) usually do so with those of the same race noting, “the whites spread with the whites and the blacks spread with the blacks”. In this case, the cultural defining aspect of meal time in the prison has to do with who the inmates “spread” with.

This is different from the O’Donnell article on defining Chinese society through what is eaten. O’Donnell describes how the difference between seafood and livestock consumers is indicative of the shift from socialism to capitalism and takes it further by claiming this difference shows how Chinese culture has shifted from one that provides for to one that competes with.

The most interesting thing about these two articles is the difference in how food is viewed but the authors as well as the subjects they studied. O’Donnell sounded most concerned with the provisional aspect of food and society, where she defines a good Chinese government only by how the people eat during their reign. On the other side of things, the prisoners had all the food they needed to survive provided for them and instead of eating it they wanted to make their meals something more. Therefore for me it was way easier to get a sense of the prison culture than the Chinese based off of the discussion the authors proposed about food. The prisoners were more concerned with a total emobiment of the what, who, and how of their meals where it seemed that the most thing discussed in the O’Donnell article was simply the what, and how that pertained to society.

For me, meals are always much much more than a matter of survival. Often times my stomach will be full by my tongue will want more, so I will keep chugging at a delicious Pizza, or embark on a dessert journey filled with ecstasy and bliss. This is not only indicative of the culture live in, but my personal identity and how it is expressed. Meal time is a medium to express where you are from, who you enjoy being with, and what you value in life which is ultimately why one can understand huge parts of a society based off of what people eat.