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As the French lawyer and gastronome, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once said, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are" (Schnetzer, 1999), the food we eat says a lot about our identity. A wide range of information about a person is expressed through his or her food choice. And we make assumptions about people based on their food choice.
According to a paper written by Phillips (2003), a person's identity can be shown by how they choose their diet or how they like their meat cooked among many others. When we encounter a person who doesn't eat meat, fish, and poultry and label that person a "vegetarian," we make assumptions about that person's moral and religious beliefs, culture, ethics, economy, taste preference, ethics, aspirations, and health among many others. In the process, we define a person based on what they eat.
What we eat communicates not only their preferences but it may also express our religious beliefs as well, like how the Hindus don't eat cow because cows are considered sacred. On the other hand, Muslims and Jews don't eat pork for an entirely different reason. What we eat and what we don't eat says something about our beliefs.
Our food also communicates our status in life. For Veblen (as cited in Phillips, 2003, p.7), "people of a lower social status envy and emulate those of a higher status. In turn, wealthier people and those of higher status change their consumption habits in order to remain distinguished." Fox (n.d.) explained that when people identify themselves with others, they eat the same things in the same way and in the process, they end up eating food they loath or avoiding tasty food like how "social climbing people have to learn to like caviar, artichokes, snails, and asparagus" (ibid.) When we see people eating a certain kind of food, we make assumptions about their social status and their financial capacity.
References
Schnetzer, a.W. (1999, July 11). The Gastronomic Servings of Brillat-Savarin. Retrieved January 16, 2009, at http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/Brillat_Savarin.htm
Phillips, C. (2003). How Do Consumers Express Their Identity Through the Choice of Products That They Buy? Retrieved January 14, 2009, at http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/research/pdf/2003-17.pdf
Fox, R. (n.d.). Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective. Retrieved January 15, 2009, at http://www.sirc.org/publik/food_and_eating_2.html
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