Food

Subjects this term, especially Food Sociology is actually making me scare of eating food nowadays, or shall I say more caution when it comes to food products? If you are a hospitality student who happened to study the same subject as I am, then perhaps you will understand this more, but if you are not, perhaps you will not be aware of all these.

Brillat Savarin said ' Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are'

He is the founder of gastronomy, and what he said, is just brilliant. Yes. Whatever that goes in your tummy, will determine who you are. Whatever that you consume now may not affect you in short term, but when in long run, it will definitely impact you slowly and when you realize it, it may be too late. 

As much I wanted to tell people about what I had learnt, others may not think that it is important. People always said, ' I am still young, I should eat whatever that I want now' Oh well, I do agree with this statement to a certain extend, but hey, it has no harm to educated yourself about what you eat right?

But I am lucky that I have a mum who are as health conscious as I am, so if you can see from pictures of me and my brothers, none of us are even close to overweight. Well, not trying to be proud, but I must say, it is all because of my mum. She had been trying to feed us with oats since we were young, trying to force us to eat celery  making sure that each meal has vegetables in it, now she is pretty much a tea person. And oh, my parents are trying to grow their own vegetables now. I am surprised to find that my dad successfully grown some HUGE pumpkin in our garden, spring onion, coriander, passion fruit, sweet berry etc. So ya, I think my family is turning organic slowly. haha. Which is a good thing!

One fine day, I was so enthusiastic to tell my mum about the benefits about vegetables and wanted to encourage my mum to ask my dad to eat more vegetables. And guess what my mum says? 

'You think I don't know ar? You did not see everyday you dad is eating more vegetables now? I know all these, better than you do.'

At that moment, I feel so proud of my mum. haha. 

Anyways, everyone eats. No matter what race you are, no matter what size you are, as long as you are a living being, you eat. Eat is part of our live, when we sad, we eat; when we are happy, we eat; when we are angry, we eat; and no matter what we do, we will still eat. Of course, anorexia or bulimic does not count. Those are the psychological reasons that are stopping them from eating properly. 

Eating is like a therapy for most of us. You feel good after you eat because you feel satisfied, sometimes you feel bad after you eat because you felt guilty. But there is not doubt, food is a necessity and we have to eat, to live. 

And so, everyone have to eat, and we all eat three times a day, or two if you have brunch. Imagine the amount of food that goes into your body, how much and what our body absorbs from it. You eat fast food, your body absorbs all the fats which leads to high cholesterol, high blood pressure in long term. You eat junk food and your body absorbs all the additives, preservatives that were used to produced the product. 

If you are a nutritionist, perhaps what I am saying now is just peanuts of what you had learnt, yes, I only touch the water a bit, but it certainly has an impact on me. 

Everyone knows eating vegetables are good. Your mum told you so, your teachers told you so, your friends told you so. Yes. Eating vegetables are good for you and it has so so many nutrients that our body acquire. I am sure most of you are aware of it, so I will not touch much on it. But the thing is, as more and more research were being conducted on food, more tacky and wacky things will come out, like GMO ( Genetically Modified food), clones etc. As the demand of food increase, the supply have to increase as well. Hence, you need to increase the food production. But how? Then comes hormones injection, antibiotics, clones etc. All these food are becoming so common now that sometimes, we don't even know what we are eating. We don't even know that we are eating food that were being inject with hormones, antibiotics, whether it is Genetically Modified or not. 

If you heard of some food product from certain country, *ahem* 70 percent of the things you find in the market comes from???  They use coloring to make the food more appealing, they inject sweetening agent into fruits to make it sweet, it adds in melamine in milk powder so it could save their production cost by diluting the milk etc. So tell me, how sure are you the food that you eat are safe?? 

Hence comes organic food which is produced naturally without the use of all those components like pesticides, herbicides etc. In Malaysia, the price of organic food is still rocketing high compared to normal food products. The organic food market is slowly growing, however, it will not grow unless the demands goes up. One thing about organic food in Malaysia is, the regulations are still not strong enough and those that claimed to be 'organic' food may not be organic at all. It may just be a marketing strategy to convince people to buy their products. So why would you buy organic food, when others are 2 times cheaper than organic food? Even I can not convince myself! Because, it is all about money. If the price is cheaper, then only consumers will slowly accept organic food and purchase organic food. But when there is no demand, how would the price drop??

So tell me, will it change your mind of food after reading what I had written so far? Like my lecturer said, we all know, but we don't do anything about it. UNLESS, there is a huge impact like what happen to the melamine case, then only the authority will do 'something'. 

I know what I wrote may be boring to you, but this is my interest and something that I take really seriously. If you are interested, I can tell you which video to watch. =)Hopefully everyone who reads this, will start to take what they eat a little bit more seriously. =)