Food and Intercultural Life

Here at the Intercultural Life Office, we have been blessed with team members with different dietary needs and lifestyle approaches to food.  From vegans to lactose/gluten intolerants to the bacon lovers, and the peanut allergies, food is important and always a topic of choice in the office.  Since nutrition and living a healthy lifestyle is a very important part of my life, and because food is a very intimate part of anybody's daily routine, I have decided to shed some light on how food is closely tied to living a "culturally aware"life.  

I would like to begin my small contribution to this blog by focusing on people's relationship with food and how that is affected by their socioeconomic status.  Food is an important part of life and often times, what one eats can be easily tied to one's socioeconomic status.  As a college student who is off of the meal plan, I have come to the harsh realization that healthy food is much more pricey than the super processed food that I don't want to put in my body.  This realization led me to another realization that affects many minority populations today.  Because our food intake is a strong determinant of our health,  I could not stop thinking of the disadvantaged families that do not have enough money to purchase food that will give them good health.  Its not just about deciding whether to buy the cheap potato chips vs the veggies. It is also about how that decision will affect you in the future.  Being in a lower socioeconomic status often times means that you cannot afford good health, and that is a terrible realization.  Those of higher economic status can enjoy better health because they can easily pay for the $5 bag of clementines when the lower socioeconomic status family would rather spend those $5 on five McDonalds cheeseburgers.

How does this tie in with ILIFE then?  I think it is important to understand diversity and cultural awareness not in the usual ways that we typically think.  Its not just about skin color, ethnicity, or sexuality (to point some out).  It is also about the not so obvious factors that make us different.  We can't choose our socioeconomic class, we can't choose our skin color, but we can choose how we behave toward food and the differences we encounter.

Welcome Back

As we begin our new school year we are reminded that Central College is a place where people from varying social classes come to learn as equals. However, the reality remains that economic standings divide this country up into fractured groups and the state of the economy has not helped.  In fact the gap between the wealthy and the middle/poor classes continues to increase. According to Dateline NBC, the number of people on Medicaid since 2008 has doubled.  Also, in a more interesting twist of events, a 2011 study found that urban areas were not the place in which most poor people were residing. Instead, that honor was bestowed on suburban areas.

What concerns me the most is the lack of media attention the subject is receiving.  According to journalist Amy Dean, most freelance reporters would love to be covering stories about the average and poorer Americans as compared to the wealthier one percent. The problem is that these reporters are not being paid enough to cover their minimal costs to write the story.  Thus a real problem of not becoming informed citizens occurs, and people miss out on opportunities to educate themselves on how the poor are actually using their time and money. This problem breeds the stereotype that these people are unemployed slackers who drink their unemployment checks away and misuse welfare.

It is important to keep an open mind about people and not fall into stereotyping. So I dare the student body this year to understand and listen to those who are different from themselves, whether it is in socioeconomic, racial, religious, or whatever difference there maybe. I challenge you all to learn outside of the classroom and beyond the mainstream media about the stories in American.  Finally, welcome back to Central College and let this be a grand year for learning.

http://insidedateline.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/23/12376840-in-suburban-america-middle-class-begins-to-confront-poverty?chromedomain=usnews

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10375-why-are-working-people-invisible-in-the-mainstream-media