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.