Week 1, Post 2: This week's reading

While reading Thinking Food/Thinking Gender, I realized that in America we tend to associate the kitchen with mostly females. I mean, I have noticed that all of my life, but some guys will put off cooking because it is the “woman’s job” when really, it can be anybody’s position. I also understand that the idea of women being in the kitchen came from many years ago when men would go work on the farm and the women would be inside taking care of the children. I see how we set ourselves up for failure here too, because now, many guys don’t like to cook therefore they don’t and the women are stuck cooking. Now, I know there is a fair share of guys that actually do cook, but most of the time everyone relies on the woman to cook. I found this reading also interesting because I never really thought about how the magazines for food are directed more toward women than they are men. But now that I think about it, I totally understand! The women are more likely the ones to be grocery shopping or looking for recipes, so it stands to reason that many people would advertise cooking directed towards women.

The reading also made me think about how food has evolved from the past. People in the U.S. used to grow their crops then prepare them, where everything was fresh. Now we have a lot of “fast, easy, convenient” foods that aren’t as healthy for us. I feel like we are only hurting ourselves by what we eat, due to all the preservatives that are put in foods these days. Frozen foods have got to go!
When I was in Honduras, all we had was fresh food, and by fresh I mean grown or caught. Everything we ate made my body feel better, because for that week my body was almost completely free of all the preservatives and harsh chemicals we process our food with. It was almost like a body detox, but then of course the second I got back into the states, it was back to Wendy’s and Pizza Hut! I feel like if healthier foods were more accessible in the U.S. we would find that people might actually watch what they eat, and try to control their daily intake of fatty foods.

I would love to have a healthy, fast, easy, and convenient meal, but I mean, you can only eat an apple so many times a day. Have you ever heard of a fast food restaurant that only serves healthy food? That’s what we need to be making drive thru’s for! I mean, taste does have a pretty big impact on if people would by the food or not, but if it is seasoned right and cooked right, people would buy it! I feel like most people are like me, I want to eat healthy, but I’m a little lazy to hunt down all the things I need to be healthy. I like convenience.