Food is the most primal drive of the human evolution, as sustenance for the human body is essential, and most people eat three times a day to stay healthy the importance of food cannot be ignored or undermined. In this context, the food we consume has also been evolving from traditional home-cooked meals to fast food and from organic ingredients to genetically modified crops. The connection of social life with food has also been a very keen aspect of the change of eating habits and the health concerns in social contexts. Eating together with our relatives is one of the healthiest habits we can practice, but unfortunately, our current and modern lifestyle does not make it easy for us to eat and have a meal with our children.
This situation pushes us to have the little ones eat in the school dining room and the adults, in their work or office, almost always bad and fast. Our grandparents have shared with us how important it is to reunite the family and maintain this pleasant and affectionate routine. Many of us answered it as ‘it’s not that bad,’ or we did not understand the importance of this experience, but thanks to several studies we discovered that our grandparents were too right in their words. Family gatherings during the meal decrease the risk of addiction in the adolescent stage. This condition happens because trust is what is enriched in these meals and meetings, enabling a channel of communication that otherwise and only by inertia would be closed little by little.
It was also possible to extract that we improve our diet since with three family meals per week we reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods and increase the use of balanced and healthy foods, such as vegetables and fruits. On the other hand, eating together reduces the incidence of eating disorders in childhood and adolescence. The risk that a teenager binge, cause vomiting or dieting without a medical reason decreases significantly if they are consuming home cooked meals. These points lead us to understand that food never lost its importance to individuals or families for that matter. It was the cost of food together with the availability of the food that changed everything (Pollan).
Since food got industrialized and technology was brought in as the catalyst to grow more food with cheaper resources and labor, its quality diminished. Today, many of the people cannot afford the organic ingredients and or the fresh food because of the political and corporate stakes in the food industry. According to ‘The Food Movement, Rising’ by Michael Pollan there are now activists working together with farmers to engage more people in understanding the importance of home cooked meals and organic ingredients.
Michael Pollan did thorough research into identifying the relation of food and the health issues of the people all over the United States. It was found that people who ate more fast food had higher chances to get diabetes, blood pressure, heart problem and many types of cancers. Today, however, this issue has been widely recognized and many organizations are now working together with government initiatives to make sure that the food people consume is healthier, and there are lesser chances to get serious illnesses. It is believed that when the home cooked food will be reintroduced the social connections of the families will be rebuilt, and there would be lesser chances of social and family-related issues (“The Food Movement, Rising”).
Work Cited
“The Food Movement, Rising”. Michaelpollan.Com, 2018, https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-food-movement-rising/. Accessed 11 Apr 2018.
Pollan, Michael. “The Food Movement, Rising”. The New York Review Of Books, 2018, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/06/10/food-movement-rising/. Accessed 11 Apr 2018.
