HW 4 - Your Families' Foodways

When it comes to food, we all have our own approaches, in my family at least, we all have the same goals, we want to eat healthy so we can stay in shape, but if we can eat whatever we want and not gain weight, then we eat whatever we want. My mom has always been very keen on healthier eating and living. She wants us all to eat healthy because by eating healthier, she believes that we will be living healthier. We always look at what is in a food before we eat it. And the calorie count is always important. But sometimes you just need that chocolate bar. Me and my brother both stopped drinking soda because it is bad for us and we wanted to loose weight. For me, it had nothing to do with drinking all those weird chemicals, we all need our little vices, i guess that just wasn't mine. Mine is that i like to eat a lot. Whether it be of healthy food or fatty food, i like to eat a lot of it. Which is something that i get from my dad, because he used to be a runner and he used to eat a lot, and when he stopped he still ate a lot because well some habits are hard to break

My mom is a wonderful cook, mainly because she learned from my grandma who was an amazing cook. She taught my mom how to make ritz cracker chicken, which is chicken breaded in broken up ritz crackers. She taught her out to make ice box cake, which i can't really explain, but its it like cookies which heavy cream that you put in the freezer. Now neither of these meals are healthy, but thats because my grandma didn't want to cook meals that needed to be steamed or anything like that. She believed in the flavor of food and how it should taste rich and full, usually because she put a lot of butter in it. So for most of my life, i grew up with food that was cooked in oil and had butter in it, or something else that was terrible for me, but tasted amazing.

Now when it comes to cooking, everything my mom learned was from her own mother, who cooked, as i just said, in a very unhealthy way. Now how do you change the way you cook to make it healthier, when all you know and learned, from your own mother, is unhealthy? There isn't much you can do. Its hard to start again from the beginning and abandon what you knew when it was your mother who taught you. So when she stopped frying things and suddenly our food tasted... Healthy.... We were all confused. We didn't really know what to do. We were also used to the fatty food that she had been cooking forever. And now it was gone, we have chicken that is grilled and not breaded instead of cooked in oil. We have pasta with some garlic sauce instead of potatoes or french fries.

Then again, when we order take out, all the rules are off. We get chinese food, or burritos, or anything that will clog our arteries for us because, well, we can.

When i asked about the sudden healthy approach to food, they said that we all needed to start watching our weight because we were all getting a little big. There wasn't anything that i could really say to that because i wanted to be skinny too, but i wasn't yet willing to sacrifice the good food that my mom had always been cooking to do that. Its one of those things that we have to take in strides. It all goes for the things that we have to give up in order to fit into the american vision of what we should all look, we can't all be supermodels, but we should all try.