Alqahtani 1

Majed alqahtani
English 113B
Professor Rosenfeld
20 February 2016
Food Habits
What determines your food habits? The Culture and society you grow in. Culture plays
the most influential part in forming your food preferences. people become vegetarians for a
variety of reasons nutritional, ethical, environmental, and religious. Thus, these choices are not
only personal but also cultural. As Jonathan Foer writes in Let Them Eat Dog, food is not
rational. Food is culture, habit, craving, and identity. (685). Although, eating meat gives you
energy, proteins, and vitamins. However, I believe many people eat meat cause the health issues.
Therefore, your overall physical look also depends on your food choice and how bad meat
consumption is.
The China Study T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell. I think this is a book
that every one should be required to read in high school. Each study in it is own way proves over
and over again the horrible side effects of a diet that is primarily based off of animal protein
(meat eaters). These studies are then followed by a different study that proves that a plant-based
diet is the key to our health. It turns off cancer, reduces bad cholesterol levels, un-clogs arteries
that are quickly on their way to producing heart attacks, and in turn, reduces weight. It explains
that Americans primarily die from heart attacks that are without doubt caused from a poor diet.
All the information is right in front of us but we refuse to believe that we are on dangerous. I
think we like to put blame on our genes but The China Study explains that only 2-3% of all

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cancers could be attributed to genes. Veganism has been on the rise for a number of years. For
some, being vegan is about protecting animals, for others it is to keep healthy, for a few it is no

more than following a trend. But did you know cutting down on the amount of animal produce
we consume could be the best way to prevent global warming?
Meat impacts the environment more than any other food we eat, which because livestock
require much more space, food, water, and energy than plants to raise. In 2007, 275 million tons
of meat were produced worldwide, enough for 92 pounds for every person (Hal weil 2008, 1).
On one level, this fourfold increase in meat production since 1960. (Henning, Brian).

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This visual explains the average meat
consumption per person and shows how
do we consume meat every year. This
picture actually speaks for itself because in
reality this is true because in the United
States people actually consume more meat
than other countries. Even with these
surprising numbers, meat consumption has
continued to rise in the United States,
European and developed world. However,
does meat really cause cancer? If yes, why
do we eat meat? We eat meat because meat can give us energy, meat also contains nutrients,
vitamins and protein. Although we function best eating both plants and animals but the best
choice is to rise plants, fruits and vegetables that are fed to human, but to support chickens, cows
and pigs that we eventually eat. As a result, there may be no other single human activity that has
a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock.

Moving to United States did not change my food habits although I thought it would.
During this last semester at college I have met students giving out brochures about becoming
vegetarian. The brochure described and illustrated conditions in which animals are farmed and
treated. Probably, many students got affected and became vegetarians as it is easy to influence
students opinions at young age. However, despite the pity I felt for animals I could not make
myself stop eating meat, chicken or fish. I was never restricted in food and It would be hard to

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stop eating something I have been eating my whole life. My case is completely opposite from
what Foer was experiencing during his college years; At the end of my sophomore year, I
became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a
vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too
paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must
conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me (688). Even
though he was not a vegetarian his whole life, Foer was able to restrict himself in meat even if
was for short period time.
How food is essential part of culture? Food offers a key to various types of social
organization, uses of technology, expressions of a market economy, and patterns of daily life. For
decades, ethnographers and anthropologists have focused on preindustrial food systems as a way
to discuss how a given people-group organizes and gives meaning to the world it creates and
inhabitsthat food is part of a cultural system. (Watts Sydney) I miss my grandmothers

special dishes and feel like nobody could ever cook the way she did. I am glad and thankful that I
was raised with my family and I had the opportunity to try out so many dishes cooked by my
granny and mum. As Foer said food is love. There would never be any leftovers as we were a
big family. My grandmother would cook in big portions so that anyone could have an additional
portion of meal. She had same attitude toward the food as Jonathan Foer describes in his book
Eating Animals; Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness,
humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. She enjoyed, loved cooking and most of all
she loved seeing us full and happy. Before going to sleep my grandmother would give a
chocolate and say, it will help you fall asleep faster. Somehow, all grannys efforts to make me

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gain some weight would never turn out as she expected. I never gained weight during summer
break. However, summer break was the best time of the year.
Many people do not believe or think anything of what they eat or how it got there. But
the truth is the meat that you eat was once a living, breathing creature that had feeling and
emotions. Maybe next time you order a steak or chicken nuggets you should think about the
animals that went through extreme pain and conditions for you to eat. Not only is it inhumane to
put animals through such pain, not eating meat and having a vegetarian lifestyle can have huge
benefits to animals, the environment, and your health. Can you imagine going through the pain
that animals in slaughterhouses went through? Most people do not think of that part of it but the
real fact is that billions of animals went through a painful life to be killed for food every year.
Most people like to keep the thought in their heads that these animals live on beautiful green
farms where they are treated great and then have a very peaceful death, and never feel any or
little pain. Well that is not the case, these animals are treated very unfairly. The animals in
slaughterhouses are given a massive amount of antibiotics, hormones, and drugs to keep them
alive in conditions that are so bad they would otherwise kill them. Cows are naturally very gentle
and calm creatures. These smart and sweet natured animals have been known to go to great
lengths to escape slaughterhouses. More than forty-one million of these sensitive animals suffer
and die a painful death each year in the United States. When cows are still very young they are
burned with hot irons, there testicles are torn or cut off, all without painkillers. Most beef cattle
are born in one state, live in another, and are slaughtered in another. The cows who survive the
gruesome transportation process are shot in the head with a bolt gun, hung upside down by there
legs, and taken onto the killing floor where their throats.

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Works Cited

1_ Henning, Brian G. "STANDING IN LIVESTOCK'S 'LONG SHADOW': THE ETHICS OF

EATING MEAT ON A SMALL PLANET." Ethics and the Environment 16.2 (2011):
63,93,127. ProQuest. 28 Mar. 2016 .

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2_ Watts, Sydney. "Massimo Montanari. Food is Culture." Enterprise & Society 9.2 (2008): 36870. ProQuest. 28 Mar. 2016 .

3_ Brummett, B. (Ed).(2008). Uncovering hidden rhetorics :Social issues in disguise. Los

Angeles, CA: Sage.