hw #4

Luckily my family putts an effort in to eat what they consider healthy. I observed this in my mom and my grandmother. What seems to constrict there ability to cook completely healthy food is gender norms, economic class, and culture.

My mom tells me that when she was a child her mother taught her to eat a healthy “balance between crabs, proteins, vegetables, and fruit.” My mom says that her mother did follow this but she always loved to fry everything in “lard.” As a child my mother ate “beef stew baked potato, fried chicken, fried fish, and fried eggs in lard for breakfast.” I believe this is because of her culture. She was raised in southern Indiana where seemingly everything is fried. My mothers child food cuisine was “delicious and tried to be healthy”

The food that is prepared for me at home is “balanced” according to my mother but we do not have nearly as much fried food as my grandma cooks. When I asked my mom if gender norms effect the way we eat she says, “YEA!! I do all of the cooking and shopping. I don’t do dishes though.” This could be one of the aspects holding back the quality of our diet. When asking my mom what is more important, taste, price, or health value, she said that ideally it would be health but sometimes healthy food is too expensive for it to be the complete priority. She says that when times are hard she tries to find cheaper alternatives to the food she is used to. My mom, like her mother, has things holding back the way that we eat.

One thing I concluded from this assignment was that all caring parents think that they are feeding children healthy foods. My grandma tells me that the definition of health food has changed sense my mother was a child. The fact that any one has the best diet in the world.