Picky Eaters

Reminiscing about my childhood, I realized that I've consumed a lot of strange foods - well at least strange to the average American.  My family were immigrants from Ukraine.  Along with their meager belongings, they brought Russian cuisine with them to the U.S..  I've eaten Russian delicacies such as, cow's tongue, borsht (soup made from beets and other vegetables), kholodets (meat jelly), and red caviar.  Growing up with these foods seemed very natural for me, however, when I explain these foods to my non-Russian friends, they wrinkle their noses in disgust.  One person's delicacy can be another person's disgust.

In Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, she explains that dirt is a matter of perspective.  She says, "There is no such thing as absolute dirt:  it exists in the eye of the beholder (2)."  In the case of food, there may be cuisine in China that someone from South America might find revolting and vice versa.  Personally, I see bugs as inedible, but this is considered food in certain parts of the world.  This has a lot to do with where you were raised, the paradigm that you have lived with for most of your life.

I found an interesting quote from Mary Douglas' work that describes this paradigm, which says, "In chaos of shifting impressions, each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognizable shapes (45)."  Nowadays, if you visit a major U.S. city, you will be able to find a wide diversity of restaurants.  These can be anything from modern gastropubs to Indian restaurants with the hottest food in town.  So there is this "chaos" of all these choices that determine where one can eat.  There are a variety of people who different food preferences, such as those who are very picky eaters and those who are adventurous and love to explore all the food available in the world.  Those who categorize themselves as a picky eater would tend to go to restaurants that are closer to their comfort zone, meaning they will tend to go to the restaurant that supplies the foods that they have eaten for most of their lives.  I'm curious if this categorization of people as picky eaters has any correlation to the research that David Pizarro presented in his TED Talk on "The Strange Politics of Disgust."  Do picky eaters tend to be more easily disgusted and do they tend more towards the conservative end of the political spectrum?  Tangent aside, picky eaters construct a category of food that is safe and familiar for them to eat.  Anything that is foreign to them falls outside that category and they rule out eating that food.  I think it would be safe to say that picky eaters would place the food that I ate in my childhood outside their edible zone.

A Lesson on STD's

I was reading through "Race, Culture, Identity:  Misunderstood Connections," by Anthony Appiah and came across a line that provoked my thoughts to go into a very strange direction.  He was simply sharing the dictionary definition of culture, which read, "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions and all other products of human work and thought."  Strangely enough, when my eyes scanned the word "transmitted," my mind went to sexually transmitted diseases (STD's).  Then, it took another turn and read "socially transmitted" and I thought, socially transmitted diseases.

Taking this novel idea, I looked it up on Google.  One of the first results was from the credible, Urban Dictionary.  According to them, a socially transmitted disease is "when someone blogs, tweets, status updates something that brings the viewer/reader out in a rash."  This is an interesting definition in that I had initially assumed that socially transmitted diseases would permeate through the realm of twitter and hashtags and other media that begin trends.

The search result below read if obesity is a socially transmitted disease.  It summarized research performed on whether food choices were made based on social norms.  Their findings were that people did make food choices based on what others chose around them.  The article can be found here:  http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/is-obesity-a-socially-transmitted-disease-0.

Another result displayed a forum page for I Love Philosophy.  The person beginning the forum was interested in socially transmitted diseases.  He described STD's as being transmitted through memetic means, which is a terms used to describe evolutionary models for culture information transfer.  The term memetic originated from Richard Dawkin's book, "The Selfish Gene."  The person in the forum also suggested that STD's could be spread both through a combination of memetic and genetic means.  The forum page can be found here:  http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=180948.

I've decided to make up my own socially transmitted diseases here:
- Hashtagoreia - #Excessive hashtags
- Facebook Fever - Post, Like, Creep and Repeat.
- Selfylis (In case you didn't get this one, it has to do with selfies)
- Hipsteritis B and Hipsteritis C - We refuse to conform to social standards, so we conformed to our own social standards.

So remember, if you are going to go social, use protection!