Blog Post #3

To be a Foodie

Food is essential to human beings. We all know the fact that no one can live without food. Today, food is not only the support of survival. People focus more on how dainty the food is than whether the food can fill the stomach or not. As time goes by, the concentration on food taste is getting higher and higher. Foodie culture occurs. Nowadays we can easily find cookbooks, cooking shows and restaurant reviews everywhere. At the same time, the debate about the foodie culture in relation to socioeconomic status arose. Some people believe that it takes a lot of money and time to appreciating good food while others do not think so. In my opinion, foodie culture does not have a strong relation with socioeconomic status. Everyone can become foodie regardless of career, gender, nationality, and religious belief.

Some people might think that it cost a lot of money to appreciate good food. But is the most expensive food always the best food? Once I read a blog post about the most expensive food in the world. The article introduced about 20 luxurious foods, including the most expensive tea bag. It is the tea bag for the PG Company to celebrate their 75th anniversary. The bag is worth seven thousand and five hundred pounds. The reason why it is extremely expensive is not because the specialty of the tea, but because of the decoration on the tea bag. The company uses two hundred and eighty diamonds on the tea bag to remind people how expensive the great British tea is. Actually, what people buy is not tea, but diamonds. We can obviously recognize that the price of food can not refer to the quality of the food itself. Sometimes, the package and the appearance cost much more than the taste of the food.

In that blog post, I also found another good example that can prove the price of food does not absolutely affect the quality of food. It said that the most expensive caviar is neither the black caviar nor the red one, but the Beluga caviar. I search on Wikipedia and find a brief explanation of Beluga caviar:” Beluga caviar is caviar consisting of the roe (or eggs) of the Beluga sturgeon Huso Huso. found primarily in the Caspian Sea. It can also be found in the Black Sea basin and occasionally in the Adriatic Sea.” There is also some information about how to harvest and cook Beluga caviar, but I can’t find any words about the taste of this costly kind of food. What’s more, I find a quite interesting sentence in Wikipedia:” Beluga caviar ranges in price from more than $5,000 per kilogram in the United States to a low of around $250 per kg in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, the major production center.” The price of Beluga caviar in America is twenty times more expensive than that at the place of origin. Undoubtedly the Beluga caviar in America and the Beluga caviar in Kazakhstan are the same thing. The one in Kazakhstan might even be fresher, but the price is much higher in United States. This strongly elucidates that whether the food is expensive or not doesn’t have much to do with its quality. Besides quality, the price is also influenced by many other elements such as the place where the food is sold.

There are a host of facts all over the world that can show the connection between price and the trading place. Lobsters in Australia are cheap, but are much more expensive in other countries such as France and Germany. In New Zealand, the price of kiwi fruit is even lower than the price of apple, but one kiwi fruit might cost the same as ten apples did in Japan and other Asian countries. When I first went to China town in Atlanta, I was shocked by the food price. The values of price are approximately the same. The only difference is the currency unit. In United States, I have to spend one dollar and fifty cents to buy a package of caster sugar, which is worth only two RMB in China. The exchange rate between US dollar and Chinese RMD is now 6.827. This is not only because of the costs of transportation and taxes, but also because of a general economic rule: the price of a product is inversely proportional to the supply of the product. The price always rises when the commodity is lacking and goes down when the supply is sufficient. That is why farmers poured milk into the sea during the Great Depression in 1930s. They hope to raise the price of milk by reducing the supply. In conclusion, the price of food is not mainly impact by how delicious it is, but by the quantities of the food that supplied in a specific area.

We can not deny that there exist some people who love sumptuous food. In China, especially in Guangdong and Hong Kong, some millionaires and billionaires still consider the edible bird’s nest, the abalone, and the shark’s fin as the best food in the world. No doubt these foods are very expensive. A small bowl of shark’s fin soup will cost at least fifty dollars, but in fact I can not differentiate it with discriminate soup. I would rather eat the chicken nuggets sold by an affable old woman in the shabby and narrow lane near my home. They are the best chicken nuggets I have ever tasted. Unlike quick-frozen chicken nuggets sold in KFC and McDonald’s, chicken nuggets there are all hand-made and pickled by the old woman. After you finish ordering, she will fry the nuggets to you at once so that you can get the hot and fresh nuggets. The outside of the chicken nugget is crisp and the inside of it is tender and full of tasty juice. Condiments such as red pepper and salt are provided freely. In addition, they are unbelievably cheap. Ten chicken nuggets cost only about one dollar. It proves the fact again that how palatable food is does not have an effect on how much the food is.

Will cooking good food cost a lot of time? My answer is “no”. Because of the fast development of mechanic technology, cooking becomes more and more convenient and fast. Today, we can use electric oven, auto rice cooker, and microwave to cook. We only have to put all the ingredients in the bowl, set the time, and wait. Moreover, we don’t have to take care of the food when waiting. We can do anything else we want. Furthermore, microwave cooking book is available in libraries and book stores. According to the recipes in these books, we can cook various types of delectable food by microwave. Cooking will no longer need plenty of time.

On the other hand, although time is limited, the work one has to do is also limited. Time is just like the water in a sponge. When you squeeze the water from a sponge, you can always get some water even if the sponge has already been pressed for several times. In other words, though average middle-class person might not have gobs of time, he can always have time to cook if he loves cook and really wants to cook. The main point is not how long his vacation is, but how much he loves food.

What is good food? We can hardly find the definition of it on dictionary and internet. Different people always have different criterions to judge food. When we browse the comments on Taste of Atlanta, we seldom find a restaurant that is considered to be five stars all the time. To me, good food is the food that can make me feel pleasant and relaxed. Good food should not only be delicious, but also enjoyable and agreeable.

In addition, the taste of food may be influenced by many factors, such as psychological reason. Many people believe that they can distinguish Coca cola from Pepsi cola. They would tell you that they prefer either Coca or Pepsi. In fact, Pepsi and Coca have almost the same flavor. Once I asked ten of my friends to differentiate two cups of cola produced by two different companies. All of them used to believe Coca and Pepsi are different and they have acute taste buds which can help them to identify the different coke. But when they savored the two cups of coke, they felt really puzzled. At last, only four of them gave me the right answer. Actually the reason why you prefer Pepsi is because you love the soccer stars in Pepsi’s advertisement; and the reason why you prefer Coca is because you love red.

To sum up, despite the seeming truth of that only the elite in the society can gain good food and become foodie, my viewpoint can still be proved. No matter what social class you are in and no matter how much money you earn every month, if you love food and you try your best to be a foodie, you can become a foodie.