Question

I need help for this assignment. This is a food and culture assignment. You need to do an hour observation of a typical public eating venue that people use on a regular basis, and explore the meaning of social interactions during meal times. Participant observation is a common tool nutrition professionals use to understand patterns in eating,  meal observations are an example.

Please note that both psychological and sociological approaches have to be used for to this observation. Use the bulleted points below to guide your work in collecting notes (data) about your observation. Use them to create 2-3 paragraphs about your observation of foodways and social interactions.The responses should be in the form of 2-3 well-formed paragraphs..

• Describe what you see about food and people.

• Do you notice any patterns in how people interact, their foodways (purchasing, finding a place to eat, foods they choose, who they choose to interact with, who they DON’T choose to interact with)? What are people doing while they eat? Do they sit alone or with others? How do people group? How do they interact with people who make their food?

• What do you notice about people’s foodways and social interactions that you did not realize? What does it tell you about your own foodways?

• Add a concluding short paragraph about what you learned from this project about your own foodways—what surprise you?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Food and Culture, a real life survey(Carried out at a food court in a shopping mall):

The first thing people noticed about the food court is the food outlet which was the most crowded, most probably they believed that the crowd is there, because the outlet is the best one with respect to the food quality, order processing timeline, food taste, hygiene and the behaviour of the staff. Most of the People didn't tried to go for something new as some of the outlets were much better that the crowded one and still lacked the count of customers, maybe they did not wanted to experiment anything new with their food or maybe they got influenced by the crowd. A very few of them tried to explore other outlets.

A very few people tried the healthy food, mostly the focus was on the tastiest food items like fried chicken, pizza and burgers. People looked very particular about the hygiene as well. The time spent in the queue to order food looked frustrating for some of them. No one seemed to interact with the one's behind or ahead of them in the queue. The interaction looked limited to their friend circles and obviously with the order and delivery counter executives. A couple of instances were there when a bunch of people crossed paths with another bunch of people, already knowing each others and having a good time interacting on current affairs.

The things which i learned from this project is that most of the people get influenced easily by others, not many people are trying to take some efforts on surveying all the food outlets, they want an easy choice. People are concerned about the hygiene of the food but not about their health problems, as there are no second thoughts before eating junk food, this proves that irrespective of what people learn or know about something, they are going to do what they feel like doing. People are introverts and doesn't seem to interact with the unknowns, at least in some places like shopping malls which is quite surprising. As far as myself is concerned, I sat alone, observing people and enjoying a healthy salad, ordered from a new food outlet as the staff was very well behaved and the food cost was reasonable.