Food as an identity

Food as an identity

Last night I ate out for the first time in a weary long time. I had a weary hard time doing it because it means a lot to me to be eating at home with my family. The home is very important to the Danes. And that is connected with the Danish food culture and identity.
There are three main meals in Denmark: breakfast and dinner are typically eaten at home, whereas lunch sometimes for practical reasons has to be eaten elsewhere and often consists of a packed lunch brought from home. Food brought from home means that you have a piece from your home with you wherever you go. Food has a big variation from culture to culture, and from country to country. When people talks about Danish food, many will think about “Hakkebøf, med brun sovs og katofler” which is mince put together to a steak and thick brown sauce and potatoes, and “Rødgrød med fløde” which is a fruit dish, which also is a test in pronunciation for all non-Danes. The stew is made of for instance redcurrants, raspberries and blackcurrants, which are boiled until it is soft. The juice is sweetened and thickened, and the dish is then served with cream or milk.
Traditional Danish food is known by its huge number of fat. But food is also an important energy source both for humans and animals. Since everyone must eat, what we eat has become a powerful symbol of who we are.
To set yourself apart from others by what you will and will not eat is a social barrier. The obverse of this is that you identify yourself with others by eating the same things in the same way as them. To achieve such identification, people will struggle to eat things they does not like, and avoid perfectly tasty food. You can see that when Muslims does not eat pork in their culture because of their religion or when people becomes vegetarians because of the people around them does not eat meat. In the process of social climbing, people have to eat things like caviar, artichokes, snails, and asparagus, meat and potato pie even though they does not like it.
There are as many kinds of food identification as there are the same in fashion, speech, music and manners. The obvious ones are ethnic, religious and class identifications. Ethnic food preferences only become identity markers in the presence of foreigners, such as when one goes abroad, or when the foreigners visit their home. The insecure will cling desperately to home food habits: For examples do some English housewives even bring open tea bags to make a "proper" cup of tea when they visit Denmark.
It does mean a lot to me that I can eat Danish food, but it means that I can eat something that makes my Danish affiliation stronger.