I can see my family's social/economic status reflected in the kinds of food I grew up eating. I think about this often because I've gone through a sort of food-enlightenment over the course of the last few years and it's become very apparent to me that my "tastes," or what I took for so long to be my preferences for certain foods and not others, were not so much related to my actual taste buds as they were to the "white bread" mentality we saw in the video.
In my family, "vegetables" usually meant succotash, "pasta" meant spaghetti w/ meatballs, and "tofu" meant...wtf is tofu? Most dinners were of the meat-and-potatoes vein. Oh, and there were almost always biscuits ;] Sunday morning my dad cooked breakfast. No fruit, no yogurt, no bagels, rarely any kind of juice...we're talking pancakes and sausage and grits and 2% milk. There's a mix there, I think, of southern food and middle-middle class mentality.
When I first came to college, a couple of my closest friends had recently decided to become vegan. It was through these friendships that I was exposed to all sorts of bizarre delicacies. (What is pesto and what is it doing on my oddly-shaped spaghetti? Oh, this is "penne rigata," you say? Call it what you will, I still don't see any spaghetti sauce on it. There's got to be some Ragu in the fridge.....
Paul Newman makes spaghetti sauce?? You guys are weird.) I resisted branching out for the longest time, always telling myself that I just didn't like these other foods. The truth is that there was something threatening about them, something that didn't feel right. Just give me some chicken fingers and mashed potatoes and I'll be fine, I'll be right at home...
That's what's interesting to me about this example--my perceptual sense of taste was affected by my class mentality. It turns out I like just about any food, no matter how strange or exotic. But for the majority of my life, my psychological state actually supervened upon and shaped the signals my taste buds sent to my brain!! Or something to that effect. So social class isn't simply "in the mind;" in fact, your mind is in social class