Reflecting on Food: Food Choices
Summary
How do you make decisions about what to eat? What is important to you? This short reflection activity will help you think through your priorities when you make food choices. You’ll listen to a short reflection prompt and use (or create) a set of consideration cards to map out your preferences. There is no right answer to these questions, but it can be useful to know how you are thinking about it.
Before you get started
Print out food consideration cards or make a copy using index cards or cut up pieces of paper. If making a copy, you don’t need to copy over the definition on the back of the card.
Materials
A computer, tablet or phone to listen to the audio
A pen or pencil
A piece of paper or a notebook
Consideration Card Vocabulary
- Animal Welfare: how a food or the processes involved in making it available to you impact animals
- Appearance: how a food looks
- Availability: how readily available a food is to you – how easy or difficult it is for you to get a hold of a certain food
- Body Image: the mental picture or image of your own body, and your thoughts, feelings, and emotions related to that picture or image
- Cost: how cheap or expensive a food is
- Culture or identity: what a food represents to you, or its connection to your culture or identity
- Environment: how the food or the processes involved in making it available to you impact the environment
- Ease or convenience: how easy and convenient it is to access or prepare a food, or the time and labor required to do so
- Habit: what you’re used to eating (or not eating) – your familiarity or routines with a food
- Health & Nutrition: how a food impacts your health
- Interpersonal relationships: when you make decisions about what to eat based on the desires, needs, recommendations or preferences of others
- Justice & Labor: the wages, working conditions and rights of the people involved in growing, processing, distributing or preparing a food
- Mood: how your mood impacts what you want to eat (eg. feeling down and wanting to eat something comforting from your childhood)
- Past experience: the memories or nostalgia you associate with a food or eating experience
- Personal image: how you feel you are perceived by others when you are eating a certain food.
- Season: how the time of year impacts what you eat
- Smell: how a food smells
- Sound: the sound a food makes while you’re preparing or eating it (eg. the crunch of biting a carrot or squeak of chewing certain cheeses)
- Taste: how a food tastes
- Texture: the physical feel of a food
- Time of Day: how the time of day impacts what you eat
- Weather: how the weather impacts what you eat (eg. hot soup on a cold day)
Listen
Listen to Reflecting on Food #2 - Food Choices - https://youtu.be/JRUkuht0TcA
