Prompt: Different cultures have different customs surrounding food and eating. Describe a food-related custom you grew up with or have experienced. How does this custom reflect your family's values or cultural background?

Prompt: Different cultures have different customs surrounding food and eating. Describe a food-related custom you grew up with or have experienced. How does this custom reflect your family's values or cultural background?

Prompt Response: As I've grown up my immediate family has never had any food-related customs besides on special occasions; for example: don't eat before everyone says grace, don't leave the table or return to your room until everyone is done eating (and mainly talking), etc. But even then, these were very loose rules, that weren't even unspoken. I've always had friends in life, white, black, latin(o/a), all races, and it always seemed that everyone had a clear schedule and everything. "We have dinner at 6pm everyday" "Mom cooked casserole last night for dinner", etc. It's always been alien to me the idea of a dinner, every day, cooked by the same person, where everyone sits down together and eats. That's not even to mention the unspoken rules of other cultures that I never really learned until I experienced them firsthand. I think my situation regarding that reflects my family's values, nobody really sees too much value in that. It's also that my family is extremely inconsistent; that as a characteristic has a bit more of a poor connotation but by definition its true. It makes sense, there's 3 different cultures colliding at once, in a household where maybe for 4 months out of the year my mom works till 9pm at the hospital, and then moves jobs to another hospital where now she has a 5-day 5am-4pm schedule; and the same is going on with my dad. 


Summary: I never had much food-related customs, and that's likely because of the mixture of cultures colliding at once and the values of my immediate family members.


Reflection: I wonder how different I would be if my family was more structured.

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