Stereotypes Case

Stereotypes

Every attribute about an individual can tell you a little bit about his personality or even his background through careful observation and interpretation. Whether it’s their clothes, their accessories, their make-up, or even just the way their arms are positioned when they stand. All these little things exhibit a side of their personality, even if they never intended for it to be that way. However, we have been trained by each other and by society to read the world starting at an incredibly young age. We observe, we analyze, and we adjust. Interpreting ones actions and analyzing what it means to ourselves seem to have become a natural habit. Therefore, advertising agencies and marketing departments are taking advantage of consumers’ habit of taking every-day products and associating them with a deeper level of meaning. Certain items of clothing are advertised as something that could somehow present you as someone you’re not. Others may perceive you as ‘cool’ just because you own a pair of expensive headphones or limited edition sneakers. After years of advertising and marketing strategies, our society has created different stereotypes that some of us identify ourselves with depending on what we own, how we dress, or even how we eat.

Over the years, my personal eating habits have changed because of the change in environment and culture, change within my family as well as changes within myself. After I moved to Shanghai, the restaurants in and around my neighborhood changed, the types of food street vendors sold are entirely different, and even the selection of produce displayed at supermarkets and wet markets varied a great deal. My family grocery list would always consist of items such as rice, eggs, soy sauce, ginger, green onions, chicken feet, and ox tail or certain parts of pork that are used for a type of Cantonese soup. And sometimes we would not be able to find what we wanted at a western supermarket. Perhaps those particular items didn’t have a high demand in western markets. To further understand a culture, anthropologists and sociologists have studied the differences in food between cultures and what it tells them about their society. Certainly, some products are definitely more popular in one culture than another. For example, sushi for Japan or bagels for the United States would be equivalent to the ginger and green onions for China. These cultural norms that have been established through years of research, or even just cultural exchanges between people from different backgrounds, have provided us insights into the habits of other cultures. When we hear more of the similar eating habits from different people from the same culture, we start to make assumptions about the culture as a whole. Perhaps some of the assumptions could be wrong because the grocery list you picked up that day could’ve been a western family that decided to have Chinese food for dinner