How Food Shapes Identity, Health, and Community

What did home taste like when you were a child? What does a special meal look like in your life today? What makes a food “good” or “bad”?

Food culture refers to the beliefs, traditions, practices, and values that shape how people grow, prepare, share, and eat food. It is influenced by geography, history, religion, economics, migration, agriculture, and community life.

Beyond evoking nostalgia, these questions are an entry point into your food culture - the beliefs, traditions, and practices that shape how we grow, prepare, and eat - every day. Food culture influences how our choices reflect our identity, shape our health, and sense of community. It is the invisible architecture behind every meal.

I grew up globalized from a young age, moving between cultures and kitchens that each held their own rules around food. That experience gave me the opportunity to notice both the differences and the deep commonalities in how people feed themselves and each other. Wherever I went, food was where belonging lived. Again and again, those observations brought me back to these questions of what food culture is, why it matters, and what it means to choose it again.

Understanding food culture invites us to step out of unconscious patterns and choose how we nourish ourselves individually and collectively.

Before we can understand food culture, let’s dive into food itself.

Real food is whole food: primarily plants, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains that your great-grandmother would recognize, rather than the "edible food-like substances" that fill most supermarket shelves today (Pollan, 2008). To that definition, I would add foods from the animal realm: eggs, fish, meat, insects, all of which have nourished humans for millennia across diverse ecosystems and landscapes.

For most of human history, food was shaped by place: soil, climate, season, and community. What people ate in one part of the world looked entirely different from what people ate somewhere else. That began to change with increased migrations, the rise of global supply chains, and ultimately, the Industrial Revolution.

Today, a child in New York, Panama, or Australia is likely eating variations of the same ultra-processed snacks at school. One of the biggest shifts in eating habits over the last two centuries has been the homogenization of food worldwide, and this shift coincides with the rise of chronic and autoimmune diseases (Manzel et al., 2014). Just two generations ago, people ate foods dictated by their landscapes, their seasons, and their communities. Imported ingredients were a rare treat. Today, the same fast-food chains, packaged goods, and industrial ingredients appear in shopping carts from Africa to the United States.

And yet, despite this expansion of globalized processed food, traditional food cultures remain strong in many parts of the world, both in their native lands and through diaspora kitchens that have kept them alive across generations. These traditional food cultures share remarkable commonalities. Traditional, place-based diets tend to be high in fiber, nutrient-dense, and minimally processed (Alharbi et al., 2025), low in refined sugars and additives, and rich in microbiota-accessible carbohydrates (fermentable fibers that feed the gut microbiome and support long-term metabolic health). Dietary fiber intake has decreased dramatically over the last few centuries, contributing to a global rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and inflammatory disease, conditions that were largely absent in populations eating traditional diets (Zhang et al., 2022).

Our plates mirror our landscapes. The loss of biodiversity in our fields is inseparable from the loss of diversity on our plates and, ultimately, from the loss of diversity in our cultures (Nabhan, 1989). When we plant monocrops of corn across millions of acres, we impoverish the soil and the table. Corn syrup, corn-fed meat, and hydrogenated corn derivatives all fill the space where a thousand other plants once grew. The landscape becomes the diet, and the diet impacts the culture.

Related Reads:

How Biodiversity Shapes Everyday Life
How Industrial Agriculture Is Quietly Shaping Your Health

Culture is often defined as a system of shared beliefs, values, and practices that shape how groups understand themselves and the world around them. Much of culture operates unconsciously. It is the story we tell ourselves about who we are - the personal and collective myth that gives our lives continuity and meaning (McAdams, 2001). It is learned through repetition, family, community, media, and environment. It evolves over time, shaped by both internal traditions and external influences.

Today, external forces shaping our food decisions are more powerful and integrated into society than ever before.

Food culture is the set of beliefs, values, and traditions that inform how we access, prepare, and eat - every day. It is the answer to a simple but profound question: what do we prioritize when it comes to food That answer varies widely.

A family in New Mexico who grows their own corn and prepares masa by hand operates within a food culture shaped by thousands of years of agricultural knowledge, community ritual, and ancestral memory. A family in a food desert in Ohio who relies on a corner store stocked with processed goods is also operating within a food culture, one shaped by economic marginalization, industrial food systems, and decades of policy decisions that were never made with their nourishment in mind.

Beyond fuel, food is also nourishment and belonging. 

The erosion of food culture may be one of the most overlooked drivers of both chronic disease and cultural disconnection today. Historically, traditional cultures encoded the rules of wise eating long before nutritional science existed - distilling the wisdom of generations about what to eat, how to prepare it, and with whom to share it (Pollan, 2008). No nutritional label can replace what that living system once provided.

Traditional foods are informed by the way our ancestors ate in specific places over many generations - the fermented grains and legumes of West Africa, the mole of Central Mexico, the koji-fermented foods of Japan, the olive oil and vegetable-rich plates of the Mediterranean. Though these examples vary from place to place, they share recurring characteristics: local, seasonal ingredients; low refined sugar; specific preparation and preservation techniques that unlock nutrients and support digestibility.

But food culture is broader than what is on the plate. It is everything that surrounds the plate.

Beyond the techniques, the hands that teach them, the occasion that calls for a certain dish, the memory embedded in a flavor. Food is a marker of heritage, a vehicle through which communities gain cultural awareness, shape their identities, and maintain continuity across generations (Brulotte & Di Giovine, 2014).

As migration increased and cultures began to encounter one another, new food cultures were born. This exchange was as generative as it was disruptive.

Consider the potato, which arrived in Europe from Peru via Spanish colonizers in the 1570s. Within two centuries, it had become a dietary staple across Ireland and northern Europe -  so embedded that when blight destroyed the crop in 1845, over a million people died. A food that began as an Andean heritage became the foundation of an entire continent's survival. The tomato traveled from Central America to Italy in the 16th century, regarded with suspicion for decades before becoming so thoroughly Italian that it is now unimaginable without it. Cacao from the Americas transformed European confectionery. Corn, quinoa, and sweet potatoes became relied upon by populations who had never seen them before.

Yes, food culture has never been sealed or pure. It has always been in motion, and it benefits from diversity and exchange.

Not all dietary changes are chosen. Colonization systematically dismantled food cultures, replacing diverse, locally adapted diets with imported processed foods, invalidating indigenous agricultural knowledge, and severing communities from the landscapes that had fed them for generations. A prime vehicle for this was Industrial agriculture. With the arrival of industrial agriculture came the subsequent erasure of the long-held knowledge systems that governed how communities related to land, seed, and food (Shiva, 1993). Food sovereignty, the right of communities to define their own food systems, is inseparable from cultural sovereignty and from land rights (LaDuke, 1999). It names the struggle to restore control over food from systems that have extracted it, returning decision-making to the communities whose health, culture, and futures are shaped by what is grown, how it is grown, who grows it, and who has access to it.

The stigmatization of traditional foods as "poor people's food," "bush food," or "peasant food" compounded this loss. Shame is a powerful mechanism of cultural erasure. Generations of people in colonized nations, immigrant communities, and working-class neighborhoods across the world, learned to hide or abandon the foods of their ancestors in exchange for the social currency of modern, processed food. Family recipes and preparation methods that took generations to develop were forgotten within a single lifetime.

To take away someone's right to choose what and how they eat is to attack their identity at its most intimate level (LaDuke, 1999).

And yet, food held on, even when everything else was stripped away. In situations of migration and cultural displacement, culinary features are often retained even when the language itself has been forgotten (Fischler, 1988). Families who have been separated from their homeland and language still gather to cook the dishes their grandmothers made. The food remembers what the words could not hold, and often remains as the last living connection to a homeland.

Food-centered memory is deeply tied to identity, woven together with sensory memory, ethnic identity, diaspora, nostalgia, and ritual (Holtzman, 2006). 

No supplement or fortified cereal can replicate what a shared meal provides. Cooking gave humans not just the meal but the occasion, the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place, which served to build and sustain civilization itself (Pollan, 2013). The shared table is where community is made and remade, generation after generation. We are, in the most literal sense, what we eat, and we belong to the communities whose food we share.

We are living in a moment of contradiction. Food knowledge is more accessible than ever, traditional cuisines are being revived, indigenous food systems are increasingly documented and restored, and chefs are reclaiming their culinary heritage on a global stage. The local food movement, built on intellectual foundations laid over the last four decades (Nabhan, 1989; Pollan, 2008), has grown from a fringe proposition to a mainstream conversation.

And yet, ultra-processed foods continue to dominate global diets. Across rural regions and urban food deserts alike, many communities lack access to fresh, local food, leaving that choice out of their hands.  Children in countries around the world eat the same processed snacks, fed by the same global supply chains, disconnected from any knowledge of where food comes from or what it once meant.

This is the result of food systems designed for efficiency and profit, not nourishment.

Reconnecting with food culture does not require a complete lifestyle overhaul. It can begin with a single intentional act: cooking one traditional recipe from your family or region, visiting a local market and choosing seasonal ingredients, asking an elder how they learned to cook, learning one preservation method (fermentation, drying, pickling), or simply sharing a meal with others without distraction. Each of these is an embodiment of what one of the founding voices of the local food movement called “conservation with a human face” (Nabhan, 1989).

NANA exists at the intersection of culture, food, and community, exploring how ancestral knowledge and everyday practices can guide us back to nourishment. Through the In the Kitchen with NANA series, we have been reaching into our own histories: the recipes passed down from one generation to the next, filled with meaning, memory, and tradition. Whether you are keeping alive a recipe that has been in your family for generations, or you see yourself as the starting point of a new tradition, this invitation is for you.

Discover More Recipes

Food cultures only stay alive when meals are made, shared, and passed on, and that happens in community. This is a space where your family's food history becomes part of something larger, and where the people and stories behind the dish are honored just as much as the food itself.

Food culture is not a relic of the past. It is a living system that shapes how we eat, how we relate to each other, and how we care for the land.

Recovering and honoring it calls for curiosity rather than perfection. Curiosity about where we come from, what our landscapes offer, and how the people before us nourished themselves and each other.