After reading two articles

After reading Sandra Cate’s article and O’Donnell’s article, I think I understand food culture better than before. In Cate’s article, the author mainly talked about the role of Spread in communities. Spread is a type of food which was invented in jail, but why does spread play an important role in communities? In O’Donnell’s article, the author mainly talked about how the culture policies influence people eating in Shenzhen.
In “Breaking Bread with a Spread in a San Francisco County Jail”, the author, Sandra Cate introduced a type of food which is popular in prison, and it name is Spread. People in jail usually have spread for food. There is no personal preference in prison, which means inmate must to eat food that the prison offered. If you don’t eat the food from prison, you will be starved. Also, the price of this food is high, or we can say “Monopoly”. The consequence of offering spread to inmate without personal preference is people are all not satisfied because it is even worse than regular food or the worst food ever. So, inmates want to change their life, although they are in prison. They collect some spread and put them together and mixed. They just have hot water and microwave oven, so they choose to use hot water and microwave oven instead of fire to cook new spread. It is better than the spread which is offered by prison because the new spread contains more flavor and may be tasted good than before. And now, spread is popular in prison and prisoners like this food. I think that reflect a culture of community, although it is found in prison.
The second article, “The Culture Politics of Eating in Shenzhen” was written by O’Donnell. In this article, the author compared eating habit in Shenzhen with Policy in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a wildly booming city in China in the last 30 years. People in Shenzhen like eating seafood, but seafood are hard to catch, so that people have to come up with good ideas to catch seafood. That’s why Shenzhen people are so clever and that can earn more money than others. Also, the author compared the eating habit in Southern China and Northern China. Northern people prefer to have meat, such as lamb, pork, and beef, but people in south prefer to have seafood, such as shrimp. I think that is also a culture of community, but it was found in a country, not in a specific region.