Moving from one country to another does affect your lifestyle and therefore coming from India, my food choice changed drastically last year when I came here for college. Back home, we had lentils as a source of protein, much more organic food and many more vegetarian options to eat from. As described in the Healthy eating pyramid, it is better to consume animal-based foods less frequently than plant-based foods, that is what used to be my practice at home. I used to eat food prepared at home which consisted of fruits vegetables and protein through lentils, making my food choice full of proper nutrition and vegetarian on most of the days. Here at Penn State, I was influenced by the social norm of eating for low costs, at your convenience and having tasty meals. This made me give up the proper nutrition meal and instead I shifted to a diet which was more of animal-based products and unhealthy food which was easily available and was cheap. Therefore, the social norm of saving on money and seeing your convenience for food, made me gave up the healthy food choice and my main meals became mostly non-vegetarian including foods such as pizza, hamburgers, chicken tender paninis, and sometimes salads.

The societal issues connected with this convenient food choice is obesity, and sustainable food consumption. The video in the module shows how adversely a simple hamburger affects the environment. Beef based products which became a major component of my food choice, affects the sustainability of the environment not only through more water consumption for producing beef, but also in causing NO2 pollution (from cow dung and fertilizers) and affected my health as well. As this food choice contained high calorie foods due to the production of high calorie crops because of industrial agriculture, it contributed towards increasing the unhealthy level of the food choice. The food choice made me feel more lethargic, less active and because the food was so cheap and tasty, I craved more of it which resulted in me eating more than needed, making me gain weight. This is when I decided I need to check what I am eating and get back to a proper nutrition diet in order to avoid obesity. I believe, we should change the social norm of seeing short term benefits of saving money and convenience to looking at the long term benefits of eating healthy even though we might have to work a little extra for it.