Subculture & You Are What You Eat

This week in sociology, I found a lot of the things we learned very interesting! I never really thought about Barrington High School as its own subculture and how something as little as the rules we have in our student handbook separates us from any other school out there. When we were talking about our school being its own subculture, we also discussed some of the positive and negative sanctions we see happen when we’re at school. Sanctions are expressions of approval or disapproval given to people for upholding or violating norms. An example of a negative sanction I commonly see is when teachers give a student four detentions for having their phone out during class. I noticed an example of a positive sanction in the beginning of this semester of this class. My teacher gave us all coupons that we can use for late assignments so we don’t get points taken off for it being late and if we don’t use the coupons, it would boost our grade up by a percentage point.  

It was really interesting to me thinking about how people identify themselves through food and how we judge people through eating habits. I’m not the kind of person who judges someone by the way they eat because I know I’m not perfect and I know at times I can be a really sloppy eater, slow eater, don’t eat much, pig out on food, and so on.  When I thought in depth about it, I see where people would be judgmental about someone who’s a sloppy eater because they would probably think that they are a sloppy and messy person in general, or when a girl is on a date with a guy and the girl orders only a salad to eat, the guy would probably assume she’s nervous and is masking what her real eating habits may be.