Food is an essential component of our lives as it is the primary source of nutrition. Dependent on the available resources, people in different areas have developed different food customs and preferences. As a result, food is not only a basic physical need, but it is part of a culture, which is known as cuisine. It is essential to define culture as a collective heritage of intellectual development and art that is shared by a particular society. Culture studies have depicted certain consistencies that associate one society with a specific set of norms. Despite the existence of shared cultures, wider variations of the material cultures, ideas, and models exist from one community to the next. Diversity among the world’s population, especially in America, has dramatically increased over the past decades. Therefore, this increases the importance of putting more interest in the mental health needs of diverse populations. In this case, counselors should build cultural self-awareness, strengthen their cultural literacy on various aspects of different society groups, and practice multicultural intentionality with the ability to assess acculturation through different strategies.
With immigration waves and globalization, people of foreign countries integrate within the host culture, which is a process called acculturation. One of the ways to decrease the stress associated with acculturation is learning new food habits. Embracing the diet and culinary practices of the host culture may provide a person with positive reinforcement and enhance adaptation to the new place (Yan 310). Luckily, with globalization and digitalization, it is much easier to acquire a taste for foreign cuisine by trying to cook foreign recipes that are available online. Such food habits can ease the process of acculturation for foreigners.
Work Cited
Yan, Zi. “Acculturation and well-being among international students: Challenges and opportunities.” Rethinking Education Across Borders, 2020, 303-315.