What is it about Americans and food? We love to eat, but we feel ______ about it afterward. We say we want only the best, but we strangely enjoy junk food. We're ______ with health and weight loss but face an unprecedented epidemic of obesity(肥胖). Perhaps the ______ to this ambivalence(矛盾情结) lies in our history. The first Europeans came to this continent arching for new spices but went in vain. The first cash crop(经济作物) wasn’t eaten but smoked. Then there was Prohibition, intended to prohibit drinking but actually encouraging more ______ ways of doing it.
The immigrant experience, too, has been one of inharmony. Do as Romans do means eating what “real Americans” eat, but our nation’s food has come to be ______ by imports—pizza, say, or hot dogs. And some of the country’s most treasured cooking comes from people who arrived here in shackles.
Perhaps it should come as no surpri then that food has been a medium for the nation’s defining struggles, whether at the Boston Tea Party or the sit-ins at southern lunch counters. It is integral to our concepts of health and even morality whether one refrains from alcohol for religious reasons or evades meat for political ______.
But strong opinions have not brought ______. Americans are ambivalent about what they put in their mouths. We have become ______ of our foods, especially as we learn more about what they contain.
The ______ in food is still prosperous in the American consciousness. It's no coincidence, then, that the first Thanksgiving holds the American imagination in such bondage(束缚). It's what we eat—and how we ______ it with friends, family, and strangers—that help define America as a community today.
