Mooncakes are a traditional food that Chinese eat during the mid-autumn festival. When I was a child, my mom would sell mooncakes when she and my dad were in school. I still remember using our hand cranked grinder and old pressure cooker we used to make the red bean paste. The documentary we watched for Thursday was absolutely right. You never forget the traditional foods your family made when you were a child.

This is a video of a Chinese man making the long life noodles. When I visited China last summer, I saw some locals making these noodles on the street. There was an old man sitting next to the young men making the noodles and he told me that this was the same recipe their family had used in their noodle restaurant for 30 years.

We started as hunters and gatherers. Now we go through the McDonald's drive-thru. Might still be beef, but the methods of cooking and definitely of obtaining the food have evolved dramatically.

Like how the sentences we say and write are influenced by underlying rules of grammar, so too is the food system influenced by underlying constructs.

I learn best in analogies and infographics so here are a few that i found with regard to the functionalist, structuralist and developmental approaches to the human food system.