In the context of our moden day society, a person’s identity has a strong history of being attributed to a family history. The question: “Where are you from?” begs the question of your family’s background. This is only natural in the contemporary United States. After all, the basis of our society us founded on the system of immigration. A clear result of this: ancestry plays an immutable part of our identities.
When we think of our parents, we think of how we were raised. The way we are raised entails the food that we ate, language that we learned, morals we uphold; these are all traits that have a profound effect on what others think of ourselves as well as what we believe to be true to ourselves.
Michael Pollan argues (wholly out of context) that: “culture is what your mother fed you.” And to that point, just as we are unable to change the food we ate in our childhood, we are unable to change both the physical and metaphysical traits we acquire. What we are able to do however, is to adapt and cope with whatever boons these traits afford to us. And the act of doing so is the act of beginning to defining a personal identity.
