Food is an indication of individuality. In this world, people increasingly demand the ability to choose what exactly they buy, and in this case, they are choosing more consciously what they are buying to eat.
In recent years, many people have begun to harp on the benefits of eating organic or local or pure vegan for whatever reasons, etc. Nowadays, when I hear of people like that, I instantly think that they are some sort of hippy environmentally-concerned extremist (and I use 'extremist' and 'hippy' here very loosely, as in someone that takes an unconventionally different approach to things and absolutely not someone that does drugs and/or blows things up). Not that these people necessarly are those kind of individuals, but the point is that this is the impression I get of the overall group of vegans, or locavores, or whatever - it's their image in my mind.*** Their individuality on this earth (to me, in my mind, at least) includes or is even partially defined by the fact that they maintain a diet that is relatively limited to organic and local foods.
If I, for some reason, happened to think that organic-eating obssessors are annoying (I don't, really, not any more than I think normal people are annoying), I might want to make a statement letting them know what I think. Here, individual identities are clashing, that of my organic-hating self and theirs of organic purity. This clash has roots in the fact that I and they differ in our opinions about food and how food should be grown/prepared/produced. They have defined themselves, willingly or not, in my eyes as organic hippies that annoy me to no end (they don't really, not any more than normal people are annoying), so I proceed to attempt identify myself as an individual who disapproves of their beliefs to the point of insanity; to mediate this issue, I fill a van with Fritos and crash it into one of their organic markets while spraying pesticides, with a plastic toy water gun, all over their organic fruit stalls.
What individuality. The point here is, different food beliefs have conflicted.
Conversely, food can more literally define a person in that instead of identifying a person's individual beliefs and thoughts, it identifies the person's outside appearance. A news article recently reported that different people hailing from different areas have different waistlines. The argument went that, people from poorer areas had less access to wholesome, healthy foods, and thus were plumper on average. Here, food is literally determining what a person looks like. The people living in poorer areas will probably eat more cheap junk food and fast food, get fatter, and be seen as overweight/obese by other people. Along the same line of thought, less well-kept, well-off people may be eating less healthily, so others may see them as being poorer. The food they eat, indeed, the food that they actually have access to, is determining not only their waistlines and health, but also the social class that they belong to. In this case, the individual is reflecting the food they eat, much more than the food is reflecting the individual.
A man that is excessively picky about his food and goes only to gourmet French restaurants might be seen as entirely strange by average working class people in Denver, yet adored by the sophisticated upperclassmen of downtown Hong Kong. Indivuality is reflected in the food that people eat, but sometimes when people cannot choose from a wide variety, the food is more reflected in the invidual instead. Food not only feeds people, it can build and define people.
*** I absolutely support the movement of eating more locally and with less chemicals and/or industrial additives, this paragraph is used purely for purposes of illustrating a point. Regularly eating pesticides is not something I look forward to doing all my life.
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