SE#1

Keane Lim

WRIT 1133

Professor Eric Leake

3/27/13

What Does Food Mean To Me?

            I've always wondered why in those moments when my family went out for food at a restaurant, I grimace and find myself disillusioned by the quality of the food. I find myself thinking thoughts like "It's not as good as what we normally eat" or "Dad could cook it better" in a sardonic tone as I proceed to reluctantly clean my plate. For me, it's an instinctive reaction, especially when it comes to eating in order to celebrate a holiday or a special occasion. It just seems like no matter where I go, "outsider" food pales in comparison to what I eat at home.

             Rationally thinking, it is unlikely that my family cooks better than other places. After all, my family never went to culinary school nor got a degree like these professional chefs in other areas. My parents and grandma are not well-versed in exquisite dishes, and yet, their dishes as generic as they seem in contrast to these dishes, satisfy me more. Is it really contrary to common sense that these dishes, which can be very expensive at times and made by experts, are less enjoyable despite the effort exerted to make them and their prestige?  In which case, it begs the question of why we humans have preferences towards certain foods. I believe the answer is: it's because of the significance that these foods have on us.

            I concede that I've developed a bias for homemade food. After all, "homemade" food is cooked at home, which the word itself connotes a special warmth that restaurants could never recreate at their locations. It goes back to the importance of "place" when talking about food. I could order a grilled tilapia at Red Lobster, but it does not elicit any meaningful response out of me that I will remember in the future. That does not mean to say that I never enjoy food from the outside, but rather that I have found my most fondest memories through the food that was made at home.

            I imagine my dad taking that same slab of fish, scaling it meticulously so that it is clean. Then, I watch curiously as he takes the insides out and jerk back from the putrid smell. It becomes an interactive sport where I try to guess what the next ingredient he is going to use while he skillfully chops the green onions, cubes the tomatoes and stirs the spices into the pot.

            On the other hand, I feel this enstrangement when I eat out. Fast food's purpose is to be convenient and available. Could something so readily made carry as much care in it as with what I associate with homemade feed? This could be interpreted as my egoism since it would be a delusion to assume or even fathom that all food is made just for "you." That must be what makes homemade food more appealing - this idea that it is made for you, moreover, by the people who care about you to make it in the first place.

            My grandma, at the tender age of 81, still cooks for the family and defies the stereotypes of the elderly getting restless and sedentary as time passes. Even so, I still take that into consideration and am always grateful for what food she has introduced to my world view.  In fact, I feel food has allowed me to live vicariously in a different time period.

            My grandma has instilled on me her story of living in the 1930s. Her traditional cooking of making egg noodles for pasta dishes and egg wrappers for egg rolls by scratch showed me how creative people had to get back then in order to make the dishes that we do now where everything is premade for you. This, for me, is a paradoxical thought. How is it that things that I have taken for granted in my time like boxed spaghetti noodles or bottled water (which my grandma used to pitch straight from a waterfall) could be reduced to an even more complex preparation process?

             Homemade food is significant for me because it has brought perspective into my life about my own native roots. When I eat the sweet banana chips that my dad makes by cooking plantains, I learn at the same time that my dad used to make a living in the Philippines by waking up at 5 am to prepare these for selling at the Philippine bays. The curry chicken recipe my mom always makes along with her adeptness to cook dishes including any farm animal, comes from the fact that my family used to own a large barn which she had to take care of from a very young age because of my grandfather's untimely sickness. Knowledge of different spices comes from talking to the merchants that would frequent the food markets coming from neighboring countries like Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and India. By eating what they cook and observing them as they do so, food has brought me under the tutelage of my heritage which I will be able to pass on to the next generation in my family. This must be where they get the expression "cultural flavor." 

            When I think food, I think family because every breakfast, every lunch, and every dinner, we always congregate together in the dining room and eat together. Food acts as a trigger to quality bonding time. The best part about homemade food is that it is distinct for each "home" and each "you" in the world. Everyone else has their own dishes that encompass what it means to eat something "homemade" and share that penchant towards it some way or another. Even prisoners, who have to come to terms with the jail cell as their new home, can embellish the food they eat that defines them, like with the creation of prison spread.

            What really fascinates me about the topic of food is how my thinking has evolved from writing about it. Food is described as a "physiological need," "nutrition" to satiate our hunger. In psychology class, I learn about Maslow's hierarchal pyramid and how food is but one requisite to fulfilling the tier that we need as humans. I learned how mice developed "conditioned food aversion" where they learn to avoid food after experiencing nausea after eating it or the slow reaction times to food of unusual shapes paired with electrical shocks. Could not this connection I feel through food mean that there exists such a thing as conditioned food "affinity?" 

Observation

It seemed like not everyone didn't like Sodexo food or were very nonchalant about it. A lot of people just thought it was there and convenient, already-prepared, so they ate it. A lot of people ate breakfast or didn't even eat breakfast so they wrote about their dinner, so that was interesting.
The thing that I noticed most about what other people wrote in the other blogs was how we use food as a way to connect with people. Sometimes, the encounters aren't as longlasting such as reminding one another to go eat while others' experiences are festive and involve a lot of bonding and good moments. As a culture, food serves as a conduit for conversation and meaningful interactions with people. When you add the fact that food types itself are diversified, there's a lot of choices to be made and a lot to learn from other cultures like American and Chinese foods. The food itself may not even be that good but sometimes the food is just there and the people who have gathered and eat together become more important for the experience.

Unit 1 - P2

P2: Read the two pieces by Ahn and Nicholson. What cultural and personal significance do the authors attach to food? Compare how they do so? Did reading these pieces remind you of your own connection to food, and if so how?

            What I think is interesting about the article "Home Run - My Journey Back to Korean Food" by Roy Ahn is how it starts off with the observation that in a Korean food establishment, you will most likely see "Koreans like [him]self," plus people of other cultures. Because while he is of Korean-descent and attends restaurants where other Korean-descent people also go, he still ponders whether or not he is embodying the cultural identity that he was growing up with from his parents - challenged by slips of the tongue like galbi-tang vs. galbi-chim which make him unconfident.

            This speaks a lot to how he attaches cultural and personal significance to food because he equates heritage to knowledge of native foods. When he was younger, the personal significance for food is, how what he ate, became a "testament to [his] successful American acculturation." As a teen, he began talking of food in terms of "convenience" where he "downplay[ed] [his] ethnic roots" as a teenager and ate what his friends did - pizza, etc. and the "dual-fridge" where Korean food was in the garage and American food was in the kitchen. (The placement of which is also very interesting)

            It is very nice to see in the end of the article how Ahn's views changed after his parents' death (R.I.P. Mr and Mrs. Ahn), and he had chosen to pass on the significance food has had on his life to his son, Charlie, by exposing his son to his half of his family culture and his dreams of cooking Korean and non-Korean cuisine at his birthday party, undeterred by the "Korean-ness" of the dishes, and how he noticed how his Korean culture manifested itself in subtleties in how he cooked things.

            With Geoff Nicholson's "Eating White", the cultural significance is derived from "the way [his] mother would have wanted it," and personally, food becomes more significant to him depending on "authenticity."  I think that line that speaks to me the most in the article is when he talks about the "packaged, ground white pepper" since anything else would have "adulterated the whiteness." There is a noticeable play on the word white in the memoir, in terms of the color of the foods that it describes as well as the skin color of the writer as an expat Brit. He talks about how growing up in England, drinking "school milk" was like a "moral duty," which is interesting because Nicholson seems to attach food to the rigidity of his mother's "white food" diet, almost like a moral duty of its own.

            Both authors compare food based on the influences of their parents, but Nicholson attaches food to old-fashioned conventionality and authenticity whereas Ahn uses food to explore his culture in the midst of other ones like Americans. Nicholson's nondescript recounting of his father's habits where he wanted no "adventure" when he ate his meat and potatoes parallels how Nicholson attaches very little personal significance to food and seems more preoccupied by distinguishing whether or not the food is "white" or not. It seems that when comparing the two articles, Ahn focuses on the enrichment food has on a culture whereas Nicholas associates it with cultural blandness and white - this idea of absence of any semblance of color/vividness.

            As the only Filipino-American in my family, I tend to relate to Ahn's experience moreso than Nicholson's because I find myself preferring American food as opposed to food from my ethnic roots, simply because of my upbringing. I used to worry about whether I was neglecting my heritage through food. Sometimes, it is hard to distinguish between what constitutes my cultural vs personal connection to food because it can be a mix of eating it because of this "obligation" I feel towards my culture and doing it because I like it, while it also coincidentally being food of my ethnic roots. For my parents, I'd think they'd relate more to Nicholson because of how much they draw back from their experience in the Philippines how the tropical fruit, fish, etc. here are not as they are "back home."As an aside, I'm guessing another way people might empathize with Nicholson's connection to food could be the portrayal of Chinese fast food here in America in places like Panda Express where people might be skeptic to whether it really is "Chinese" ... or maybe not, and they proceed to chow down without a second thought. 

Unit 1 - P1

P1: Describe the most recent meal you had. What did you eat? Where and how? With whom? Was the meal in any way remarkable?

The most recent meal that I had was breakfast with my grandma, my parents, and my brother. There was a variety of breakfast foods for the choosing since it was a celebration in anticipation for my new school quarter.

Since I have class at 8 on Monday mornings, we had to wake up really early in order to all eat together. Grandma made her pancakes from scratch, and my parents made a torta dish which is like an egg omelette filled with tiny silver fish. We also ate turkey bacon, as per our usual routine. Ever since we tried it, we have not returned to regular bacon. There was orange juice and milk, toasted bread and freshly washed fruits in bowls. The mangoes were particularly sweet and ripe, so it was fun to eat them. My grandma likes to make sure that we eat a balanced meal in the morning since she says it's one of the two most important meals of the day.

Since the sun had not risen yet, and it was still quite cold, we all huddled up in fluffy, warm blankets to eat breakfast in our living room since we didn't have enough chairs in our dining room for the five of us. It was a very cheerful morning and encouraging because my family told me to try my best in school since education opportunities in the Philippines are more scarce since most people have to work to make end's meat.

The meal was very remarkable, and I was very grateful because my whole family made a nice feast before I left for DU again. Spending quality family time is remarkable in its own right, but when you spruce up common day events like eating breakfast, it makes it all the more special.