Keane
Lim
WRIT
1133
Professor
Eric Leake
11
April 2013
Vietnamese Food
Culture
A cultural phenomena that I was
interested in investigating was how cultures create their own community through
food in a different country. One example of this in America is how expats from
Vietnam have proliferated in the food industry with their Pho restaurants. In
casual conversation, dishes like pho have become representative of Vietnamese
cuisine. How has Vietnamese food culture created
its own niche despite being displaced from their home country and in turn, has
it been affected by this external influence?
As I was seated to my table at a pho
restaurant that I go to often, I was caught off-guard by a question I had never
been asked before: "Would you like chopsticks or utensils to eat your pho
today?" This became the focus of my observations as I realized that not
all customers shared the same customs as me as an Asian-American who normally
ate with chopsticks. I noticed that while some Americans used the chopsticks,
many opted to use forks and spoons. In Asia, chopsticks are customary for
eating most dishes but here in America, this cultural tradition seemed not to
hold as much importance as it would in the home country.
This opened my eyes to the fact that
there are some behaviors that we do, that we are not consciously aware about.
These mannerisms exhibit food values and culture such as with etiquette in how
we eat. Another example of food value and culture in the Vietnamese community
is that it is proper etiquette to slurp your soup to let the chefs know that
you enjoyed the meal.Other customers did this,
too, as they were talking to the people at their table, but I wondered if that
crucial aspect of the Vietnamese food culture was even known to the other
customers who ate pho here or if it was by coincidence.
With some introspection, I thought
whether or not I was oblivious to food values and culture in a different
community like in European influenced restaurants. For example, even though pho
has become an iconic order for many people at these restaurants, I noticed that
very few people ordered the other dishes on the menu. For the one hour I was there, I saw
only one order that was not pho: spring rolls. Granted, since pho is in the
restaurant name, one might argue that this observation of mostly pho orders is
obvious. However, food culture is home to many other dishes which seem to not be
equally and thoroughly enjoyed. Perhaps part of how we perceive food culture
depends on how selective we are with the dishes that we eat.
Another observation that I made with
the food value of pho in the Vietnamese community is the name of the
restaurant. Most people assume that the numbers of the pho restaurants like Pho
56 means that they were the 56th restaurant in the chain to be made. However,
the names of some of these locations actually have significance to the owners.
I ended up asking the owner of my particular pho restaurant afterwards, and he
told me that he named his restaurant based off the year he left his country of
Vietnam to move to America. The owner would go ask some customers as they were paying if they
were Vietnamese, and they would communicate in their own dialect. It is really
fascinating what a community that have created through food, especially considering
Vietnamese's past with its war and Communist regime.
Alexandra Greeley touches upon the
idea of nostalgia for the Vietnamese through Pho in her article "Pho: The
Vietnamese Addiction" in Gastronomica.
She talks about how a traveler ordered a bowl of pho which "failed to
bring to [his] mouth the table of 'Hanoi pho'" despite it having all the
same ingredients (Greeley 80). This idea of authenticity of the "pho as
[they] knew it" and how there was a migration of the pho recipe from North
Vietnam to South Vietnam after the new Communist regime in 1954 is relevant to
their food culture (Greeley 81). Since there are so many ways to experiment
with making pho, the Vietnamese used to argue about the methods and
ingredients. Pho had a different recipe that defined the region of Vietnam that
the cook was from. The food values and culture differ depending on whether or
not you understand the "purist" sentiments that Vietnamese feel
towards pho or if you are just a casual customer (Greeley 82).
In "Pho Scene in the United
States" by Cuong Huynh, he also talks about how this staple dish has
transformed culturally, contrasting how it is "not exactly the same as was
first loved in Vietnam" by the refugees who came to America. (Huynh 1)
These dishes, he wrote, acquired changes to "adapt to the more varied and
flexible environment of America" (Huynh 1) which I saw firsthand with the
offering of utensils to eat pho. This observation makes me think that food
values and culture have also changed to integrate themselves in a newer
community.
While the traditional Vietnamese
culture has values toward food that distinguish itself, it has also taken in
some food values from other cultures to create a more diverse ingroup. Food
appears to be both divisive when a culture is contained in another but also malleable
and dynamic to fit the needs of a new environment. Food ethnographies are
fascinating because there is so much unsaid and overlooked in the environments
that people eat at that speak a lot about food values and culture.
Bibliography
Huynh,
Cuong. "Pho Scene in the United States." Ezinarticles, 15 Apr. 2009.
Web. 10 Apr. 2013.
<http://ezinearticles.com/?Pho-Scene-in-the-United-States---Part-1&id=2223803>.
Alexandra Greeley. "Phở: The Vietnamese Addiction." Gastronomica: The
Journal of Food and Culture , Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 80-83.
10 April 2013. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/gfc.2002.2.1.80.pdf?acceptTC=true>
