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The soul is fed by food. Food is the one great thing that unites all civilizations to the extent that we all eat it and have souls. However, what nourishes your soul?
A plate of kimchi, white rice, and fried Spam is comfort food for me as a first-generation Korean-American. Both personally and culturally, such preferences hold significance. Our comfort foods serve as a map of our identities, origins, and life experiences. Remarks “What you want to cook and eat is an accumulation, a function of your experiences — the people you’ve dated, what you’ve learned, where you’ve gone,” says Jennifer 8. Lee (TED Talk: Jennifer 8. Lee hunts for General Tso). Even while there could be components from other cultures, you will always eat items that have personal significance for you.
In a large portion of China, only the elderly continue to purchase daily at the wet market before preparing traditional meals at home.
Food is especially significant when you join a diaspora and are cut off from your mother culture, according to Jennifer Berg, head of graduate food studies at New York University. According to Berg, “it’s the last remnant of culture that people shed.” You will immediately lose some characteristics of maternal culture. The first is how you dress, since the things that are most noticeable are the ones that you let go of if you want to fit in or be a part of a wider mainstream culture. There are more chances to connect with memories, family, and location while you eat, which you should do three times a day. Giving up is the most difficult.
Identity through food
According to chef Dan Barber (TED Talk: How I fell in love with a fish), the myth of the “melting pot” in American food is not all that dissimilar from the idea of a melting pot of American society. According to him, “the majority of cultures don’t think about their cuisine in such monolithic terms.” The cuisines of France, Mexico, China, and Italy are each made up of dozens of different regional delicacies. Additionally, I believe that “American” food is trending in the same direction—that is, becoming more regional rather than international.
The majority of civilizations don’t think about their food in a single way. The cuisines of China, France, and Mexico each include dozens of different regional delicacies.
The abundance of the nation’s natural resources influences American cuisine. Unlike the Japanese, whose cuisine today includes buckwheat in addition to rice, the Indians, or the French and Italians, who include lentils and beans in addition to wheat, Americans, who have never experienced agricultural adversity, had the luxury of not depending on rotating crops. Barber claims that humans were compelled to integrate those crops into their culture as a result of their negotiations with the soil. Thus, eating beans becomes part of being French, while eating soba noodles becomes part of being Japanese.
Andrea Turvey’s illustration for TED.What are Americans, therefore, if our diet defines who we are? Meat, that is. Barber asserts, “I would say that Americans are a (mostly white) meat culture if we have any unifying food identity.” “Whether you’re talking about a 16-ounce steak or a boneless chicken breast, the protein-centric dinner plate is something that America truly invented and now exports to the rest of the world.”
According to Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of the FEED Project and The 30 Project, which seeks to address the worldwide problems of poverty and obesity, food is a feature of every culture and religion’s festivities. (See her TED Talk: Hunger + Obesity = One Global Food Issue.) “Food has a festive quality that is universal. The same is true in America, where there is food for every season, harvest, and holiday. It aids in our self-definition.
Using food to survive
Food can sometimes be a lifesaver. Economic need drove the creation of new cuisines, even if the Chinese chefs who sold “Chinese” food around the world ate traditional cooking at home. For instance, Lee claims that Chinese cuisine in America is Darwinian. Chinese cooks used it as a means of subsistence and income in America. Chop suey was created in the late 1800s, followed by fortune cookies during World War II and the ubiquitous General Tso’s Chicken in the 1970s. As Sichuan and Hunan cuisine arrived in the United States via Taiwan, waves of more genuine Chinese cuisine followed.
Meanwhile, only grandparents in Chinese cities are preparing and consuming what outsiders might consider “Chinese” cuisine. According to Crystyl Mo, a Shanghai-based food writer, the elder generation still went to the wet market every day to purchase, haggle for tomatoes, and then make traditional meals at home that evening. However, the majority of people who were born after the Cultural Revolution lack cooking skills. According to Mo, “their parents never taught them how to cook, and that generation was solely focused on studying.” Despite having a high level of education, they either eat takeout or return to their parents’ house for meals.
Food as prestige
The restaurant culture that has exploded in Shanghai has benefited those slightly younger folks. There are more than 100,000 restaurants in the city, which has 23 million residents, compared to less than 10,000 ten years ago. Shanghai now offers cuisine from every Chinese province as well as any type of international cuisine you can think of.
For middle-class Chinese, food has become a status symbol due to the entrance of international foods and brands.
For middle-class Chinese, food has become a status symbol due to the entrance of international foods and brands. According to Mo, “food as status has always been a huge thing in China.” It’s part of our past to be able to serve a VIP the best yellow rice wine as a sign of respect or to be able to afford to eat shellfish, abalone, shark fin, or bird’s nest soup. It has since been modified by using various Western dishes to symbolize social standing. It might be a Voss water bottle, Godiva chocolates, or Starbucks coffee. It’s a means to demonstrate your worldliness and sophistication.
Eating is the main social activity for families and friends, and it is done family-style with shared dishes. Eating, sharing, photographing, posting, and viewing other people’s food images are all ways that food facilitates social interaction in an urban setting. The event even includes standing in line. “People may laugh at the thought of standing in line for two hours to eat at a trendy restaurant, but waiting in line with your friends is an extension of your experience eating with them,” Mo adds.
Naturally, eating habits and motivations are also highly cultural. In China, individuals eat food for its texture rather than its flavor. Sliced pig ear or jellyfish have a pleasing texture but no taste. Food must be either extremely hot or extremely cold; if it’s warm, there’s a problem. At a banquet, the most costly items—like steamed fish or scallops—are served first, followed by meats, lovely veggies, soup, and, if you’re still hungry, rice, noodles, or buns. According to Mo, “you would be really confused if you started a meal and they brought out rice after the fish.” “For example, is the meal finished now?”
Food as enjoyment
According to Mark Singer, technical head of cuisine at Paris’s Le Cordon Bleu, “in France, food is still primarily about pleasure.” “Eating and cooking are enjoyable pastimes.” It’s a time of day when the entire family may come together, even if the French may begin their day with bread, butter, jam, and maybe a hot beverage—”There’s no way that it would expand to eggs and bacon,” Singer adds. Born in Philadelphia, Singer has spent over 40 years living in France. He skips his breakfast.
He claims that the country’s food situation has drastically changed during the last 20 years. “What was a major eating issue has gradually subsided. Events like birthdays, New Year’s Eve, and Christmas Eve still have a strong connection to traditional cuisine and cooking. But it doesn’t happen every day.
Berg goes on to say that some of the concepts of French culinary culture might be a performance. This summer, I taught a course on mythmaking, mythbusting, and the performance of Frenchness in Paris. The pupils want to think of France as a pastoral country where people travel to twelve different marketplaces to buy food five hours a day. Except for the very privileged, the majority of people purchase convenience food, and the majority of croissants are actually manufactured in factories. However, our belief in that mythology is a component of who we are.
When an Italian child first encounters food, it’s most likely ice cream rather than bread, rice, or eggs.
An ice cream-eating girl. Andrea Turvey’s illustrationIt also reveals how a nation enjoys its cuisine. Similar to France, takeout is still not very common in Italy. Italian food expert and Slow Food editorial director Marco Bolasco argues, “Eating fast is not at all part of our culture.” Even during lunch, we eat in a casual manner.
“In Italy, food is love, followed by nutrition, followed by history, and finally, pleasure,” he explains. According to Bolasco, an Italian child’s first meal experience is most likely ice cream rather than buns, rice, or eggs. Food is less influenced by money and status than, say, in China.
Community via food
Community is central to the food culture of Arab societies. For instance, at the daily iftar that breaks the fast during Ramadan, everyone seated at the table shares platters of traditional food like tharid and h’riss, which they all eat with their hands. Naturally, private iftars will be held in homes and institutions, but there will also be communal, public, huge iftar meals served at mosques, schools, marketplaces, and other community groups. This family-style eating is comparable to the food served at a Chinese dinner table, when guests are expected to eat from communal platters rather than individual portioned and plated plates.
Humanity as food
However, it’s possible that food is more about moderation than advancement.
Barber says, “The best way to suppress our worst kind of hedonism is through food, which is one of the great things about it.” “No landscape in the world enables us to eat the way we believe we want to in a sustainable manner.” According to Barber, food also serves as a tangible representation of our connection to nature. It is the point where ecology and culture converge. When it comes to culture, it may even become more significant than language and even geography.
Richard Wilk, professor of anthropology and director of the University of Indiana’s food studies program, asserts that “your first relationship as a human being is about food.” Being breastfed or bottle-fed is our first social experience. Eating together, together with talking and caring for ourselves, is a social act that contributes to our humanity. To learn to eat is to learn to be human.