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2/17/23 | Food and Culture

Mar 15, 20235 min read

Hi everyone!

During last week’s meeting, we had a conversation about food culture and how the expectations, interpretations, and even the name of a food host have cultural significance and connotations of identity. First, we started out the meeting by watching several videos talking about food culture and then had a discussion about Asian American food culture within the United States.



The first video we watched was titled “Cooking Communities. The Cultural Importance of Food” where Dr. Rocio del Aguila, a professor at Wichita State, spoke about the meaning of food culture and demonstrated how the names of food within a Latin American context are entrenched with both a global and local meaning. Alfajores is a butter-based shortbread cookie filled with dulce de leche which is most popular within Argentina and Peru after they became colonized by Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries. Specifically, Alfajores originated in Spain and were later transported to South America through colonization. Etymologically, the name alfajores stems from the Arabic word al-hasú which means stuffed or filled. During the 16th Century, Spain was inhabited by Muslim Moors who probably brought the pastry to Spain from North Africa and the Middle East as there is a similar confection in those areas called the maamoul. This example depicts the cultural significance of this dessert both from the immigration of the pastry to Spain and the Americas but also how the pastry itself has been affected by the physical location it is transported. We, much like food and names, are a product of the time and place we live in. In addition, Dr. Aguila pushes for people to think about the significance of holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas and what makes those holidays significant. Is it the nostalgia, food, or the people we interact with? All these interactions determine who and with what people we identify with.


In the second video we watched, “Food: A Third Culture Kid’s Sense of Identity,” Eric Pak talks about his experience of being a “third culture kid.” That being, a person who lives in a different country than where their parents grew up and at the same time has a third cultural experience where they are connected to other third culture kids who have had a similar cultural experience. Eric’s parents grew up in Korea and due to work, moved to the US when Eric was three. Many years later when Eric was a teen, they moved to the Philippines and then Thailand where Eric resides today as a 17-year-old. When entering these new cultures, Eric recounts being asked, “Who are you?” or, in other words, what is your identity? In response, Eric recounts that his mother, no matter where they were, searched for the first Korean grocery store closest to their new residence and so, no matter what country they moved to, Eric had that sense of familiarity at home. He connects this idea of food’s connection to “home” with Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart where Zauner could connect with her culture within the isles of H Mart or Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks'' where Tan denies her love of her cultural food to appear more “American” in the eyes of society. In both of these cases, Eric states, either by finding or denying their childhood foods, they are interacting with their own cultural identity. Eric posits that when he thinks of home he smells of sizzling bulgogi and sour kimchi, he is grounded via the food he eats within his cultural identity–Korean.











The third and fourth videos we watched were speaking about the value of Chinese cooking and Chinese American cuisine. The third video, “Fast food? The true value of Chinese cooking” presented by Vincent Yeow Lim speaks about his life experience of being the child of Chinese immigrants to Australia and the hard work of cooking and opening Chinese restaurants when the Western expectations for the cuisine are cheap, fast, varied, and delicious. The effort that goes into frying the “easiest” dish fried rice is immeasurable. Preparing ingredients, using multiple woks, and having various dishes (all with different ingredients and cooking times) arrive at the table at the same time gives a great depth of knowledge, experience, and skill. Yet, to many, Chinese food is not to be expected to have the same value as a cuisine with attention to plating or dining like French cuisine. Cecilia Chiang, in “The Woman Who Changed Chinese Cuisine in America” speaks about a similar experience where she was questioned about putting dishes such as Hot & Sour Soup or Peking Duck on her menu when they had never been introduced to Americans. In response, she said that “...good food is good food…” no matter who you serve it to. We talked about how each cuisine is endowed with the social reflection of its people. For example, the history of Chinese cooking is tainted in the American consciousness by negative connotations, which were founded on racist opinions of Chinese people. An example of this was the use of MSG, which was demonized in 1968 by a physician in the New England Journal of Medicine who talked about “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome” in which after the physician ate Chinese food in the United States. He felt palpitations and weakness in his outer extremities which he attributed to the restaurant’s excessive use of MSG which has been proved by current clinical evidence as false. Both of these experiences indicate that there is a disjunction in the work that it takes to produce Chinese food with what American society specifically interprets.

We talked about how it's important to constantly readjust our interpretations of the food around us and what foods we identify with. After all, we are the food we eat, inside and out.

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