Food feeds the soul. To the extent that we all eat food, and we
all have souls, food is the single great unifier across cultures. But
what feeds your soul?
For me, a first-generation Korean-American, comfort food is a plate
of kimchi, white rice, and fried Spam. Such preferences are personally
meaningful — and also culturally meaningful. Our comfort foods map who
are, where we come from, and what happened to us along the way.
Notes Jennifer 8. Lee (TED Talk:
Jennifer 8. Lee looks for General Tso),
“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. There may be inbound elements from other cultures, but you’ll
always eat things that mean something to you.”
In much of China, only the older generations still shop every day in the wet market, then go home and cook traditional dishes.
Jennifer Berg, director of graduate food studies at New York
University, notes that food is particularly important when you become
part of a diaspora, separated from your mother culture. “It’s the last
vestige of culture that people shed,” says Berg. “There’s some aspects
of maternal culture that you’ll lose right away. First is how you dress,
because if you want to blend in or be part of a larger mainstream
culture the things that are the most visible are the ones that you let
go. With food, it’s something you’re engaging in hopefully three times a
day, and so there are more opportunities to connect to memory and
family and place. It’s the hardest to give up.”
Food as identity
The “melting pot” in American cuisine is a myth, not terribly unlike
the idea of a melting pot of American culture, notes chef Dan Barber
(TED Talk:
How I fell in love with a fish).
“Most cultures don’t think about their cuisine in such monolithic
terms,” he says. “French, Mexican, Chinese, and Italian cuisines each
comprise dozens of distinct regional foods. And I think “American”
cuisine is moving in the same direction, becoming more localized, not
globalized.”
Most cultures don’t think about their cuisine in
monolithic terms. Mexican, Chinese and French cuisines each comprise
dozens of distinct regional foods.
American cuisine is shaped by the natural wealth of the country.
Having never faced agricultural hardship, Americans had the luxury of
not relying on rotating crops, such as the Japanese, whose food culture
now showcases buckwheat alongside rice, or the Indians, or the French
and Italians, who feature lentils and beans alongside wheat. “That kind
of negotiation with the land forced people to incorporate those crops in
to the culture,” says Barber. And so eating soba noodles becomes part
of what it means to be Japanese, and eating beans becomes part of what
it means to be French.
So
if what we eat is what we are, what are Americans? Well, meat. “If
Americans have any unifying food identity, I would say we are a (mostly
white) meat culture,” says Barber. “The protein-centric dinner plate,
whether you’re talking about a boneless chicken breast, or a 16-ounce
steak, as an everyday expectation is something that America really
created, and now exports to the rest of the world.”
Every single culture and religion uses food as part of their
celebrations, says Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of the FEED Project and
The 30 Project, which aims to tackle both hunger and obesity issues
globally. (Watch her TED Talk:
Obesity + hunger = 1 global food issue.)
“The celebratory nature of food is universal. Every season, every
harvest, and every holiday has its own food, and this is true in America
as well. It helps define us.”
Food as survival
Sometimes food means survival. While the Chinese cooks who exported
“Chinese” food around the world ate authentic cooking at home, the
dishes they served, thus creating new cuisines entirely, were based on
economic necessity. Chinese food in America, for example, is Darwinian,
says Lee. It was a way for Chinese cooks to survive in America and earn a
living. It started with the invention of chop suey in the late 1800s,
followed by fortune cookies around the time of World War II, and the
pervasive General Tso’s Chicken, in the 1970s. Waves of more authentic
Chinese food followed, as Hunan and Sichuan cooking came to the U.S. by
way of Taiwan.
In Chinese cities, meanwhile, only grandparents are cooking and
eating the way that people from outside of China might imagine “Chinese”
food. The older generation still would shop every day in the wet
market, bargain for tomatoes, then go home that night and cook
traditional dishes, says Crystyl Mo, a food writer based in Shanghai.
But most people born after the Cultural Revolution don’t know how to
cook. “That generation was focused purely on studying, and their parents
never taught them how to cook,” says Mo. “So they’re very educated, but
they’re eating takeout or going back to their parents’ homes for
meals.”
Food as status
Those slightly younger people have been the beneficiaries of the
restaurant culture exploding in Shanghai. The city is home to 23 million
people, and has more than 100,000 restaurants, up from less than ten
thousand a decade ago. Now, you can find food from all of the provinces
of China in Shanghai, as well as every kind of global food style
imaginable.
The introduction of global foods and brands has compounded food as a status symbol for middle-class Chinese.
The introduction of global foods and brands has compounded food as a
status symbol for middle-class Chinese. “Food as status has always been a
huge thing in China,” says Mo. “Being able to afford to eat seafood or
abalone or shark’s-fin or bird’s-nest soup, or being able to show
respect to a VIP by serving them the finest yellow rice wine, is part of
our history. Now it’s been modernized by having different Western foods
represent status. It could be a Starbucks coffee, or Godiva chocolates,
or a Voss water bottle. It’s a way of showing your sophistication and
worldliness.”
Eating is done family style, with shared dishes, and eating is the
major social activity for friends and families. Eating, exchanging food,
taking photos of food, uploading photos of food, looking at other
people’s photos of food — this is all a way that food brings people
together in an urban center. Even waiting in line is part of the event.
People may scoff at the idea of waiting two hours in line to eat in a
trendy restaurant, says Mo, but waiting in line for a restaurant with
your friends is an extension of your experience eating with them.
How and why you eat your food, is, of course, also very cultural. In
China, people eat food not necessarily for taste, but for texture.
Jellyfish or sliced pig ear don’t have any taste, but do have desirable
texture. Foods must either be scalding hot or very cold; if it’s warm,
there’s something wrong with the dish. At a banquet, the most expensive
things are served first, such as scallops or steamed fish, then meats,
then nice vegetables, and finally soup, and if you’re still hungry, then
rice or noodles or buns. “If you started a meal and they brought out
rice after the fish, you’d be very confused,” says Mo. “Like, is the
meal over now?”
Food as pleasure
“Food in France is still primarily about pleasure,” says Mark Singer,
technical director of cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. “Cooking and
eating are both past time and pleasure.” The French might start their
day with bread, butter, jam, and perhaps something hot to drink
— “There’s no way that it would expand to eggs and bacon,” says Singer
— but it’s a time of the day when the whole family can be united.
Singer, who was born in Philadelphia, has lived in France for more than
40 years. (He doesn’t eat breakfast.)
“Things have changed dramatically in the past 20 years when it comes
to food in the country,” he says. “What was a big affair with eating has
slowly softened up. There are still events in the year, like birthdays
and New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve that still say really anchored into
traditional food and cooking. But it’s not every day.”
Some of the ideas of French food life may be a performance, adds
Berg. “I led a course in Paris this summer on myth-making and
myth-busting and the performance of Frenchness. The students want to
believe that France is this pastoral nation where people are spending
five hours a day going to 12 different markets to get their food. The
reality is most croissants are factory made, and most people are buying
convenience food, except for the very elite. But part of our identity
relies on believing that mythology.”
An Italian child’s first experience with food is not buns or rice or eggs, but probably ice cream.
How
a country savors a food is also telling. In Italy, as in France,
takeout is still relatively rare. “Eating fast is not at all part of our
culture,” says Marco Bolasco, editorial director of Slow Food and an
Italian food expert. Our meals are relaxed, even during lunch break.”
Food in Italy is love, then nutrition, then history, then pleasure,
he says. An Italian child’s first experience with food is not buns or
rice or eggs, but probably ice cream, notes Bolasco. Status and wealth
play less of a role in food than say, in China.
Food as community
In Arab cultures, community is key to the food culture. The daily
iftar
that breaks the fast during Ramadan, for example, features platters of
traditional fare such as tharid and h’riss that are shared by all who
are sitting down to break the fast, eating with their hand from the same
dishes. Families and institutions will host private iftars, of course,
but mosques, schools, markets and other community organizations will
also offer large iftar meals, and all are open to the public and shared.
This family style of eating is not dissimilar to the dishes on a
Chinese dinner table, where one does not eat a single portioned and
plated dish, but is expected to eat from shared, communal platters.
Food as humanity
Perhaps cuisine, though, isn’t so much about progress as it is about restraint.
“One of the great things about cuisine is that it the best way to
hold back our worst kind of hedonism,” says Barber. “There is no
landscape in the world that sustainably allows us to eat how we think we
want to.” In another sense, says Barber, food is the physical
manifestation of our relationship with the natural world. It is where
culture and ecology intersect. It can become even more important than
language, and even geography, when it comes to culture.
“Your first relationship as a human being is about food,” says
Richard Wilk, anthropology professor at the University of Indiana and
head of its food studies program. “The first social experience we have
is being put to the breast or bottle. The social act of eating, is part
of how we become human, as much as speaking and taking care of
ourselves. Learning to eat is learning to become human.”
