Tag Archives: food

A cornfield in Nebraska. Jan Tik, via Flickr
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America: A Country without a Cuisine


Rows of yellowed corn
A cornfield in Nebraska. Jan Tik, via Flickr

I celebrated every birthday under my mother’s roof with a bowl of miyeokguk, or seaweed soup. I ate it for breakfast and had the leftovers for dinner the rest of the week. When I was old enough to understand, my mother explained that it was a Korean tradition to eat this soup on one’s birthday. It was also a tradition for women to eat nothing but miyeokguk for several weeks after giving birth. That sounded great to me; I love miyeokguk.

Records of seaweed in Korean cuisine date back to the tenth century. Coastal people of the Goryeo dynasty fed new mothers miyeok (seaweed), having witnessed whales eating it after giving birth. The soup is eaten on birthdays to honor one’s mother and the pain she endured while giving birth.

Today, seaweed is widely known as a “superfood”: low in fat and calories and loaded with crucial nutrients like iron, iodine, and vitamins A, C, and E. Studies have shown it to be good for your heart and blood pressure.

Yet I love the rather mystical origin story of miyeokguk: a mother whale giving birth and then intuitively seeking seaweed in her given environment to nourish herself. The story could serve as a metaphor for Korean cuisine itself, whose traditions arose from a people’s harmonious dependence on their immediate environment for sustenance. But in the United States, where I was born and raised, our relationship to food today seems more distant from our surroundings than ever. We Americans consistently lead the world’s wealthy nations in obesity. Have we forgotten how to nourish ourselves? Where and when did we lose our way?

The co-owner and executive chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber, offers one theory on America’s problem: it doesn’t have a cuisine. “All cuisines evolved out of a negotiation that the peasants were making with the landscape,” Barber explained in an interview. “Now what could the landscape provide? And how could they make it nutritious and delicious in terms of a diet? That’s the genesis of every cuisine.” In other words, a cuisine is not just a style of cooking; it’s “a pattern of eating that supports what the landscape can provide.”

Food in America, however, evolved in the reverse manner. Thanks to the New World’s “freakish soil fertility”—as Barber puts it—the first European settlers were able to impose their fully formed notions of cuisine upon the land. In the northeastern colonies, they planted crops from England, retaining their food traditions and only occasionally replacing familiar ingredients with indigenous foods.

As the nation grew, regional food cultures—New England, soul, Cajun, Creole—did form, developed out of long-established cuisines brought over by early European colonists and African slaves and infused with the immediate environment’s indigenous offerings.

More recently, however, the industrialization of farming and agricultural technology has tamed the land, introducing monocultures of wheat, soy, and corn, whose surpluses are fed to livestock in industrial animal-feeding operations. With the abundance of a few ingredients, food is now more processed and homogenized and less nutritious than ever before. Synthetically produced flavors have replaced nature-made ones. The proliferation of fast food has narrowed our diets, too, by limiting our food choices.

Our modern food system, with all its technologies, has created an ever-growing rift between us and the rich, diverse supply of nutrients that nature provides. But we can repair our relationship to our food and health by creating and eating a cuisine that the seasons, soil, and climate can provide sustainably. Nature can produce all the nutrition that we need. Our bodies have complex systems to perceive and receive that nutrition. And we, too, possess the instinct to nourish ourselves from our surroundings, just as the whale mother knew to eat her seaweed.

Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

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Photo by elzinga alexander, via Flickr.
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Foraging for Bits of Home


Chestnuts on the ground in a forest
Photo by elzinga alexander, via Flickr

When I was growing up in suburban Maryland, every fall would bring a familiar sound. Thud, thud, thud!—chestnuts falling in their hardy armor. My mom and I would gather them up and roast them. I loved peeling away the smooth veneer and eating the sweet, still-warm fruit nestled inside, like nature’s Ferrero Rocher.

I was not, however, so fond of the way in which we procured our chestnuts.

My mom hunted for them on suburban lawns. This was during the nineties—before foraging was a way of life, before it entered the lexicon of popular (now mainstream) “foodie” movements, before bearded chefs in Brooklyn were cooking local and seasonal. My mom and I wandered into people’s yards, into patches of wooded private land, and picked up chestnuts by the plastic shopping bagful.

“Mom, this is probably illegal,” I would tell her, hoping my protests would get me out of the chore. What if someone I knew from school saw us? Would they think we were poor, that we couldn’t afford food from a store?

But my mom would press on gleefully, giddy at the thought of collecting her favorite seasonal treats.

Chestnuts are well protected by their shells. When she came across one of them, my mom would pry it open on the spot. She would place the ball and big toe of her left foot on one side of the split husk, then carefully do the same with her right foot—as though she were in a balancing act at the circus. The husk would give in to her weight and split open to yield its shiny brown nut. If she were in a hurry, the whole spiky thing would just be thrown into the bag—to be shucked later by my child labor.

I recently discovered that my stepmother is also an avid forager. She pulls her car over whenever she spots a good patch of wild dandelion greens or perilla leaves. She has brought home the thinnest twigs of a mulberry tree to dry roast in the oven for a nutty, golden-amber tea. Mulberry is good for diabetics, she has told me. Some years she picks up pounds and pounds of acorns that have fallen in yards or parks to make acorn starch. In Korean, she has described to me the painstaking, multiday process. She starts by soaking and rinsing the acorns multiple times to leach out their bitter and toxic tannins. Then she removes their little stemmed caps and thoroughly dries the nuts until no moisture remains. Finally, she grinds them up into a fine brown powder.

Why would my stepmother spend days to make acorn starch when she could so easily buy it at the local Korean market? Foraging, she tells me, lets her step out of her car and leave behind the grocery store and her factory job. She can breathe the crisp fall air and focus on the task at hand. She knows the exact source of her ingredients, having made good use of the bounty that the land right outside her doorstep has to offer. Seeing the process from beginning to end also gives her a sense of satisfaction, she says—much in the way that a chef takes pride in her quality control.

I suspect that foraging is also a way for both my mom and stepmother to make a foreign land a familiar one. It thrills them to recognize an ingredient—a wild plant, nut, or mushroom—and transform it into a dish that can transport them back to their childhood and their place of birth. With this ritual, they create a sense of home.

Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Fresh and Fetid: Remembrance of Lunches Past

The cool kids had Lunchables and Mondos. I had a neon cooler ripe with the aroma of kimchi.


Eddie Huang and his mom in front of the supermarket
In search of Lunchables. Eddie Huang (Hudson Yang) and his mom Jessica (Constance Wu) journey to the supermarket.

“Ugh, what is that? Gross!”

About seven minutes into the pilot episode of ABC’s new comedy series Fresh Off the Boat, eleven-year-old Eddie, the new kid in school, is invited to sit at the cool kids’ table during lunchtime. He’s conscious of making friends, especially the right kind who will ease his entrance into the local social structure. But Eddie quickly blows his first impression when he pulls out a Tupperware container of homemade noodles.

“It’s Chinese food. My mom makes it,” Eddie explains.

“Get it out of here!” the table’s alpha boy yells. “Oh my god, Ying Ming is eating worms! Dude, that smells nasty!”

Fresh Off the Boat adapts the memoir of Eddie Huang, chef and owner of Baohaus, a Taiwanese restaurant in New York. Though his recollections were turned into “a cornstarch sitcom,” as Huang claims in an angry Vulture op-ed about his own show, Fresh still highlights an experience that hasn’t been visited on network television in decades: life as an Asian American. Huang spoke with comedian Margaret Cho—whose All-American Girl twenty years ago was the last sitcom to depict an Asian American family—about his doubts whether Hollywood would do justice to his story. “I believe in you,” she told him, “and to be honest, we need this.”

Indeed we do. But I hadn’t realized how much “we” needed this cathartic mainstream exposure until I started watching the show. The scene brought back surprisingly vivid memories of elementary school, its lunchroom hierarchy, and my mom’s cooking. I had accepted these memories as amusing anecdotes, dinner-party fodder. But Huang’s show elevated to comedy an important experience all-too-familiar to many Asian American (and other) kids: the search for a seat in the cafeteria.

My own search began as a fifth-grader in suburban Maryland. As in many school cafeterias, the cool kids sat together. They always seemed to bring brown paper bags with ham or turkey sandwiches on thin, crustless Wonder Bread. They drank out of juice boxes. They snacked on Doritos, Fritos, or treats like Gushers or Fruit by the Foot. The most envied kids had boxes of Lunchables and Mondos (artificially flavored drinks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup), the ultimate beverage of choice.

I found my place lower down the totem pole with a more marginalized and diverse crowd. My best friend Julia, a Jewish girl, had in her packed lunch healthy items like fruit, Yoplait yogurt, pita, hummus, and Ziploc bags of carrot or celery sticks. Rachel usually either brought a lunch in a recycled paper bag or bought from the cafeteria a tray of chocolate milk, soggy canned green beans, tater tots, and chicken nuggets. Another Jewish girl, Aviva, ate latkes and other foods unrecognizable to me. And Shobi’s mom made her incredible pocket sandwiches stuffed with a deliciously aromatic mixture of soft spiced potatoes, onions, and peas. Like a grilled cheese sandwich, these were gently fried with a nice brown crust. I would later learn they were samosas.

One day, my mom packed a doshirak (Korean for a compartmentalized lunchbox) of rice, bulgogi (marinated beef), and kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage) in an insulated cooler with a mottled neon green-and-orange pattern. The aroma of the kimchi assaulted the noses of my dining companions as soon as I unzipped my lunchbox.

“Ugh, what is that?!”

“It’s Korean food,” I said apologetically.

Mortified, I confronted my mother as soon as I arrived home after school.

“Why did you pack kimchi in my lunch, Mom?” I cried.

“Because I was out of other banchan,” she replied nonchalantly, as though the lack of other Korean side dishes served with every meal was sufficient explanation for her egregious error.

“Why can’t you pack me a normal lunch like the other kids’?”

I was angry with my mother’s lack of understanding. All I wanted was one of those brown paper bags or a box of Lunchables. Not a cooler box of pungent foreign food.

And I wanted better clothes. As in the opening scene of Fresh, my mother also rejected my sartorial choices. Her final judgment: too expensive. I went to school every day in no-brand T-shirts and ill-fitting Mom Jeans, while the most popular girls—Kristen, Ashleigh, and Julie —had closets filled with Limited Too, the preferred retailer of ten-year-old girls. What I would have given to sit with the cool kids in a new Limited Too outfit and laugh while flicking my shiny ponytail.

In retrospect, I wanted to be popular as much as I wanted to belong.

The day after his humiliation in the cafeteria, Eddie dumps his homemade lunch in the trash. When his mother finds out she is upset and baffled. “But you love my food!”

Eddie attempts to articulate the gravity of the situation in a monologue far more effective than my childhood protests. “I need white people lunch!” he tells his mom. “That gets me a seat at the table. And then, you get to change the rules. Represent. Like Nas says . . . I got big plans. First, get a seat at the table. Second, meet Shaq. Third, change the game. Possibly with the help of Shaq.”

In its inaugural episode, Fresh hit the nail on the end: Eddie does love his mother’s food. That is a part of who he is, his heritage. But he is also mindful of where he is going and who he is expected to be. Despite the difference in details, I related to Eddie’s balancing act and his constant negotiation between how much of his culture to bring to his evolving identity and how much to leave behind.

When I was ten, I didn’t realize that this experience would add to the richness of two of the many ways I identify myself—Asian and American. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to experience the cultural complexity of American society, laid out on the table every lunchtime in our virtual ethnic-food fair, where I tasted my first samosa thanks to Shobi’s mom. And I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have eaten fresh homemade meals without artificial, processed ingredients.

My mom’s love came packed every day, in a brightly colored cooler.

Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: