Speaking of how the food cultures you grew up with impacts you:
When I left Southeast Asia, I only knew how to cook mostly French and Italian foods. It didn't make sense to cook Malay or Indonesian or Chinese foods because, well I could buy it cheaply any time I wanted. In that region.
I learned quickly that because I had never eaten a simple meal my entire life, eating food that was prepared simply made me extremely sad. Like, mental health bad / my life is bad / why did I leave, bad
@skinnylatte@smathermather Italian food is VERY simple. Everything must be super fresh and in season. Pepper and salt, olive oil and lemon. Nothing else. The French made it complicated.
@geonerd@smathermather probably more accurate to say that cooking Italian food outside of Europe is not simple. When I started, procuring the ingredients I needed in order to cook Italian dishes that tasted simple and good, was not a simple process. In a part of the world with no fresh tomato, basil (the tropics, where we have.. no seasons). Only after I got more confident in cooking regional Italian cuisines and being familiar with produce around me was I able to cook like, with simplicity.
I learned quite quickly that if I was going to be okay with my life abroad, I had to learn to cook and eat in the ways that made me happy.
I leaned into: this is the food I grew up with. It's HARD to make. I'm not even going to bother with 'simplified' or 'shortcut' versions of it. I simply cannot accept it.
I'm going to be a 'I make things that takes hours' sort of bitch.
I've been happier since. I'm fine with being a person who likes complex food, complex flavors, complex cooking techniques
I'm never going to have kids. I'm at a point in my life where I'm not time poor. I'm no longer a self-hating Protestant. It's okay to linger and take a long time to cook myself something utterly delicious. It's not decadent. Decadent is also ok.
That also gave me an opportunity to connect with the people and cultures that grounds me as an immigrant somewhere alien.
I go to Chinatown. I buy dried mushrooms and beancurd sticks from a specific store. I speak Cantonese. I soak them for hours.
Somehow, even cooking in the fussy way that I do, as I got better and better at it and especially as I moved the vast majority of my cooking to the wok, I ended up cooking really complex and complicated meals that I love, in less than the time it takes for someone to do a '30 min recipe' anyway!
A simple southern Chinese middle class dinner at home is: rice and 2-3 dishes. I can do all that in 30 min now. Once I finally got that, I was like, oh, that's how my mum did it. Wok and roll, baby.
To be clear, simple is not bad. Simple is sometimes delicious.
But it is simply not how I like to eat.
Just like people who like simple foods feel they can only 'indulge sometimes, I can only have simple flavor taste profiles sometimes!
That doesn't mean that the complex food doesn't taste like how it should be. The Teochews (the food culture I grew up in) are known for being fussy and simple at the same time (preparing in very complex ways, to attain very simple flavors). I cook like that
i think about this when i go to dinner parties and people are like 'this dish was delicious' and the host is like 'oh i'll send you the recipe it's super easy it only takes 20 min!' and that's something that is fine
whereas
in indonesia or singapore the conversation would be 'this was delicious' 'yeah it's my great grandmother's recipe it took 50 hours to cook and i'm never going to give you the recipe' and everyone is like 'thank you for sharing it with me i quake in this complexity'
@skinnylatte While in India the recipe would be happily shared, but will probably be “get some pyaaz, tomatoes, and lentils, and cook and add spices until it’s right”. 😜
@skinnylatte Oh right. Yeah Indians will happily share without the marriage part, but it’s still not useful in a western “give me detailed instructions on every single step, plus a 1000 word intro detailing your life history right up until you learnt it” sense of the word “recipe”.
@pmonks that's something i talk to my thai and other friends about this.
something feels off to me in terms of sharing a cultural recipe with someone who 'just wants a quick way to do it' and wants The Dish and The Story but who is like, not really engaging with it in any meaningful way that i feel is really essential to learn to cook the food. it's not just a thing to consume, beyond the actual food
@skinnylatte Yeah for sure. ime for many Indians food means love, and preparing food is primarily an act of expressing love to others. As someone who grew up in a “food is fuel” familial culture, that was pretty foreign to me, and while I understand it intellectually (and appreciate it!), I personally don’t feel that way about food myself (and don’t consider either position to be “right” or “wrong” - they’re just different).
I've also noticed this can have some negative side effects - we have friends who get riled up when their kids don’t finish their food, for example, and I think that’s partly because they consider it a rejection of their love. Another example is that I, despite being a reasonably healthy weight for my height, regularly get the “you don't look healthy” (which is code for "you’re too skinny”) when visiting my in-laws.
@skinnylatte@pmonks [Western white person barges into thread]
During covid lockdown, I wound up picking up a week’s worth of Indian takeout every Sunday. The food was good, as the online reviews had led me to expect; but I was surprised & nearly bowled over by the love that accompanied the food. Everyone there knew my car, the chef remembered what I liked & what I didn’t order again. A few times a miscommunication led to problems with my order, and…
@skinnylatte@pmonks …they hand-delivered to me without charge & outside their delivery area. The chef’s mother was often the one to hand me my pickup food; &, despite a big language barrier, communicated such love to me that it helped fill the the gap left by not being able to see my own mother during lockdown.
I’d still be going there if they hadn’t had to go back to an all events-catering model after lockdown ended. If I ever throw a big party, they will cater it.
@Gorfram@pmonks that’s lovely and I’m glad you got to experience it! The opposite of ‘a bit too much of that food love’ is once I was in traffic in an Indian city, my friend’s parents drove up next to me, demanded I leave my cab and get into their car, and drove me to theirs where they had 40 items for breakfast I couldn’t possibly finish (including hand churned butter). Which is nice. But. Also, hospitality in moderation.
I was thinking about exactly this in a book about the sociology of food in Cuba. The writer, a lefty American, went to Cuba for field work. She was like ‘my preconceptions were people have food, they have healthcare, seems great’ and then she went on trips with poor Cubans who would go to 5 different markets to try to get something to make a dish they wanted to make. Basically, food for food for fuel and survival feels different from thriving. (The book is called ‘Food in Cuba’)
And everyone has different ideas of what ‘thriving’ food means. Obviously my situation is diff and I can’t compare myself to any Cuban, but my thriving food is definitely ‘food that takes a helluva long time to cook, with good ingredients and that is made with love’
So living in America I am sometimes just surprised when I am told ‘eating well is something only rich people can afford’ because that isn’t true many other places, and food is only fuel is a weird state of mind for me personally
@Affekt the authorities here are the gov versions of the parents who make their kids pay rent to teach them about finance then wonder why their kids don’t visit anymore later in life
@juergen_hubert food quality in California is a lot higher than elsewhere here. Relatively easy and simple to get European quality ingredients. Still mostly thing for people with money and some time (you have to go to the farmers market for example, or buy a special brand of dairy).
Asian origin ingredients are actually good. A lot of handmade stuff that in Asia would be made in a factory. Asian vegetables grown in Florida or Mexico.
@skinnylatte My only real experience with the USA was admittedly with Columbus, Ohio - fairly representative for the Midwest, or so I gather, but probably not very much for the West Coast.
(Oh, and as an addendum: The local bread was terrible, which was a major issue for me as a German.)
@juergen_hubert I’ve been told that food in the Midwest is Germanic / Nordic in origin and that maybe back in the day before all of the food was industrialized, it was pretty decent, but now somehow that region has become synonymous with not good food culture outside of Chicago.
Only in some communities (like among the Amish) you get bread and butter done the old way that’s still great.
Californian bread is a bit better but a different style.
@skinnylatte After I returned from the USA, I learned how to make my own sourdough bread - just in case I ever ended up in a country with an Anglo-Saxon bread culture again. 😉
@skinnylatte I grew up eating a lot of fast food and much of it was because my parents were too tired to cook after work.
I always thought that fast food thrives in the U.S. because people work long hours and are too exhausted to cook afterwards. Especially when you have a family to feed.
@betsyvr@skinnylatte I don’t understand why there aren’t cafeterias serving nutritious freshly cooked meals at a low cost in a canteen style in every neighborhood. It seems that everyone too busy to cook food would choose that option frequently.
@dx@skinnylatte that’s a good question. I don’t know. Just from my experience, places like McDonald’s have good brand recognition so people go there because they know what they want.
It takes the burden off of the “what should we have for dinner?” question
@betsyvr@dx I saw a YouTube video on this recently. They did a deep dive into the topic and it said in the past there were options for low cost food at places lik automats. However as industrialization and housing issues happened, workers started moving out and downtown real estate no longer supported the prices of such places. So like with everything else, America had something nice and good, but no longer.
@skinnylatte I was the driver one day for an acquaintance on income support (US, Seattle, SSDI) and we drove to five places to get the best price for her budget on this rare day when she had wheels and could do it all.
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