The topic of decolonizing food has been coming up in my brain and media sources. There is a movement going on by the Sioux Chef who are decolonizing food by using traditional ingredients from the land and region they are in to make healthy, sustaining food for people. Through this they are connecting with Indigenous people across the nation to start satellite restaurants where the regional ingredients and traditions of Indigenous people are recognized as well as starting gardens on reservations, doing a lot of educating and activism works, and compiling a cookbook. I am really inspired by this.
In the process of this, one of the founders made an adamant statement that they are not cooking with “colonizer’s ingredients” like sugar, wheat, and dairy. I connected with that because I developed food sensitivities after I went through a stressful year plus some other factors (it’s intense what our bodies do when put under too much stress for too long). My food sensitivities cause my body to become emotionally unstable and feel exhausted and weak when I eat gluten/wheat which is the worst one. Dairy is next which causes me to feel nauseous and have a headache. Then corn, (even corn syrup, which is in so many things, even ketchup!) which causes cramps in my intestines so sharp that I cannot move. So, I definitely stay away from those foods. The difficult thing is when I go to get-togethers and the lumpia, adobo, pancit, halo-halo, babingka, hopia, (woops, getting carried away in all the foods I want to eat right now) etc. start coming out and I can’t eat them because of the wheat hidden in soy sauce or dairy making everything creamy and delicious, I feel a kind of way. Also, I am self conscious that my body cannot process foods anymore like other people’s can. Then when the older ladies at the gathering say, “you barely ate, eat more! Try this, do you not like it?” I feel a sort of guilt that even the way I can enter into a Pilipina space in public, through food, is made smaller. This makes me more interested in how food used to be made in regions that my family is from and live now. It is also fun to make up new creations in my kitchen of dishes that I know and make allergy friendly for more people to be able to enjoy! And in this way I feel connected to a Filipino way of passing down family recipes, using different spices, amounts, and ingredients for yummy meals that have the same name.
For my children’s literature independent learning contract I picked up a book called Tofu Quilt by Ching Yeung Russell. The book is a collections of poems, written about when the author was growing up in Hong Kong and the mainland of China. It is interesting because the writing definitely reveals a lot of the sexism and honoring boys over girls that happens in the traditional way of raising kids. It also shows the relationship between China and Hong Kong. Ching moved to America after getting married to a American man she met in her last year of college. This is interesting in thinking of topics of possibly better opportunities for women in America, but less good opportunities if a person is APIA in the 1970ish, and how her children navigated being half Hong Kongese.