Food
Flavor and it’s ability to bring you into a memory is something I feel is too often taken for granted. There are always for every person smells and tastes that will instantly transport them into another time and place. In my life food has always played an important role, before I was born my mother was a macrobiotic chef and my father had made the entire backyard into an organic garden. For the first several years of my life I had a vegetarian mother and a pescatarian father. Most cuisines don’t have to many veggie only options so imagine the delight on my parents faces when they packed up their things and moved to Zushi a small city in the Kanagawa prefecture of Japan. Now the reason they would be delighted is that the Asian cuisine’s were in a much greater abundance and quality than in America, and those cuisines were stock full of the most tasty and flavorful dishes that used no meat. My parents then went and were trying all kinds of food they could get.
The flavors of the many different kinds of Asian cuisines have become key parts of my person. Different foods may make me feel sad, happy, or maybe just make me feel somewhere else. I can and will talk about my long stint in Japan but that will be later, for now I am going to focus on America.
Once I moved had moved into America I was struck with a bit of culture shock. Being a little bit different because I grew up in a different culture instantly drew me to being the target of bullying and exclusion, of course some people thought it was cool I was from Japan and all that but the majority of people at my high school just thought I was another weird kid who didn’t act the same as them. What was able to bring me friends and comfort in that time, Flavor and food. More specifically homemade Onigiri. The first friend I made when I moved here was a kid named Mitchel, Mitchel was of Thai heritage and had also lived in Japan a couple of years. It was the second week of school, I was eating lunch alone. My mother had prepared several Onigiri fresh that morning as we had all been feeling homesick. On the first bite I was instantly brought back to a warm sunny day at the small park in the middle of Zushi. In my moments of remembrance I hadn’t noticed the boy staring down at my plate from across the table. I had never seen him at school. We shared no classes. But still this one link, a rice ball wrapped in seaweed was able to bridge the gap between us and force a conversation.
This is not the only instance in my life where food broke the ice or something similar. Foods role in Manufacturing not only the necessary nutrients for your body but also in manufacturing links between people. Needs more appreciation. The prominence of Asian American restaurants and their relation to their integration in society is definitely something I will be examining during this project.