I definitely consider cooking and food an art, even now you
can enrol into a university and study culinary arts where apart from cooking
you learn how to manage and administrate a business related to hospitality
maybe a restaurant, a café, a hotel or a bar. In this way looking around the
world is very nice to see how all this art and cultures of cooking and spices
and ingredients from the entire world fusion, in different countries because of
migration or because of marketing. With
food is really easy to view cultures other than your own because you have it in
your weekly menu.
Let see: A normal day
in my life menu will be if I only consider dinners...
Monday: Peruvian dish cebiche, fish cooked in Lime juice and
chilli
Tuesday: Pasta spaghetti Bolognese easy to make (Italian
food?)
Wednesday to slacker to cook I will eat Maccas/Subway/KFC/
Junk process food (United States)
Thursday: Fried rice? (Chinese) could be Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese or even Peruvian
style fried rice
Friday: I might go out, eat in a fancy restaurant could be
anything, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, fusion? etc.
Saturday: maybe another Peruvian dish can´t forget where I am
from.
Sunday: an Argentinean BBQ in my house with a German beer? Nice!!!
In this way saying how many cultures and way of cooking is
around my life all this has influenced in what I eat, what I drink, what I cook
and not just me, I am sure everybody because you just don't eat typical food from your country you always want to try other flavours other spices and if you like to cook, other ways other techniques of cooking. I am sure you can find a Chinese
restaurant or a Mexican restaurant everywhere but they would not taste the same
they will adapt to the culture of the country where it is.
The biggest example for me happen in Peru with Chinese
restaurants.
My girlfriend is Taiwanese and she speak mandarin. One day I asked
her what “CHIFA” means ? she say it's not a mandarin word , I say that's how Peruvians call
to Chinese restaurants in Peru. Then I show her a menu with the names of all
the dishes with photos and she couldn't recognize any: “that's not Chinese food”
she said… awkward they all sound Chinese for me but taste different from any
other Chinese restaurant I ever eat.
Hello Sergio,
ReplyDeletefirstly it was interesting to read your personal view of how food has influenced the way you view various cultures. I liked the way you discussed this by showing relevant images to support your personal examples. Having said that I do believe your post needs some improvements to help strengthen your ideas. It would have been great to see your examples linked to scholarly readings, there was no reference list included also your post needed a few hyperlinks to further websites to help broaden my knowledge of your ideas. Hope this helps! Thanks for the read.
Hi Sergio. I really enjoyed this post of yours as I could relate to it. Especially the part where you mentioned about your Taiwanese girlfriend saying "that's not Chinese food." I'm a Malaysian Chinese and I've been in Melbourne for over 11 years. I've been to countless 'Chinese' restaurants serving Chinese-but-actually-not-Chinese-food. My family and I would sit there awkwardly, staring at the supposedly Chinese food.
ReplyDeleteBut you're right! What a person usually eats tells alot about their background and culture. Coming from a Chinese family, our usual meals would be rice served with a few dishes (which consists of meat, vegetable, and maybe herbal soup). But there are times when we do cook Western food for a change. And it's really interesting to see the different and odd ingredients we chuck in because it tells us alot about a culture.