The article about how sushi ‘went’ global made me think of three things.
First, what other foods have made the transition? Did it occur under the same conditions?
Second, the globalisation of food and the deleterious impact of globalisation.
Finally, how food can bring/ encourage/ nurture cultural understanding.
I’ll ramble on about that last point today.
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I've learned about soft power and cultural influence. I've been taught the terms, with some really longwinded powerpoint somewhere, and I'm sure I've stayed up till the crack ass of dawn to write an essay about it at some point.
I guess what I forgot, in between all the academic terms and grading, is that I've been a recipient of this cultural exchange. I often use food as a means of learning about another culture and introducing others to mine.
It starts off with bringing lunar new year snacks to the office. It's taking out a few friends to dim sum, and another colleague then taking us out to mantu.
When we hosted students from other countries, they would eat the assortment (or as one person described it, eclectic) range of foods we had. Eggs for breakfast. Rice for lunch. Maybe a pizza for dinner if mum was running late. I wondered what those students thought about it all. I thought of all the ways we went out of the way to clarify how a certain dish wasn’t ‘traditional’ but reflective of us.
When travelling (oh god I miss even having the option of travelling) I was definitely the person who looked up places to eat. I planned my trips around food, whether it was a restaurant to go to, a cooking class or a festival.
Nothing beats stumbling into a small, hole in the wall restaurant, tucked away in the corner of Shibuya. What was a refuge for rain turned into a memory that I’m still talking about four years later.
Food framed as a cultural commodity that we export and import. I saw it when "aussie beef" was what my host families would talk about incessantly, searching for a point of connection within the first few hours of meeting a awkward australian teenager and welcoming her into their home. The thinly sliced, plastic wrapped slices of beef didn’t resemble the slabs of meat we had at woolies, but I appreciated the sentiment.
But I’m no economist. Trade policy, government influence and tariffs is the last thing I want to write about. But undeniably, they all play a part in this exchange of goods.
I guess what their bottom lines fail to capture is the unquantifiable exchange of culture, of customs that comes with it all.
Things like the little rituals that you absorb when you share a meal with someone from a culture different to yours. Things like table manners. Things like learning how to hold your chopsticks right. Faux pas like sticking your chopsticks in your bowl of rice. Like sitting in a small family run restaurant in a walled city in Italy’s north, not knowing that the main meal came after the pasta. Learning the joys of mulled wine in the unforgiving fridge that is Alexanderplatz in December. Balancing prawns, asparagus and open faced sandwiches on a deck in Copenhagen. Trying to cook chicken corned soup without creamed corn in the English countryside. Cooking rice in a microwave for six months. Learning how to eat with my hands.
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"Social cultural meaning.”
God I can’t wait for this pandemic to be over.