Matthew Grubisich
ENG 414 - SU’11
K.Leslie
Bringing It Back to the Roots
When it came to food, growing up with a first generation Vietnamese mom meant that I ate anything and everything whenever it came my way. I have come to realize now that she was encouraging me to embrace cultural foods, and for this I couldn’t be more grateful. On top of this enriched appreciation for diverse foods, I have recently been enlightened with the perspective of wanting to know my food better: where it comes from, what it does for me and what it goes through to reach my table and thus - my tummy. This enlightened perspective can be attributed to Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” and many other books or articles on the topic of food, it’s origins, it’s social, health, economic, or environmental impact on our daily lives. Through reading his work, I have developed the keen awareness for more than what I used to just eat unwittingly. I pay more attention to my food and have therefore found a deeper appreciation for it because of the closure behind considering food’s process, and by process I mean not only what it went through to reach me, but also how it was prepared and presented. There’s so much that goes into what we eat and we often put forth very little thought about it; but when one reaches this revelation it makes for an enriched experience. When my mother made food, she did it with a caring and graceful disposition, using spices that carried strong undertones of Vietnamese culture into the arms of a joyful palette. When reflecting on my mothers cooking and the work of Michael Pollan, it is safe to say that food can once again be appreciated, starting from the ground up. With the reflection of personal experiences and excerpts from Pollan’s work, I hope to point out aspects of food as to isolate factors, on how it gets to you or what happens on it’s way, that would otherwise be overlooked. From the roots to the dish, food can be appreciated the entire way there.
Over time, the conventional idea of cooking at home has evolved, traveling down a food-chain-conveyor belt of natural taste to processed perfection. My mom, accustomed to ingredients that went through a minor process to get to her, relied on the freshness of meats from local butchers and the abundance of produce to make her traditional and health-conscious meals. The foods, found at Vietnamese markets, went through low-level processes that would have demanded very little economic costs or presented no unordinary health concerns. The economic costs would only entail fuel used for the transportation of goods and health risks wouldn’t be anything other than known food-born germs and bacteria. Unlike the Asian food communities my mom frequents, Pollan would compare current social trends with cooking as to say that it has developed a dependency on highly processed ingredients that end up producing significant health risks, social and economic costs and lead to the downfall of authentic cooking. In Pollan’s article, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”, he interviews a food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, and highlights high main point of consumer behavior and that is that, “…[consumers are] ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both.” Balzer comes to that conclusion after identifying the downward spiral of how people perceive the verb, “to cook”, as a limited and easy process to produce immediate gratification. As I put this idea into the context of my life, it brought me to a homemade dish that I had prepared recently. This dish was pork sausage fried rice. Pollan’s implication to the overuse of processed ingredients made me realize that although I’m making fried rice from scratch, there are other costs at hand that needed to be realized. The sausage for example had a high health cost because of the fatty content and the many preservatives used to prolong the shelf life of it. The eggs used were an economic cost because they were bought from Safeway, a food chain, which also means that local farmers are not the ones raking in revenue. Even spices I often use had seemingly gone through one or two steps, minced garlic, lemon pepper or steak seasoning, in efforts to reduce one or two steps in my cooking process (the perks of American culture). The use of foods that have seen little processing is a dying art and if we learn from, and appreciate, cooking styles of different cultures, we can bring cooking back to the grassroots level.
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[conclusion] This is a testament to the direction and danger of our food culture unless
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