My family has never been a big proponent of dietary diversity. It’s an up and coming commonality to mock white suburban families for their unimpressive palettes, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that my immediate family is the poster child for this kind of stereotype. Both of my parents were born and raised in rural Michigan, each with their own enormous families and cooking culture. My mother lived on an isolated farm in the Northern Peninsula, where most residents are career farmers with limited access to outside grocers. Food was acquired locally, with most protein being sent to small scale butchers, and veggies coming directly from the back yard. Supermarkets acted as an extension of this system; they would distribute milk and meats provided by people you probably knew by name, with a produce aisle only ever touched as a last resort. Of course, the chilly climate of the northern Midwest took many fruits off the table, and the egregious travel times needed to import exotic goods made them difficult to come by. As a result, spice cabinets generally laid bare, staple meat-and-potatoes meals took the forefront, and uncommon processed foods became a delicacy; my mother regularly recounts how the most decadent meal available to her was a can of Spaghetti O’s mixed with chunks of sliced hot dog. Fortunately, her upbringing in a full-table, family-dinner home has made my mother into quite the diligent cook, though her taste for variety is admittedly lacking.
My father was raised in a small suburb in the Southern Peninsula, in a community descendent of Polish immigrants. The locals were incredibly proud of their low-cost homeland favorites, like pickled cabbage and polish sausage. Even as my fellow grandchildren and I visit the town decades later, meals are dominated by these cultural staples. My grandmother won’t let us leave without ensuring us in great detail that the sausage is as good as it’s ever been. Coincidentally, the locals have a great skepticism for anything they haven’t seen personally under the metaphorical knife. Family owned butcher shops dominate the protein scene, and name brand supermarket selections have to be modified significantly before they’re put on the table. It’s very reminiscent of the cooking culture seen during the rise of processed foods; there is great shame in serving something from a can, but there’s no shame in working a canned ingredient into long standing family recipe. My father, who has a stubborn disinterest in cooking, seems to have at least picked up on this ‘tradition.’ He buys simple, puts some vegetable oil in a pan, and has a meal before him within ten minutes. His contribution to family meals rarely goes beyond preparing a protein, but he swears that no one can do it better.
My parents were subject to a stringent culinary routine that never wavered, and outside influences rarely challenged their perception of food. They wouldn’t be confronted with true diversity until they decided to move to the East Coast, and start a family.
Ellicott City is a historic town about an hour’s drive inland from Baltimore. Quiet streets and noteworthy education systems have created prime real estate for international families looking to move to the U.S., and proximity to the harbor provides a colorful array of seafood that Maryland has become known for. I cannot stress enough how little this affected my early upbringing. My parents, affronted by a rainbow of new and unfamiliar choices, fell back on their staples. Almost every meal concocted in our house can be separated into four main groups: the protein (generally grilled), the green salad, the secondary vegetable du jour, and a starch. To this very day, homecoming dinners are rarely blessed with something as exotic as grilled squash. Snacks and sweets were more treacherous territory. Neither of my parents grew up with access to the decadent donuts and cakes that can be seen wrapped in plastic and lining market walls. My mother was never around processed food enough to treat it any more than an occasional indulgence, while my father’s family history of incredible dessert recipes was overshadowed by his distinct lack of energy for food prep. This effort-consciousness evolved into health-consciousness as the 21st century introduced a new emphasis on nutrition. The rules were simple; if it was sweet, it had to be preceded with a green of some kind. This left brownies, ice cream, and even sugary beverages completely off the table, and most cereals were on thin ice.;It wasn’t until I learned very recently, by reading Pandora’s Lunchbox (by Melanie Warner), that I discovered just how unhealthy cereal can be, and by extension, how unjustified I was to scream at my mother for not filling my 6-year-old body with Reese’s Puffs. This rule was so frequently enforced, that I once burst into guilty tears the same night I had eaten a crumb of brownie off of a knife before dinner had even started. I came to my parents with a sobbing confession, at three in the morning. They weren’t thrilled, for a number of reasons. At this point, the greens-before-goods rule has etched itself into the back of my subconscious, where it still nags at me to this very day. Unfortunately, it’s up to bat against an ever dwindling self-control, and an awfully tempting box of double fudge cookies.
I think it goes without saying that our house wasn’t exactly a culture epicenter for the culinary arts. Sure, we had neighbors from New Zealand, Mexico, India, and all parts of China, but we rarely visited for dinner. Family friends would have us over for special occasions, but pre-adolescent me was even more skeptical of foreign spices than my parents were. It wasn’t until I attained the unwavering independence of a high school freshman that I started to visit my friends throughout all hours of the day, dinner included. Years of family meals at Asian-American fusion restaurants, which are second only to crab meat as far as east coast popularity goes, had prepared me with a beginner’s knowledge of eastern food. Regular visits to the Shi, Cheng, and Zheng residences familiarized me with the rest. My friends would encourage me to try any number of unfamiliar flavors and substances, ranging from wild mushrooms to fish eyes, that they themselves were raised on. And I was no slouch when it came to accepting their offers; as my ability to handle chopsticks to any respectable degree improved, so expanded my palette. I started receiving invites to youth group dinners at tofu bars, quizbowl meetings at hot pot spots, and birthday celebrations at an indecipherable establishment where you would grill pig intestines at your own table. These exciting new foods would, and actively do, horrify my family. Foreign textures found in tofu, sticky rice, and certain mushrooms – not outlandish foods by any capacity – send my parents reeling. Amongst the packaged steaks marinated in salad dressing and chicken, plain on rice, however, these “otherworldly” options quickly caught my attention. By senior year, I was encouraging my family to accompany me on all sorts of culinary ventures, from pseudo-Korea to the small Mediterranean paradise on Route 40. My pitches have yet to catch on.
So, how does all of this affect how I eat today? Well, it really hasn’t. Shamefully, I must admit that my family’s staple-style cooking has been adopted into my daily lifestyle. The staples, however, are a little different; with Michigan style meals at home, and trade-port style markets all around, it was only a matter of time before I devised my own selection of regular contenders. Carbs became increasingly common after I joined high school track and field. Every morning began with a peanut butter toast sandwich, and the evenings would round out with cheese covered pasta with fruit. Of course, lunch was entirely up to whatever the school was serving on any given day, since hours in an ice-pack chilled home lunch left the all-too-important carbs all soggy and flat. As I was thrust into the independence of college, and away from family made meals, I tried to keep my now unmonitored diet under control. The greens-before-goods rule still applies in full force, and the cooking is kept simple. My palette has expanded to peanut butter sandwiches with jelly, and slightly less pasta than before (with just as much cheese). Proteins and veggies have also taken the forefront over sweets, as my retirement from competitive running gave way to a high-investment hobby in fitness. Very recently, I’ve started learning to nuances of how to cook whole chicken breasts. I implore you not to try it.
There are so many stories I want to include in this paper, like how my friends and I would visit the same home-owned tofu shop every weekend before it closed, or how I promised myself at age 13 that I would develop a lifestyle where I’d never have to diet (it’s been going pretty well, if you’re curious) – but there’s only so much space to fill. So for the time being, I’ll leave you with this: my parents were never the most adventurous when it came to food – family traditions and a lack of foreign influence made sure of that - and they never raised me to be much differently. That doesn’t mean I didn’t find my own culinary adventures in the cultural hub that was my home town, though you wouldn’t guess it from looking at my fridge. My lifestyle is easy, minimal, and as basic as you can get; but rest assured that, given the opportunity to try a strange new cuisine, from Western Europe to the far east of Asia, I’ll be the first to dive in.
My father was raised in a small suburb in the Southern Peninsula, in a community descendent of Polish immigrants. The locals were incredibly proud of their low-cost homeland favorites, like pickled cabbage and polish sausage. Even as my fellow grandchildren and I visit the town decades later, meals are dominated by these cultural staples. My grandmother won’t let us leave without ensuring us in great detail that the sausage is as good as it’s ever been. Coincidentally, the locals have a great skepticism for anything they haven’t seen personally under the metaphorical knife. Family owned butcher shops dominate the protein scene, and name brand supermarket selections have to be modified significantly before they’re put on the table. It’s very reminiscent of the cooking culture seen during the rise of processed foods; there is great shame in serving something from a can, but there’s no shame in working a canned ingredient into long standing family recipe. My father, who has a stubborn disinterest in cooking, seems to have at least picked up on this ‘tradition.’ He buys simple, puts some vegetable oil in a pan, and has a meal before him within ten minutes. His contribution to family meals rarely goes beyond preparing a protein, but he swears that no one can do it better.
My parents were subject to a stringent culinary routine that never wavered, and outside influences rarely challenged their perception of food. They wouldn’t be confronted with true diversity until they decided to move to the East Coast, and start a family.
Ellicott City is a historic town about an hour’s drive inland from Baltimore. Quiet streets and noteworthy education systems have created prime real estate for international families looking to move to the U.S., and proximity to the harbor provides a colorful array of seafood that Maryland has become known for. I cannot stress enough how little this affected my early upbringing. My parents, affronted by a rainbow of new and unfamiliar choices, fell back on their staples. Almost every meal concocted in our house can be separated into four main groups: the protein (generally grilled), the green salad, the secondary vegetable du jour, and a starch. To this very day, homecoming dinners are rarely blessed with something as exotic as grilled squash. Snacks and sweets were more treacherous territory. Neither of my parents grew up with access to the decadent donuts and cakes that can be seen wrapped in plastic and lining market walls. My mother was never around processed food enough to treat it any more than an occasional indulgence, while my father’s family history of incredible dessert recipes was overshadowed by his distinct lack of energy for food prep. This effort-consciousness evolved into health-consciousness as the 21st century introduced a new emphasis on nutrition. The rules were simple; if it was sweet, it had to be preceded with a green of some kind. This left brownies, ice cream, and even sugary beverages completely off the table, and most cereals were on thin ice.;It wasn’t until I learned very recently, by reading Pandora’s Lunchbox (by Melanie Warner), that I discovered just how unhealthy cereal can be, and by extension, how unjustified I was to scream at my mother for not filling my 6-year-old body with Reese’s Puffs. This rule was so frequently enforced, that I once burst into guilty tears the same night I had eaten a crumb of brownie off of a knife before dinner had even started. I came to my parents with a sobbing confession, at three in the morning. They weren’t thrilled, for a number of reasons. At this point, the greens-before-goods rule has etched itself into the back of my subconscious, where it still nags at me to this very day. Unfortunately, it’s up to bat against an ever dwindling self-control, and an awfully tempting box of double fudge cookies.
I think it goes without saying that our house wasn’t exactly a culture epicenter for the culinary arts. Sure, we had neighbors from New Zealand, Mexico, India, and all parts of China, but we rarely visited for dinner. Family friends would have us over for special occasions, but pre-adolescent me was even more skeptical of foreign spices than my parents were. It wasn’t until I attained the unwavering independence of a high school freshman that I started to visit my friends throughout all hours of the day, dinner included. Years of family meals at Asian-American fusion restaurants, which are second only to crab meat as far as east coast popularity goes, had prepared me with a beginner’s knowledge of eastern food. Regular visits to the Shi, Cheng, and Zheng residences familiarized me with the rest. My friends would encourage me to try any number of unfamiliar flavors and substances, ranging from wild mushrooms to fish eyes, that they themselves were raised on. And I was no slouch when it came to accepting their offers; as my ability to handle chopsticks to any respectable degree improved, so expanded my palette. I started receiving invites to youth group dinners at tofu bars, quizbowl meetings at hot pot spots, and birthday celebrations at an indecipherable establishment where you would grill pig intestines at your own table. These exciting new foods would, and actively do, horrify my family. Foreign textures found in tofu, sticky rice, and certain mushrooms – not outlandish foods by any capacity – send my parents reeling. Amongst the packaged steaks marinated in salad dressing and chicken, plain on rice, however, these “otherworldly” options quickly caught my attention. By senior year, I was encouraging my family to accompany me on all sorts of culinary ventures, from pseudo-Korea to the small Mediterranean paradise on Route 40. My pitches have yet to catch on.
So, how does all of this affect how I eat today? Well, it really hasn’t. Shamefully, I must admit that my family’s staple-style cooking has been adopted into my daily lifestyle. The staples, however, are a little different; with Michigan style meals at home, and trade-port style markets all around, it was only a matter of time before I devised my own selection of regular contenders. Carbs became increasingly common after I joined high school track and field. Every morning began with a peanut butter toast sandwich, and the evenings would round out with cheese covered pasta with fruit. Of course, lunch was entirely up to whatever the school was serving on any given day, since hours in an ice-pack chilled home lunch left the all-too-important carbs all soggy and flat. As I was thrust into the independence of college, and away from family made meals, I tried to keep my now unmonitored diet under control. The greens-before-goods rule still applies in full force, and the cooking is kept simple. My palette has expanded to peanut butter sandwiches with jelly, and slightly less pasta than before (with just as much cheese). Proteins and veggies have also taken the forefront over sweets, as my retirement from competitive running gave way to a high-investment hobby in fitness. Very recently, I’ve started learning to nuances of how to cook whole chicken breasts. I implore you not to try it.
There are so many stories I want to include in this paper, like how my friends and I would visit the same home-owned tofu shop every weekend before it closed, or how I promised myself at age 13 that I would develop a lifestyle where I’d never have to diet (it’s been going pretty well, if you’re curious) – but there’s only so much space to fill. So for the time being, I’ll leave you with this: my parents were never the most adventurous when it came to food – family traditions and a lack of foreign influence made sure of that - and they never raised me to be much differently. That doesn’t mean I didn’t find my own culinary adventures in the cultural hub that was my home town, though you wouldn’t guess it from looking at my fridge. My lifestyle is easy, minimal, and as basic as you can get; but rest assured that, given the opportunity to try a strange new cuisine, from Western Europe to the far east of Asia, I’ll be the first to dive in.
This is an updated version of my food autobiography from a couple months back! Click below to see the original!