Food Memoir

by Megumi Miyashita

Eating is the essential part in my life. Eating is the happiest time for me. I love food and I am a big eater. My friend told me that she had never met the person who eats so much as I do in her life. I have loved food since I was a kid, so all my friends know me as a food lover. I am always thinking about what I eat for the next meal. I am not a picky eater, so I can eat all foods that are served to me. I can eat coriander, but it is not my taste. When I was a kid, I could not eat wasabi and mustard because kids are sensitive to those kinds of spicy tastes and I had images that they were adults’ tastes. The reason why I love food so much and I am not a picky eater is that my parents told me the joy of eating. We often eat together since I was a kid. When I was a kid, we went out to have dinner on weekend and this was a kind of my family’s habit. We often went to Chinese or Western food restaurants, not Japanese because we could eat Japanese food at home. However, since my brother started living by himself for going to university a little bit far from my home, we did not have many chances to eat out. And he rarely went back to my home, so we ate out together just once a year, New Year’s Day. New Year’s Day is the most important day in Japan, so people in Japan often spend time together with family members. Even if we eat at home, eating with my family feels so happy for me still now. Eating is not only just tasting food, but also it is a part of communication. Of course, I love food and eating, but another reason why I love eating is that eating and talking with someone makes me comfortable. Compared eating foods by myself, I feel much happier about eating with someone; my family members, my relatives, and my friends. Since I came to here, I have many opportunities that I eat by myself. I love eating with my family, eating and cooking by myself make me so sad. Then, I realized eating and talking with people was so precious and important thing for me. So, I have felt that eating and drinking with my friends in here are not common thing, and I appreciate to the opportunities. My brother eats well and he is not also picky eater, so I can say like this.

I am from Japan and I had never stayed at foreign places for a long time until I came to the United States, so I grow up with Japanese food. I prefer eating to cooking, so my mother mostly cooks for me. My mother cooks every day to my family, so now, I struggle with cooking by myself. When I asked her how to learn cooking, she said she learned from her mother. At that time, I remembered my grandmother also cooked very well. When I go back to Japan, I am going to study cooking. Cooking Japanese food takes too much time for me, so now I often eat pizza, pasta, and bagel. I have tried to cook Japanese food since I came to here, but it hasdnever succeeded. I cooked stir-fried noodles, Niku-Jyaga (potato and meat stew), miso soup, Ton-Jiru (pork soup). I have never topped my mother’s taste and I have to appreciate to my mother’s hard working. Dashi (broth) is essential for Japanese food. Dashi has a lot of varieties; bonito, other fishes, kombu (kelp), shiitake mushroom and so on. We often use bonito and kombu. The taste makes me always comfortable and it must be my comfort taste. We as Japanese mainly use dashi when we cook soup and boiled dishes. My family’s meals include at least one dashi dish anytime. Dashi dishes were the food that I missed the most since I came to here. I did not realize dashi was an essential taste in my eating life until staying in here.

I love eating not only Japanese food, but also international food. I love traveling and I have been to abroad more than ten times. I have been to South Korea five times, China twice, Canada twice, United States twice, Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan. The biggest purpose of traveling for me is tasting local food in real local places and learning the culture. The international foods I taste in Japan are not real local tastes, and their tastes are adjusted for Japanese. For example, when I went to South Korea for the first time, I was very surprised that Korean kimchi was much spicier than I had expected. I am a big fan of kimchi, but at that time, I noticed that real kimchi taste was this, and until that time, the kimchi that I had eaten in Japan was not real kimchi that local Korean people ate normally. When I go to local place, I can eat the real tastes everywhere. I am fascinated with local tastes, so I do not hesitate trying local food. One of the impressive memories of traveling to abroad was being in the United States when I was a high school student in Osaka, Japan. At that time, I was surprised the portion of food in restaurants and I felt I could not eat all. At that time, I ate too much grilled salmon, and macaroni and cheese. In Japan, we have a culture that we have to finish eating all in restaurants, and we do not have a culture that we go back to home to bring leftovers. So, serving too much portion in here always reminds me of that time. Food teaches me unique culture like this experience.

Since I came to the United States, I tasted a lot of foods that I had never eaten before, and they made my view to food richer. One of the things that I felt so was Variety Showcase at The Redd on Salmon, Portland, Oregon. We went to there as a required field trip and it was an amazing experience for me. In there, we could so many small bites of foods. At very first, I tasted Caramelized and black leek tatin with pickled leek top powder and fresh leek fromage blank. In brief, it was the food that caramelized big sliced leek was on pastry like small pie and it was my most favorite food in the showcase. I personally do not like big and long sliced leek since I was a kid, but I can eat small sliced leek. We use big sliced leek when my family cooks hot pot in winter season because everyone except for me love big sliced leek. The reason why I do not like big sliced leek is that the taste is very strong, the texture is spongy, and the smell is stinky. I tried to avoid eating the leek pastry. However, the leek pastry was really amazing because leek was very sweet and the texture was easy for me to eat. The texture was not disgusting like leek for hot pot. The combination of crispy pastry and melty texture leek was awesome. I would have liked to eat it more. I had two foods that I felt my homeland, Japan. One of the foods was Purple Peruvian potato, fish velouté fermented, guajillo chili, rose monarda. The reason why I felt Japan was the fish sauce. We have food for New Year’s Day named Ougon-Ika (golden squid), the ingredients are sliced-thin squid, herring roe, caplin eggs, soy sauce, fermented seasoning, and salt. I love the food and it is the food that I feel the combination with rice is the best more than any other food. it is a little bit expensive and the food for New Year’s Day, So, it is hard to discover in normal supermarkets, but if you go to department stores, you can get easily. I often requested my mother to buy Ougon-Ika. The potato food reminded me of the memory in Japan. Another food that reminded me of Japan was corn miso made by Three Sisters Nixtamal. They were the people who came to Cascadia Grains Conference. Miso is an essential food for Japanese people because we love miso soup. My mother often cooks miso soup for us. We have a traditional culture of Japanese food. It is called Washoku in Japanese. Basically, there are soup, rice, one main dish, and two small side dishes. We often drink miso soup as one soup, so miso is an important food for our lives. The miso I tasted in the showcase was very sweet and I loved the taste so much. I felt that we could not use the miso for miso soup because of too sweet taste, but I think that dipping vegetables is the best way to use the miso because the taste is strong but mild, so it can make the most of the original taste of fresh ingredients like local vegetables. However, it was not normal miso because it included corn, so the texture was interesting. Only one food that I felt mystery was Chilled indigo noodles, kimchi, pickled veggies, benne seed, chili-soy dressing. I personally like spicy food, so I looked forward to eating it. However, the taste made me very confused because the flavors that I felt was too many, so I did not know what things I tasted. I was curious two things about the food. One thing was kimchi and chili were spicy tastes, so I did not know which spicy tastes I felt. And one more thing was the color of noodles because blue color tends to reduce people’s appetites. So, I was curious about why they chose indigo color for noodles.

 I suppose that my comfort food is formed by what food I ate when I was a kid. My comfort food is Japanese food; broth of dried bonito and kelp, miso, tea and so on. Even if I stay in the United States for a long time, my comfort food would not change because I have grown with the tastes of Japanese food, and they occupy most of my food memories with my family and friends.