I\u2019ve spent the majority of my life on a farm raising sheep\nand a small crop of various produce. Before all of that, I lived in a middle\nclass, white, suburban neighborhood named Daniel\u2019s Ranch located in Carnation,\nWashington, a small farm town home of the original producers of carnation milk\nand \u201cknown\u201d for (at one point) having the world\u2019s most milk-producing cow. Daniel\u2019s\nRanch couldn\u2019t\u2019ve included more than 50-100 families i.e. houses. In regard to\nmy background with agriculture, my life in the ranch aside from a very small garden in which\ntomatoes and Squash were exclusively grown (both of which I despised at the time).\nIn fact, as a child I was very picky about what I ate. If I had a choice in the\nmatter of what would be made for a meal, I would insist on spaghetti with\ncheese and butter or grilled cheese as well as other foods of a \u201csafe\u201d nature.\nBy \u201csafe\u201d I mean foods with no strong smells, flavors or textures. My food\npickiness was by no means a product of my upbringing, as my parents were both\nquite adventurous with their preferred cuisine. They ate things like raw smoked\nsalmon, prosciutto, escargot, very runny French omelets and other foods of an\n\u201cadventurous\u201d (by my young self\u2019s definition) nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s very likely that my predisposition towards certain foods can be attributed to my genetic makeup. Flavors that I like and dislike could be a product of what my ancestors had to eat and therefore grew an affinity for, not only a mental predilection, but a chemical, brain rewiring, propensity. According to a genetic test I am more than fifty percent British and\/or Irish and according to both my grandfather and the genetic test I am one fourteenth Danish. What can be said about that I don’t know, as ethnic cuisines far from that of English or Danish appeal to me such as spicy African dishes of lamb, salty, acidic Mexican foods with meat bases such as pork tongue, and creamy spice based dishes such as most Indian food. I can however say that some foods that are of my liking within the cuisine of my heritage exist as well. including salty black licorice, smoked salmon, and pickled herring in mustard sauce. Although I do think predetermined, genetic flavor inclination exists, this is not a barrier for affinity towards flavors contrasting those of what our ancestors ate. Also to mention, just because one comes from a culture in which certain foods or flavors are penchant, an example being a certain vegetable popular in cuisine from said culture. It is if not possible likely that an individual does not favor said ingredient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a child, very few vegetables appealed to me. Squash, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, mushrooms (not a vegetable, but in my youth, there was no distinction), zucchini and tomatillos all seemed vile and untouchable. However, I wasn\u2019t the type of child who refused to try anything. I mean, how would I know if I didn\u2019t favor something until a tried it? Which, looking back at, is very forward thinking coming from a child under the age of 10. After I had tried something I didn\u2019t like, there was very little chance of myself giving it a second chance. That being said, just because of my disposition didn\u2019t mean my parents would make grilled zucchini or babganoush for dinner any less. My personal affliction with vegetables made my youth especially difficult due to the fact that I was a strict vegetarian from the ages of 6-17. The word vegetarian within the context of myself is somewhat misleading. When the word vegetarian is used the connotation of vegetables is evidently made, despite that, as a vegetarian I ate very few vegetables and instead ate very processed vegetarian \u201cmeat\u201d. I understand the precarious nature of a vegetarian not eating many vegetables, but what has to be understood is that I grew up in a time (early 2000\u2019s) where processed, soy-based vegetarian meat was gaining popularity. A well-timed transition on my part I suppose. As opposed to eating spinach dip, hummus, and cucumber sandwiches, for almost every meal, I would eat deep fried soy nuggets and soy breakfast sausage links, cheese, and carbs. In that age where one could be an \u201cunhealthy vegetarian\u201d, I most definitely was. My diet of cheese, carbs, and soy-based products ended when I decided to quit my meatless philosophy and veer towards the very exciting world of meats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meat is a very vast and dynamic\nsection of foodways and without a doubt the reason I became as enthralled with\nfood as I currently am. For the first time in my life my parents were no longer\nasking me to try foods for my own \u201cmind widening\u201d benefit. I was now taking the\ninitiative upon myself to explore the world of food as I never had before. By\nincluding meat into my meals, a whole new world opened up itself before me and\nI finally got to explore it. When I decided to make the meat-eating transition,\nI was living on my family\u2019s four acre sheep farm in Duvall, Washington, five\nminutes away from Carnation. On our farms humble garden my mother grew plants\nin which the likes of younger me had never even heard of such as ground\ncherries, kale, and dragon-tongue beans. My culinary world was expanding before\nme and I was beyond excited. Living in a small organic farm town meant that\nhigh quality meat was easy to come by. One could have a steady supply of meat\nsimply by making friends with their free range chicken raising neighbors, or by\nhaving those neighbors introduce you to their organic pig raising cousins, or\neven by making a deal with your middle school principal who raises grass fed\nbeef.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today I would describe myself as a\nfood ambitionist: going out of my way to try things I never have before and\nmaking it my goal to be more than well versed in cuisine. I can\u2019t help but\ncontribute that to my \u201clate bloom\u201d into the food world and from the open-minded\nfood philosophy of my parents<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prompting this eating memoir is a class at The Evergreen State College, entitled Comparative Eurasian Foodways<\/em>,in which the focus is to explore history, culture, and gastronomy of Eurasia specifically China, Greece, and Italy. As a reference, the class was asked to read excerpts from one of the most popular food memoirs, titled Shark Fin and Sichuan <\/em>written by Fuchsia Dunlop. The contents are of her experiences in graduating culinary school in the Sichuan province of China. Although I am not in culinary school, this gastronomy class has an exciting aspect: every Friday the class makes dishes based on the cuisine of the three cultures previously stated. Each base of the meals we make are ones we\u2019ve spent all week learning about via lectures, readings, and media, such as films. Most recently, we focused on meats by making meatballs traditional to said cultures. The Chinese meatball, which to me was flavorfully more unique than the others was one of pork which (aside from the average meatball ingredients) consisted of water chestnuts, sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger and green onion with a reduced, sticky sauce made up of a variety of flavorful ingredients like Shao Xing cooking wine, star anise, and rock sugar. It\u2019s complex, cultural, meat-based foods like this which my younger, vegetarian self had no possible grasp of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In part one\u00a0of this memoir, my brilliant awakening to meat was touched upon. To further the readers understanding of my relationship with flesh and its culinary use, I will expand upon this. After being a vegetarian for 12 odd years, my knowledge of meats was beyond lacking. At the age of 17, I couldn\u2019t tell the difference between ham, roast beef, or turkey. Being disconnected entirely from meat eating culture, there was so much about meat that fascinated me. It was all so new, everything I learned held so much weight: the salty, slightly sweet and smoky flavor of ham with its spongy, juicy qualities, the dry, soft turkey with its almost gamy flavor, and roast beef with its utmost complex tantalizing essence; all of it was a learning process and one which was greeted with intense craving. Due to a complete lack of knowledge in meats, that entire genre was comparable to that of the new frontier, the world was my oyster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the note of seafood, which to this day is my protein of choice, it was the deciding factor on my ambitious transition into the carnivorous ways. Growing up my entire life in the PNW, in fact forty minutes from the \u2018oh-so majestic\u2019 Seattle, there was no lack of seafood. The most acclaimed of such is the salmon, which growing up and still to this day is one of my least favorite seafoods; that is, however, if we\u2019re talking about the Seattle way of cooking it, which is the only form it was ever served to me. To elaborate, a meal which my household ate perhaps once a month maybe more if it was on sale, was salmon fillets baked on cedar panels with brown sugar, salt and pepper, garnished with dill and lemon juice after cooking. As a kid it was a very bland dish with a very uniform flavor, however being high in nutritional value seemingly justified the one note meal. It was in my teenage years that I discovered smoked salmon lox, salmon jerky, and salmon sashimi, which are superior forms of this fish which \u00a0highlight all the good aspects. The good aspects\u00a0being the subtle fishiness and the amazing fat which the salmon holds between each layer of its muscles. My preference for raw, cured, and smoked salmon rather than simply a baked one gave rise to my overall inclination to foods prepared with these aforementioned methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raw, cured, and smoked meats are the\nessence of what meat should be. As a field trip for my gastronomy class, we\nwent to Portland, Oregon and got to experience a culinary variety showcase. On\nthe way to the event while riding in one of the school vans, mostly oblivious\nto what I was about to experience, a gas stop was needed. During this break, a\nfew of us went into the gas station store and bought cheap processed foods to\ntide our hunger due to not eating breakfast. I grabbed an extremely processed\n\u2018meat stick\u2019 which only god knows how many different animals coincided in this single\nitem. Paired with this stick was a highly processed \u2018cheese food stick\u2019, which\naccording to the ingredients consisted of anything but dairy. The reason I\u2019m\nmentioning this is for the purpose of juxtaposition of the qualities of food\neaten before and during the variety showcase. Walking into the showcase I was\nunprepared for the events proceeding. About eighty vendors all with their own\ntwo-to-three table long booths were preparing and serving tapas-sized plates of\norganic, locally grown dishes. Such dishes were oven-roasted small purple\npotatoes covered in a caramelized buttermilk sauce seasoned with smoked kelp,\nmoist tres leches style melon cakes made with special varieties of organic\nmelons grown in the area, and savory, sweet, flakey pastries topped with\ncaramelized leeks, all of which were so phenomenal and overshadowed my gas\nstation snack by such magnitude that I had forgotten I had even partook in such a food until finding the wrapper in\nmy pocket preceding the event. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Such high-class foods of a higher caliber such as ones sampled at the variety showcase have opened up the culinary world to me more than was previously thought possible by myself. This showcase was a demonstration of culinary creativity and skill. Not only is creativity a main factor in delicious foods, but so is flexibility with the ingredients making up a dish. Take for example, a butternut squash; now this squash is an earthy semi sweet food that in my experience is cubed, oven roasted with olive oil, salt, and pepper and treated as a savory side. Of course, the use of butternut squash can also be that of a sweeter profile by cubing and roasting with cinnamon and brown sugar. However, this is no dessert, simply a sweet side. I experienced a dish at the variety showcase in which butternut squash is pulverized into a squeezable paste, slightly sweetened and squeezed using an icing dispenser into chocolate dipped ice cream cones. The creamy paste is cold, refreshing, quite sweet, and slightly earthy, it tastes very much like a high-quality dessert. However, its base and majority of flavor can be attributed to the vegetable\u00a0that it is. Now, this food cannot be associated with a specific cuisine or culture, it is merely a product of modern food ingenuity. Taking this gastronomy class and learning about not only historic food culture, but also modern food culture, my palate has been widened and my mentality towards foods and flavors has grown and expanded for the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Chase Christensen I\u2019ve spent the majority of my life on a farm raising sheep and a small crop of various produce. Before all of that, I lived in a middle class, white, suburban neighborhood named Daniel\u2019s Ranch located in Carnation, Washington, a small farm town home of the original producers of carnation milk and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.evergreen.edu\/cefie-portfolio-s20-arn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}