Cooking My Way Through My Roots
“As Amy S. Choi mentions in “What Americans Can Learn from Other Food Cultures,” food preferences are personally and culturally meaningful. It is usually one of the last things people let go of as they assimilate into their new worlds, especially if that new world’s dominant culture is white and you are not.”
Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn, In S. Y. Shin (Ed.), What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories About Food and Family
As a part of my ILC, Feeding the Diaspora: the Foods that Make Communities, I will be doing my own cooking to connect with my roots. I’ve decided to focus on Korean food this quarter and am utilizing Dok Suni: Recipes From My Mother’s Korean Kitchen by Jenny Kwak, a cookbook I grew up with. Over the next ten weeks I will be cooking dishes both familiar and as-of-yet unknown to me in an effort to find my place in the past and to root myself in the present. Roots are not only where we or our families begin, they are also where we find ourselves now; those new places we choose to make our homes in, to make community in. The roots of trees spread far, as do ours, and food is one of the oldest and most persevering roots we have. We must tend to them now so we may all continue to thrive.