Over the past ten weeks I’ve had the opportunity to dive into the intersection of my academic passions for food studies, cultural studies, and community-based journalism. My Winter ILC, Feeding the Diaspora: the Foods that Make Communities has been an enriching experience of investigating and analyzing how food and culture interact and shape each other, as well as how both are transformed and deeply informed by a sense of place. Through my column in the Cooper Point Journal, Evergreen’s student newspaper, also entitled Feeding the Diaspora I had the opportunity to express my personal experience with the entwining of culture and food while also gaining beginner proficiency in Adobe InDesign, a skill I plan on continuing to grow in Spring Quarter. Working with my subcontractor faculty Therese Saliba on expanding my skills in analytical writing pushed my boundaries of academic comfortability that allowed me to overcome my previous misconception that I didn’t have what it took to write a well written analytical paper.
I have never gravitated towards analytical writing in my college experience, often preferring memoir or reflective papers that allowed for a greater expression of creativity. Despite this, I endeavored to write a 10 page analytical paper and have found joy in that process. When I expressed hesitation over the paper’s length, Therese Saliba pushed back with a steadfast “you can do it,” and do it I have. With her help, I was able to visualize the paper in a way that felt manageable; first crafting my thesis statement, then breaking the main topics down piece by piece. I began to view the paper as a puzzle to piece together, the texts I read throughout the quarter functioning as the glue to keep those pieces in place. Utilizing What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family edited by Sun Yung Shin and Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, two poignant texts that were integral to my ILC, allowed me to provide deeper analysis to the subject matter I discussed within my paper; how new food cultures emerge within diaspora groups as a result of this inter-cultural mingling, assimilation, and what access to ingredients and cultural knowledge—or lack thereof—is available to them.
What We Hunger For was a powerful first read of the quarter for me, containing brilliant stories from talented writers across the U.S. diaspora groups. Many of the essays and memoirs touched on food as a lasting connection to countries of origin and ancestral homes in the face of assimilation, a sentiment I found echoed in my own family history. It was a joy reading and learning how those of different cultural backgrounds find ways to keep the connections with their cultures alive and thriving, even in places where they don’t feel well represented. In this book, food became more than what we eat, it became who we are. Tastes Like War was equally poignant, though even more personally impactful as Cho’s own family history ran quite parallel to my own. It was jarring to not only have new context brought to the history of the Korean War and the legacies within the Korean American diaspora, but to have this new context given to my own family history. It gave probable answers to questions I had not been ready to ask, and then gave the tools to confront these probable truths without overwriting or erasing the facts I had already come to know about that side of my family. I was taught how to speak of traumas without abolishing the history of joy.
An important part of this ILC was my ePortfolio WordPress website, which allowed me to explore other ways of writing about food outside of analytical and journalistic. The most impactful writing to emerge from my ePortfolio was my blog post “What Do We Hunger For?” posted to the Home & Heritage page. This post was one I didn’t think I would ever write, much less come out of this ILC, but Professor Sarah Williams, my faculty sponsor, encouraged me to push boundaries of what can be included in food writing and invited me to confront hard truths. Through the month of February, I was dealing with mental health issues that had begun to negatively impact my ILC work. I found myself unable to do anything, whether that was school work or even eating. I opened up to Professor Williams about this struggle and the words she spoke to me began to rekindle the passion that I had entered this quarter with; “bear witness to yourself.” That one sentence, encouraging me to write my experience and acknowledge the place that contention with food holds in the field of food studies, led me to investigate my mental health in a way I hadn’t before and ask myself, why do I feel such hunger while depressed? And why, despite that hunger, do I not want to eat? Through this encouragement and questioning, I was able to make discoveries about myself and my relationship to both my mental health and food that I would not have made if not for this ILC.
As I close out this quarter, I find myself with a feeling of overwhelming gratitude for the faculty I had the joy of working with and the course materials I was able to dive into and learn from. Stepping out of Winter and into Spring Quarter, I am excited to continue this work of investigating how food and culture intermingle and transform in U.S. diaspora groups, and what shapes these transformations take. I end this quarter having come to know the complex histories of food, immigration, and assimilation better, understanding the intersections that each holds. Of equal importance, I end this quarter having come to know myself—a mixed-race diasporic American—all the better.
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