Food, Self, and Society

Ava Chin is an urban forager and upon hearing about GreenProofing she decided to visit it and write an article about them. GreenProofing is the small environmental company I have been working on a service-learning project with this semester. Its core business is to create green roofs on the tops of urban buildings (hence the name). While I’m involved in another initiative led by GreenProofing (to bring farm fresh foods to local school children in Harlem) I thought that this was a great little article to share with you guys!

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/urban-forager-in-the-wilds-of-the-rooftop/#more-163913

For Spring Break I visited Jamaica with my family and stayed at a resort. We were in Ocho Rios, which is located along the Blue Mountains and every thing was beautiful. The resort was all-inclusive and what that meant above all was that my family and I ate like royalty. Every night was a banquet! We had the option to eat from a variety of foods and people walked around handing us a cold beer or smoothie at any hour that we were on the beach or by the pool or in the lobby or just idley standing around. In fact, the only place that there wasn’t someone to hand me a smoothie was after I got out of the shower, haha just a joke! We hung out on the beach in the daytime and at lunch we ate barbequed jerk chicken and jerk pork that was made in a little hut on the beach. Since this food and society class goes with me everywhere, I am also happy to report that all of the foods were indigenous to Jamaica! I also found my new favorite drink: honeydew juice and I recommend it to everyone. It cooled my body down after one glass and I believe that it ought to be this summer’s blockbuster hit drink!

Last week while we watched “Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the all-American Meal” I was eating a chicken sandwich. I soon realized that this was not a very good idea! The film discussed the industrialization of the food specifically the meat and poultry industry. While the imagery of dozens of chicken carcasses rolling along on a conveyor belt was enough to make someone lose his/her appetite, what did it for me was the dark little shacks that the chickens were grown in. Seeing as I am a firm believer in the healing and overall good qualities of the sun I thought that this was the most inhumane thing that you could do to a living being. But, the realities of the things going on inside of the dark little bungalow turned out to be worse. A chicken farmer spoke out about how the way she was asked to tend to the chickens had ultimately affected her health. On account of the hormones and antibiotics that she was required to administer to the chickens, she was now allergic to most antibiotics. She explained that the purpose of the hormones is to quickly grow the chickens. Accordingly, the chickens develop from the size of a chick to a full-sized chicken in a matter of weeks and their bones can’t support that so many of them have fractures or are unable to move around. I’m not a chicken farmer so I don’t know what chickens need to grow and live on, but I do know that in some karmic way whatever the chicken’s body has experienced in those couple of weeks of torture that it is kept alive before it is slaughtered for food will manifest in the substance of that juicy chicken sandwich that I was eating at the time, so I threw it out.

In the manner of bridging the gap between eating healthy and overcoming the stigma of eating healthy the key is in education. The great divide persists on account of the elite culture that some practitioners of organic food habits have established. Effectively, the barriers to entry for eating healthfully are relatively high for lower income folks who do not have access to nutritious food in their neighborhoods because few organic food markets are willing to take that business risk. Many social businesses have begun to occupy this niche, but their reach is limited on account of a lack of funds or that people are unaware of their existence and thus do not come to them for help. In order to accomplish the task of bringing healthy foods to lower income neighborhoods more people need to understand that there is a demand for healthy food because many of these individuals are immigrants that are used to eating fresh. It follows that it is best to reach these people who may or may not understand the intricacies (and there are a couple of them…this is coming from someone who has tried to remain faithful to eating organic!) by marketing freshness. It is then relevant to educate these newly acquired consumers about the ways of eating organically.

I enjoyed our discussion about food security because it reacquainted me with the fact that food availability is strongly related to culture. In the article about the Korean military brides I was astounded to hear about the degree of torture that these women experienced on account of a scarcity of Korean food in the United States. While, I do remember my mother conveying to me her difficulty in stomaching American poultry and meats for the first three years, what the Korean women, who arrived during the 1950s and 1960s, experienced pales in comparison. Their scenarios got me thinking about how the issue of cultural imperialism, or the attitude that there is a right way to eat, is still prevalent in Western practices. I’ve alluded to the idea of a structured way to eat in the previous post about food trays in school cafeterias, but it is also prevalent in food aid and distribution. Much of the way the donators direct their thoughts of food distribution to countries of need and situations of emergency is echoed in the way that the United Nations defines food security, which is a household that has a high chance of going hungry. Essentially, they address the issue of hunger as providing any food to a group of people, who may or may not be culturally experienced in eating and digesting the food. An example of this is the practice of including powdered milk in food rations to the Korean people during the Korean War. While, well-intentioned it is important to point out that dairy is not an aspect of the Korean diet, so often times they would consume it and become sick or else not use it. After this foresight it is frustrating to see that food aid still issues macaroni and cheese, which is an American construct, to billions of suffering people around the world who eat the alien food out of necessity. I’m sure that all of this treatment has carved out a place of resentment towards Westerners for many of these people.

Whenever I reflect on my days in elementary school thru to high school, cafeteria food sticks out to me. Especially the lunch plates that they served us on. There was always a little spot for a carton of milk, an entrée, creamed spinach or some other untouchable vegetable, and a roll. Everything had a neat little spot and this first struck me as strange when I was at one of my parents’ dinner parties.

I was piling my mom’s delicious food onto a disposable Dixie plate and I realized that the sections were not accommodated to fit this Indian meal. I had salad but I also had raita, a yogurt dish that you eat to dull down the spice, with nowhere to be put. I was at a loss as to where to place the dal, which is to be used as a kind of gravy for the chicken birayni. Oh! And then there was some naan.

After my neurotic food episode at my parents dinner party, I went back to school and noticed the way all of the food items fit into the empty lunch plate slots as neatly as they were able to be broken up into the food groups. I noticed similar patterns when I went to restaurants such as Boston Market that fitted take out food into sectioned plates along with a corn muffin. And, then there was nutrition class where they taught us that food ought to be consumed in portions allotted by the food pyramid, another solid food organization figure that contained sections.

I can’t say that I’ve consciously felt ill at ease about my discovery all these years, but after reading the excerpt from Joel Denker’s book The World on a Plate that was assigned for class, it is good to know that someone else noticed. Denker relates the need to pigeonhole food items as an American concept reminiscent of the early nineteenth century when immigrant homes in the United States habitually held cooking classes to educate the foreign women on how to cook an American meal. The classes were all a part of the paternal behavior that instructed the new arrivals that the best way to conduct their lives was the American way. The cooking rules taught the immigrants that many of their native dishes (i.e. mixed dishes such as chicken biryani, which is a combination of rice and chicken!) were not conducive to proper digestion. In fact the best way to serve a meal was to separate the contents out into a starch, protein, and vegetable (i.e. mashed potatoes, a piece of chicken, and boiled broccoli).

After 18 years of school cafeteria food I can tell you that the menu has not changed much. Considering the amount of cross acculturation in New York City you would expect the school food to have reformed. And speaking of change, it is difficult to section off most non-nineteenth century American dishes. If that is not a convincing enough reason to get rid of those lunch trays, over the years we have learned that the food pyramid is not nutritionally sound. This is ominous of other forms of solid food organization figures breaking down.

Whenever I think of sushi, I think of Dr. P’s laboratory at the NYU Psychiatric Research Center…because sushi made me go crazy! Haha, bad joke. No, but really, I am affiliated to the center on account of the fact that I conducted research here during high school. I was there for a year and I helped out on the topic of cognitive reading although I remember little to nothing of it. This is probably because most of the stuff went way over my head, but the other part of it was that I was so transfixed on taking in the sophisticated environment around me.

At 16 I was still the sheltered daughter of two Indian immigrants and I had much to learn in the ways of the world of downtown NYC. I took the subway to the center by myself, a privilege that I cherished because in Queens I was driven everywhere. But, just to be sure my mom always accompanied me on my way back home. My walk to the building was colored with stockbrokers yelling into their phones, yogis rushing to their classes, eleven year olds with skateboards, organic food restaurants, and college students. Everyone had somewhere really important to be and after a while I took to coping that attitude. With my headphones in my ears and pretending to look straight ahead of me I rushed over to the lab where I was met by occupants that gave me a funny feeling that I was in cahoots in working on a secret government project.

The view from within Dr. P’s laboratory looked like something out of a Sci-Fi movie where an odd assortment of the brightest minds in the world was brought together to advance the field of cognitive reading. There was a 5 year old and a 7 year old, a smattering of 30-something year old scientists, all with heavy accents, at least two other high school-aged students, and then there was Dr. P with his jolly belly and suspenders. Other than the cosmetic quality of the scene, the fact that everything that came out of these people’s mouths was incredibly intelligent made it that much more unreal. But, strangest of all was that we all came together at this large table to discuss our findings and eat sushi, like a family. Dr. P would be propped up at the head of the table like the man of the house with a bib around his chin, someone would reach over and ruffle up the 5 year old child’s hair, and one of the highschool-aged girls or else one of the 30-something year old scientists would walk around pouring water into everyone’s Dixie cups.

The naïve girl that I was took all of this in with large eyes, rationalizing that this experience was just another aspect of the sophisticated Downtown NYC culture of which I was still unaware. In retrospect, I still think that there was something odd about that environment. Dr. P’s lab WAS an assortment of oddly-arranged people, but no secret government projects here, just a bunch of people looking for some food and stimulating conversation around 5pm on a Tuesday. By virtue of their age and whatever activity they took up at the meeting they cumulatively composed a traditional family.

As much as “the family” freaked me out, at times I forgot myself as the quiet and absorbent observer and let them include me in their activities. Thanks to moments such as this I tried sushi for the first time in my life. While I didn’t take to it immediately I learned to appreciate the California Roll and I tried eel for the first and only time in my life. Today sushi is one of my favorite foods and I guess I have “the family” to thank for that.

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