My idea for our final website revolves around a quality I have found myself and others frequently incorporating into many of this semester’s presentations: food. Food crosses all barriers in New York City; no matter the ethnicity or nationality, every resident has experienced cuisine outside of their own ethnic palate. You walk down one street block in any of the five boroughs (yes, even Staten Island) and are bombarded by almost too many choices: Italian pizza, Halal carts, Japanese sushi, Chinese dumplings, Indian naan bread, and more. Though many traditional boundaries and norms clash between cultures, food is the open door between them.

Diet is a highly important aspect of immigrant life, a connection to the home country, where the staple crops grown reflect the land and even its history. During my neighborhood visit, one immigrant woman I interviewed said that the only way she is truly able to pass down her Haitian culture to her children is through cooking Haitian food at home. Her family even opened a restaurant with authentic dishes in order to share the culture with those who know nothing about it. Indeed, food is sometimes passed down through the first and second generations of Americans more than facts. Many people with immigrant parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have certain ethnic meals they are familiar with, if not eaten daily then on special holidays. For example, all I knew about my own Norwegian heritage before this class was the pastry my family makes every Christmas. Similarly, I hardly know about my Italian heritage, including where in Italy my family is from, yet every Sunday I sit down to eat pasta and meatballs.

So how does this apply to our website? I think the food industry in New York City opens up a lot of options for this project. For example, we can explore the lucrative Chinese food industry- frequently mentioned by Foner, and as we found in one of the neighborhood visit projects, accommodated to the type of immigrants found in the area (the Chinese restaurant with the menu in Spanish). When did this blend of food become available to different people- have immigrants always shared foods with other residents of the city, or kept it amongst themselves? When did this array of options begin to pop up virtually everywhere? What is the nature of competition between ethnic restaurants?

We can also do some fieldwork, and question immigrants in ethnic niches about their interactions with restaurant owners – and possibly immigrants themselves – from different nations on the blocks they inhabit. Does interacting within the realm of food lead to more positive cultural contact than would usually be expected? Another aspect we can focus on is the assimilation of food. How have ethnic foods been “Americanized” throughout time in the same way as the people have? What types of ethnic foods have mixed? (Many Chinese-owned and staffed Mexican restaurants have opened up such as Fresh Taco in Ridgewood, Queens).

Another interesting thing we can look at is food in the immigrant home versus the restaurant business. Is the food found in immigrant homes the same as what is presented to the public? Is it Americanized as well, or more authentic when eaten in a private home setting without a business behind it? What can native food tell us about the immigrants’ original land, circumstances, and culture? Are certain classes of immigrants less likely to eat their native cuisine and gravitate towards “American” food?

So now the fun part- I feel like there would be a lot of room on the website for specific and detailed maps of blocks with pictures of the restaurants on that block. Statistics on the number of certain ethnic restaurants in certain neighborhoods and the city as a whole could also be included, possibly in graphs. We could use audio and video recordings of the information we may find via interview during fieldwork. It would be interesting to include pictures of the foods in the respective restaurants or carts we go to, and we can even put up recipes of our own national foods that have been passed down to add a little personal flavor! As journalist Mark Kurlansky put it, “Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.”