Essay About Food Culture

Pig feet. Chicken nuggets. Lettuce. Pasta. Potatoes. Empanadas. My ever-changing food culture can in large be attributed to my family’s peripatetic lifestyle. From a young age, my family developed the habit of moving at least once a year. Every three to six months a new country or city became home. While the meals I ate were influenced by my parents’ personal preference, they were even more a reflection of our current “home.” As expected, the food I ate in Hangzhou was very different from the food I ate in Sao Paulo or Winnipeg; therefore, to say that my food choices were inconsistent would be an understatement.

At an attempt to provide me with some sort of food structure, my mother would always emphasize the importance of eating fresh foods.

In Boston my aunt would take me to eat baozi at a nearby restaurant, where everyone spoke strictly Chinese. I recall being extatic because I could finally speak Chinese and be understood, and because they knew that the right was to cook any Chinese meal was to drench it in oil. Lastly, in Hangzhou I would take the train to Shanghai every other weekend to eat brigadeiro at the only Brazilian restaurant there was. I would walk in speaking Portuguese and would always get a free desert, it was like travelling to Brazil without have to face a 28-hour flight.

As I now realize, part of the reason I went out of my way to eat the foods that I liked was because it not only gave me a sense of belonging, but I was afraid that I would never get to eat those foods again. My parents moved so much that it could be years before I ate another “real” jiaozi or coxinha. However, once I graduated high school, things began to change. I moved out back to Shanghai for 8 months and for the first time I didn’t spend hours trying to find a foreign food place; instead, I cultivated the local food. I came to understand that while the world might be huge, returning to the places I loved so dearly wasn’t