Very little can solve or create problems like food. While doing fieldwork once, I was able to bond with an informant’s family over food. Grandmother wanted me to sample her rice and beans. We spent an hour comparing how her family made it with how my family did. In the meantime, I had a second and third helping of hers. We couldn’t be too different if we could eat a meal together and form a cultural bond.
Having spent hours watching my Hungarian Grandmother make potato pancakes allowed me to appreciate Julia Gelowtsky’s. Julia became my Polish Babchi and created a lifelong bond between our families.
By contrast, my girlfriend Charlotte wanted nothing to do with traditional cuisine and firmly believed in fast food. I would have loved her if she only dressed in Paisley, but not to like rice and beans, potato pancakes, and poppyseed bread. No. she didn’t last past the nasty infection she gave me.
In anthropology, we learn early how food binds family and society together. Not being able to eat with someone can significantly impede other relationships. And disparaging their foodways may earn you the status of an enemy.
Food is not just physical sustenance; it can be the foundation of social relationships.
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I count four different kinds of rice and just one dish of beans. I guess that tells what the emphasis was. Why are the tortilla-like little loaves of bread on top of the rice1?
A AI generated image. I had nothing in my archive that I could find. Most of that stuff remains undigitalized.
Food can unite folks, sorry about the infection 🙁
A trip the emergency room ( critical care in those days) took care of it.
Fully agree, Lou. Food does bond or separate.
I’ve recently stopped eating what I describe as “penance food”. These include things like white fish and beans – not offensive in their own right, but they’re the kinds of food you eat if you’re trying to “be good” or “cut down”. Nobody ever thinks, “I might push the boat out and treat myself to some white fish and beans”. Life’s too short for penancey food.
Oh, you have me thinking of penance food from coastal Maine! You took me right back to the 1960’s!
What is penance from coastal Maine?
One I remember was boiled cod ( a white fish) with boiled potatoes. It was basically a mush, almost tasteless. If you needed “seasoning” you might use some bacon fat drizled on top.
Oh dear, and it would have all been the same colour too! Boiled white stuff with more boiled white stuff.
and very, very bland – penance food