Food Ramble

I am going to try to make sense of a ramble of seemingly unrelated thoughts: working out, traveling, our readings on India/China/Russia, avocados, and ice cream. 

When I go to the gym at school I prefer listening to my own music, but I will put the travel channel on in the background so I can zone out to some place beautiful.  One thing I’ve noticed when watching the travel channel is that it is incredibly rare to discuss traveling or exciting destinations without relating them to food.  If anything, food is the seller of the destinations on the travel channel, behind the physical beauty of the place.  This is something I can relate to, I like tasting the local foods when I travel.  Honestly, I more than like it, I find more pleasure out of finding an authentic restaurant off the beaten track than discovering a museum I haven’t heard of before.  Like in Michael Pollan’s food rules, we like to treat ourselves to delicious food when traveling because we see it as important to experiencing the culture of the places we travel to.  This is funny when we think about the readings from earlier in the semester on food culture in India, China, and Russia.  We think of Indian, Chinese, and Russian food as a particular, defined menu of foods, and we think of these foods as exotic.  When you examine the reality of our preconceptions, there really is no such thing as Indian, Chinese, or Russian food, though.  Region by region, these platters change.  But all over in the world, communities exot-ify other communities' foods because it is desirable for us to taste food from around the world.  

However, this is true mainly for ethnic cuisines.  For the most part, this is not the same for specific food items.  Take, for instance, avocados.  Avocados are in so many of our plates and dishes, but we don’t think of them as exotic, even though they do not grow in the North-Eastern United States.  How about bananas?  I don’t think the United States grows bananas at all, yet they are a lunch box staple and are commonly looked to as a quick, cheap, and easy snack.  I do think this is specific to the United States, though.  I went to Price Chopper with my friend who is international and she had never eaten an avocado before coming to the United States.  She had seen them in food magazines at home, but they didn’t sell them at supermarkets in her country because they didn’t grow them in the region.  She saw her ability to relatively cheaply buy avocados at an American supermarket as a part of the American dream, as a part of what makes America great, and a world leader.  I discussed with her the environmental impact of the American mindset of being so far from what’s regional and what’s in season, but she asserted that America would no longer be America if avocados were no longer sold at ease.  


In conclusion, countries all over the world fantasize and exot-ify unfamiliar cuisines and we travel to taste new foods, because food is pleasurable to humans and it gives us a culture and shared identity.  One of Pollan’s Food Rules was about how if you’re going to eat an ice cream cone with a lot of calories, you must make sure you’re going to enjoy the ice cream cone and not worry about the calories while actually eating it, because eating is meant to derive pleasure and not self-hatred.  So enjoy the damned ice cream or [insert desired food name here].