Eating like an Immigrant, Part VI: Education and Culture

Participating in the My Kitchen, My World challenge has reinforced to me how much foods preserve and pass on cultural identity. You can learn so much about a culture by the foods they eat and how they eat their meals. I’m thinking at the moment of the communal nature of Ethiopian food, sitting together at a small table together, with a large round of injera flatbread spread across it, and stews for all to share as everyone tears off pieces of the bread to scoop it up.

The resonance between food and identity is so powerful. The PBS documentary I mentioned earlier, The Meaning of Food, discussed a recent cookbook, In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. It consists of recipes passed around by Jewish women at a concentration camp. Separated from family, home, and sustenance, they wrote down their recipes as a way of preserving and passing on their culture. I haven’t read it yet, but I find the concept incredibly moving.

As my kids grow, I imagine many interdisciplinary teaching moments coming out of cooking foods of different countries. I really want to (eventually) design a course for the home-school co-op that I’ll be teaching at on food and music of different cultures. As you cook, you can bring in ideas about another country’s situation or needs, as well as people you might know who serve in that country.

Or–closer to home–cooking immigrant foods could be paired with hospitality. Many of you have immigrants in your community–one way to reach out to them could be to cook them a meal, perhaps one from their country. Or ask them to teach you how to cook one of their traditional meals.

Also, for us, a meal from another country has become a cheap substitute for travel. Or anticipation of future travels, if we’re in an optimistic mood. We’ll make a meal from a particular country or region, and then watch a film from that country, or watch a Rick Steves lecture. Or try other pairings–a meal and a book (I just finished reading Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy and am indulging in its sequel, Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, and find myself wanting to cook Italian food many nights, especially since she stops the narration occasionally to give a few seasonal recipes), a meal and music (Shepherd’s pie and some Irish folk music?), or a meal and an art exhibit.

Recipes

Here are a couple of fun food and culture pairings we’ve done–of course (a recipe I mentioned in the last post) there’s pairing the Pixar film Ratatouille with ratatouille.
The Godfather movies with antipasti.
Tapas with Rick Steves’ travels to Spain

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.