Food Memoir Glog

http://beccamartin2014.edu.glogster.com/food-memoir

Food Memoir Video

Food Memoir

At the dinner table, Mom is going through the events of her day, relating them to us with many hand motions and exasperated expressions. I am waiting for a moment when she looks towards her far right to make my move. There! Plop. And again waiting, waiting, there! Slop. Eventually all of the horrid miniature trees were part of the forest under the dinner table, and I was free of them.

Lunches were more difficult; I had to be crafty, slipping the lettuce up a sleeve, or sneezing while carrying my plate past the garbage can and simultaneously dropping my applesauce. To this day, I firmly believe my over-the-top pickiness pertaining to food, more specifically anything green or texture-less, was television. Every show I watched had an anti-vegetable agenda.

It is really a true miracle that I can even stand to look at any veggies let alone approach them, and sometimes even enjoy them. That marvel must be attributed to my grandmother. Not because she cooked in any special way, or she uses more butter to prepare the vegetables—she scared me into it with good, old-fashioned guilt.

This sudden polarization, going from revulsion to toleration and intermittent enjoyment, did not occur with a few words and sentences. It started out with her keen eye, watching my forks journey from the plate to my mouth, and noticing the passengers’ disappearances. She never outright talked out it. It would just be a look, a nudge, a cough, a scowl. When I decided not to heed these warnings, fed up (literally) with leafy greens, my grandma made her move: she began cooking the foods she ate as a child.

And as we all got to eat a variety of dishes, each containing different proportions of cabbage and potatoes, Grandma would explain how they came about, “In the home country, all we had was cabbage. So all we ate was boiled cabbage.” She would then go on to clarify that our cabbage had salt and pepper on it, what we of course considered the basics—but back in the Ukraine salt was used to preserve meat and pepper saved for special occasions. “When we came to America, during the Great Depression we had no money, no food; sometimes we got potatoes, because we grew them.” Without ever pointedly telling us to appreciate what we have access to, and what we consider normal, my siblings and I understood through the context in which she grew up.

Food literally meant living another day, and it was not seen as a leisure activity where my grandma grew up. Food truly is the base level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and I am now able to appreciate its necessity. My grandma showed me that through tradition. Without the cultural explanation through the history and story coming from an elder, the message would not have been so clearly conceived through just the food itself. In the same way, many “acquired tastes” (like boiled cabbage) would never catch on, because you have to be told, by someone you respect, to try it. This shows the different degrees of respect as it relates to age, according to the Iceberg of Culture. I tried to foil my mom’s attempts to get me to eat vegetables, but I did listen to my grandma, so even though both women are elder to me, I could sense that age carried weight, even as a small child. Thus, lacking that first introduction I would have continued in my anti-green ways, never being able to appreciate my culture through my grandmother’s wise words.

This guilt-trip was the instance I learned I was from the Ukraine. My grandmother still doesn’t like talking about “the motherland.” She had been taught to fear uncovering ancestry, since her family faced such backlash as immigrants when she was growing up. In America, many immigrant minorities faced criticism; those from Eastern Europe were, on balance, poorer. They came with lesser or no wealth, their possessions almost nonexistent, and undertook the arduous journey from the other side of the world. This flood basin of poverty collecting in this boundary of Europe and Asia, encompassing Russia and the Slavic, central, and Baltic countries, can be attributed to the crops most common there: potatoes. Many dishes featuring potatoes are innately “poor-man’s” dishes, due to the simple and cheap ingredients paired with straightforward preparation. Cabbage and potatoes was my grandmother’s first dish she learned to cook. Food in cultural dishes are “…intimately intertwined with ideological, political, and economic realities” (Twiss 2). Had my grandmother not grown up in that region, in those circumstances, I probably would have never been convinced to give green things another try. I wouldn’t have had as much perspective on other parts of the world or other times in history. And I definitely would not have had the deep relationship with my grandma through food as I do now.