Memories through Food: How Taste Passes on Culture

Food shapes memory and experience in unexpected ways

Cooking Class in Taiwan

Now that my kids have gone back to in-person learning, they’ve started coming home every day complaining about the food at the school cafeteria. Having enjoyed home-cooked lunches for most of the lockdown, they are once again having to adapt to the cuisine served outside our home. Witnessing this has made me reflect on my own childhood, the experience I had with food growing up, and how it shaped my life.

This is a departure from my normal style of post, but I wanted to use it as a tribute to the food that shapes all of us. I also wanted to take this opportunity to share some must-try recipes that you and your family can enjoy.  

Learning Culture Through Food

Growing up as an Asian American girl in a small town in the deep South, I lived in two distinct worlds. At school, I lived a typical childhood, albeit looking utterly foreign to everyone around me. Meanwhile, at home, my parents raised us with the traditions of their own childhoods. They saved money carefully to take me and my sister back to Asia so that we could meet our extended families and connect with the place where they were raised. 

I remember summers in the humid heat of Hong Kong, when my grandmother taught me to cook. One of my favorite memories was of her teaching me to make a fun gor (粉果), a translucent steamed dumpling with cooked filling. I watched as she took boiling water and poured it over tapioca and cornstarch. We then kneaded the hot dough on the marble tabletop together. I remember her laughing at me as I struggled to roll out one single wrapper without tearing it. Meanwhile, she would take several dough balls, flour them, stack them, and roll them out simultaneously, tossing out four to five at a time with machine-like speed. She joked that I ate more of the cooked filling—pork sausage, dried shrimp, and shiitake mushrooms—than I wrapped. When we finished, she showed me how to steam the fragrant dumplings, and we ate them together. 

Food Is Memory 

In modern times, we are disconnected from the tradition of the food that we consume. It comes boxed and wrapped up, sanitized to the point where no one can see the human connection anymore. But food encodes culture. Each dish tells a story about a group of people, their traditions, and their collective experiences. It represents generations of history passed down through flavors. It demonstrates how communities adapt to changing tastes, the availability of ingredients, and migration.

As I was growing up, my mother would tell me the story of where our food came from. Legend holds that thousand-year-old eggs were first created over six hundred years ago, when eggs were accidentally buried in mud and cured. The delicate translucent skins my grandmother taught me to make are part of the tradition of Cantonese dim sum, a weekend morning family affair that lasts multiple hours.

These recipes bring a legacy of culture and history, one that is often retranslated and adapted for America. Tofu is one example of this; what is often seen as a “diet food” in the United States has been consumed for two thousand years as a protein staple, but new ways of using it have brought a new thread to the story. 

Traditional Chinese Food in a South Carolina Lunchroom 

In my hometown, I was often one of the first Asian Americans that many people met. I was perceived as foreign and different, and I wore it like a cloak that I could not shed. No amount of unaccented English, Gap clothes, or MTV could change what I looked like. It was impossible to hide. 

At school, I ate standard cafeteria fare: pizza, burgers, hot dogs, and meatloaf. Years of overcooked broccoli, limp french fries, and dry cakes convinced me that cafeteria food was mostly unhealthy or just plain terrible. My mom always cooked Chinese food at home, so I began asking if I could bring it for lunch. Though the nearest Chinese grocery store was hours away from where we lived, she assiduously sourced ingredients from far and wide, often growing vegetables that were not sold in stores in our home garden. She did this all so that she could recreate the dishes my grandmother had taught her. My father used to joke that if he went one day without rice, he would faint, so she cooked him three meals every day to go with his rice. It took until I was nearly a teenager before he agreed to let us eat pizza for dinner. 

The dichotomy between food from home and school could not have been more stark. At home, we made soymilk by grinding up beans in a food processor and squeezing the rich liquid through a cheesecloth by hand. We rolled out our own dumpling wrappers and made neatly-folded potstickers. We steamed Chinese chicken buns. We prepared rich, slow-cooked pork and thousand-year-old egg congee. 

I remember bringing the lunches my mom had lovingly packed to school and eating them in the cafeteria, surrounded by sandwiches, chips, and burgers. The steamed buns, red bean soup, stir-fried noodles, and other family favorites stood out amidst the American fare. Many kids teased me about the “strange” food that I brought to school with me. 

But I knew a secret. I had been to Asia many times, and I had seen a world where these foods were not exotic, but rather part of a vibrant and beautiful culture. As I shared my lunch with friends, I told them of the places where these traditional dishes originated and explained the history behind them. I taught my classmates the names of the foods and how they were made, sharing what made them special. Many of them listened and learned more about my Asian culture, and some even asked that I bring more to share. Eventually, my friends and I created an event during high school in which each of us brought food from our heritage to share with our class. The Chinese food my family made was some of the most popular, and yes, lo mein and egg rolls were included. 

A Different Path to the Same Destination