When you think about the food you ate today, where did it come from? Who made it? Did it taste good? Why did you eat it? These questions may seem simple, but the more you think, the further back these questions go.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lists food as a basic, physiological need, according to Simply Psychology. If you don’t eat it, you die, but beyond food’s basicness is an abundance of variety. There are endless flavors, ingredients and possibilities. Some dishes date back thousands of years, according to the BBC, some that have only existed for a decade and others that have yet to exist.
Food has been a keystone of cultures the world over, according to the SLO Food Bank, and has served as a tool in understanding and uniting cultures for millennia. It shapes who people are and the lives that they lead. No matter how simple or complex, there is a story behind the food humans eat.
“People make the food,” said Michael Twitty, culinary historian, author of “The Cooking Gene” and two-time James Beard award-winning writer. “But the food makes the people.”
Come to the table
Ken Albala is a food historian and professor at the University of the Pacific and has authored or edited 25 books on food. Albala also loves to cook and delights in the process as much as the result. For his recent book “Noodle Soup,” he hand-rolled different noodles every day for two years.
When he started his family and had kids he said he gave his wife one rule:
“Everyone eats together, that’s it,” Albala said.
For families all over the world, dinner time together at the table is the most important part of the day.
“There’s just a sense of peace that comes with being in that setting,” junior Norvashua Cottingham said.
While Cottingham has a table in his apartment and can make his own food, he said family meals bring a different level of comfort.
Cottingham said dinner time was when everyone took a break from their busy schedules to be together, a sentiment senior Kimberly Banda shared in her own family dinners.
“For everyone, it’s chaotic outside,” Banda said. “So I feel like that dinner table provides a pause in a way.”
Hung Le, senior vice chancellor for Alumni Affairs, said “table fellowship” is so important to his family, that he has invited students, neighbors and friends over for countless meals in his own home.
“If you’re hungry, come in,” Le said. “If you don’t mind eating what we’re eating, you’re always welcome at our table. We don’t do lots of fancy meals, our meals tend to be simple, but the table is open.”
Completing the mosaic
By the time food reaches the table, it has gone through a journey spanning years and miles, and realizing that elevates the experience. Cottingham said people should try to find a story in every dish they eat.
“And it could just be the story of somebody just threw a bunch of ingredients together,” Cottingham said. ”But I think most people would say, they don’t want a bland story. They like a tasty story, an interesting story.”
That story extends beyond the kitchen the dish was prepared in.
“If you say the food is nothing more than just fuel, just tastes good, or just dinner, you’re missing out on all that richness,” Twitty said. “And the opportunity to connect with other people, other human beings about reality, identity, history, and for some people that’s a lot, but it’s also a good introduction.”
In Twitty’s book, “The Cooking Gene,” Twitty traces his African-American roots back through culinary and cultural sites along what he called the “Southern discomfort tour” through states that practiced human enslavement.
Without food, he said the journey would lack something crucial: a soul.
Twitty made the comparison to a mosaic that’s missing some of its pieces, and food helps fill in those gaps.
“Food helped me put the mosaic back, it told me what colors to use, the feelings,” Twitty said.
Similarly, Albala sees food as a window into the past.
“If I really want to know what people experienced in the past, I’ve got to feel it,” Abala said. “It’s got to be in my body.”
To make it even more real, Albala said he endorses using traditional techniques to cook traditional dishes.
“Once you’ve looked at the recipes you want to look at, you want to do the techniques,” Albala said. “You actually know what it’s like to make this stuff. Roast on the turnspit, bake on an open fire, whatever it may be.”
Albala’s book, “The Lost Art of Real Cooking,” is an exploration of traditional techniques and a rejection of modern methods and technologies used to speed the process up. But he encourages people to try any form of cooking because it is so useful.
“Since you have to eat, you might as well enjoy it,” Albala said. “And you might as well know how to make the things you like, just for pleasure and life.”
Banda said she loves to cook, and one day hopes to open a taco restaurant with her dad because of the role that tacos have played in their lives and relationship.
“All those memories I have for him when he makes his own [tacos],” Banda said. “I want to give back to him, in that sense, because he’s given me so much. He sacrificed everything.”
For Cottingham, cooking is also a “family affair,” and their family shares many staple recipes that he hopes to carry on. Some of Cottingham’s favorites are his grandmother’s pound cake and his mom’s sweet potato pie.
Above all is his family’s recipe for a dish called the “Dang Good Pie,” which has pineapple, coconut, brown sugar and pecans. His family has passed down the recipe from his great-grandmother.
“I plan to someday, when I have my own family, cook some Dang Good Pie,” Cottingham said.
Bitter memories
Not all the food and the memories associated with it are peaches and cream though, and on the flip side of “comfort food” comes the “struggle meal.”
“Food can be a painful thing as well, or lack thereof,” Le said.
For Le, he said he remembers growing up in Vietnam and going out with his siblings once a month to get pho with money their parents gave him. It’s a memory that he cherishes, but as he got older he realized his parents never joined them to save money for the family.
Banda also described her parents skipping meals for her and her siblings. She said this is a common occurrence in the Latino community.
“My dad would always say that when I was younger,” Banda said. “He would always tell us like, ‘Oh, he’s not hungry. He’s not hungry,’ because again, he was just trying to save and stuff and would always put us first.”
Banda said that is one of the reasons she wants to open her restaurant with her dad.
“One day those empty dinners, dinners that he didn’t have, will pay off,” Banda said.
Cottingham said his experience with food reminds him of the shoulders of family members that he stands on, and the harsh history of human enslavement in America.
“We have taken those experiences that might have been harsh and devastating to our people,” Cottingham said. “And we have, through food, repurposed them to be something that is empowering, but that is also love and life-giving.”
African Americans created or popularized much of the “soul food” that people commonly associate with the American South, according to the African American Registry. These dishes and ingredients include sweet potatoes, jambalaya, mashed potatoes, okra, collard greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread, to name just a few.
Twitty said it was more than just the physical nourishment of those foods that was key to survival for African Americans in the bondage of slavery.
“My ancestors were heroes because they survived, so I could be here,” Twitty said. “And to survive, what do we need to survive? Not just food, but a cuisine.“
Listening to the whispers
Food has changed a lot over time, and it doesn’t look the same as it might have a hundred, or a thousand years ago.
“Until fairly recently in human history, most people’s job was making food, right?” Albala said. “I mean growing it, processing it, or transporting it or cooking it.”
While fewer people today are directly responsible for food production than in the past, everyone still needs to eat — keeping food, and by extension, recipes, at the center of the human experience.
Knowing a bit more about one’s own food history and others’ food is a step toward greater connection. Twitty said food is a gateway to interacting with other souls.
“I choose to interact with as many souls as possible, to learn what it means to be human on this journey,” Twitty said. “And I can do that while keeping my core centered in my identities.”
Understanding one’s personal food history can be a challenge, but in the process, it teaches more than just recipes, but how to be human.
“It’s really special because we get those whispers from those long gone grandmas, we get those blessings from those long gone grandpas, the awareness that we’re preserving something that makes humanity human,” Twitty said.
Editor’s note: The author and Norvashua Cottingham are both in the Pepperdine musical group Won by One.
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Contact Joe Allgood: joe.allgood@pepperdine.edu
