The Tale Food Tells

By Anne Rong

At the most basic level, food gives our bodies the energy it needs to survive. I think, though, that food also nourishes the mind and the spirit. We have five senses. Food awakens all of them, and in doing so, becomes a most powerful vessel of memory. There is a reason apple pie makes you think of home, or turkey makes you think of Thanksgiving, or Goldfish makes you think of playdates. Whenever you eat a certain food, you will always remember a moment in time.

But that is only considering the memories you have had. What about the stories of our ancestors? The memories that belong to our parents, or our grandparents, or our grandparents’ grandparents? Beyond photographs, history books, and heirlooms, food can carry and pass on their stories.

My dad makes a stew called sukiyaki. Imagine a hot, bubbling pot of paper-thin slices of beef, chewy clear noodles, and a rainbow medley of vegetables. Try to taste a sweet and salty soy-based broth, ladled over a bowl of steaming rice. In my family, sukiyaki is a comfort food, and it has become a staple for feeding my terminally ill grandmother. Every time my dad makes sukiyaki, he says “it’s not really sukiyaki.” Because he is a fourth-generation Japanese American, and no one ever taught him how to cook sukiyaki; his recipe is made-up, and measurements have never been taken or written. It changes every time.

Once, I googled the recipe for “real” sukiyaki. I wanted to taste what sukiyaki really was, if I had been eating some inauthentic version my whole life. We were calling it sukiyaki, so why didn’t we make the Real Japanese edition? I gave up on that ambition almost immediately. Something felt wrong about suggesting we change one of our classic meals. It was like trying to reinvent funfetti cake, I guess. You just couldn’t make it better. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t 100% authentic. It was the only sukiyaki I had ever known, and that made it my only true version.

I realize now that the reason I would never want to change our sukiyaki is because it tells a story. It tells a story about my family, and about me. It tells how my dad is so American, but still tries to pass on the culture of his great-grandparents’ homeland through the food he cooks us. It speaks to my blended family, of Chinese and Japanese origins, two countries that historically hated one another, thanks to war. But now, my dad’s sukiyaki has become one of my Chinese-American grandparents’ favorite dishes. Our sukiyaki reminds us how food can build bridges between generations and mend conflicts of the past. As I thought about how one dish could hold such a complicated tale, I saw that it’s not only sukiyaki, but all food, that has this capability. Food has the power to help us find our identities by revealing connections to our family and heritage.

When I was in preschool and attended special swim lessons near my grandparents’ neighborhood, I would sleep over at their house every Thursday night. The most anticipated event of the evening was eating a t.v. dinner with them. Even a decade later, I can still distinctly recall those summer outings at the local Lucky’s. I’d stroll the aisles beside my grandpa, who pushed that big red cart, staring in wonder at the seemingly endless selection of colorful frozen meals behind those frosted glass windows. I think I always ended up with the mac and cheese, which came with the tiny round brownie in the corner of the rectangular paper carton, still gooey and warm from the oven.

Although they might be the most generic food on the planet, I see that like with my dad’s sukiyaki, these frozen meals were a way my grandparents told me a story. My maternal grandparents both grew up in San Francisco Chinatown during the ‘50s. Though my great-grandparents were very “Chinese,” their young children were brought up to be “American.” They ate traditional Chinese dishes, but also, the foods of their new home. My grandpa’s mother, who didn’t even speak English, brought him fresh, hot cheeseburgers each day at school. As a toddler, my grandma and her mom enjoyed scrambled eggs and ketchup for breakfast. These American foods they chose to eat were the way they declared their “American-ness.”

During the ‘80s, when my grandparents had their own children (my mom and aunts), it was the age of the microwave, fat-free diets, frozen food, Jell-O. Like their parents before them, my grandparents raised my mom on these classic American foods of the era. In feeding me the same nostalgic meals, it was not only their way of caring for me, but also, communicating a history of our family that has connected to America through the foods we eat.

Most of the time, we eat simply because we are hungry and food tastes good. A meal is nothing more than energy and nutrients to feed our cells. But every so often, a meal is more than that. The food we eat contains not only calories, but stories. Sprinkled with the sesame seeds and beaten into the butter are fragments of history and tales of the people who came before us. If we examine that bite on our plate, we might learn something about how we got here. And only then can we begin to understand who we are and what we’re made of.