Food Cultures - Home & Corporate

In my Chinese culture family, usually is the women's duty to cook and to do the shopping. The overall process of cooking a dinner or lunch has nothing to do with men. It does not have to do with the gender, but usually the kitchen belongs to the females in the family. A regular family dinner often cooked by the housewives, and usually the other females would help in the kitchen, too. A dinner would take about an hour or two, depending on the numbers of family. When I was in China, if there are only me, my mom, brother and sister, sometimes my dad, the dinner would take about an hour for my mom to cook. Also we would have less food (around 3 dish, soup, white rice). But during the weekend or vacations, when we go to grandma’s house to eat, usually there would be 10 or more people in the family. So the dinner would take 2 hours to cook and everybody would sit around the table and eat. Usually only the adults or young adults are allow to sit on the table to eat. (The age matters in my family, the older ones get more respect and get to sit on the width of the table and the other adults sit on the length). The kids have to sit on a separate table to eat with smaller dishes of the same food. We do have the television on, but usually the adults are talking and the kids are watching TV or playing while eating. The manner is very important too, we have to wait for everybody to gather around the table, then we are allow to pick up our chopsticks.

The women are the ones who are responsible for everybody’s food. Especially for my grandfather, he never gets up and serves himself. My grandma is the one who usually serve him and help him to get rice or soup. Soup is one of the most important things that most Chinese family values. The soup is not from the cans, but from a lot of the ingredients. Usually there is one type of meat; it could be chicken, pork, and duck, (sometimes snakes and a type of turtle) with some other Chinese medicine herbs. The more expensive ones would be abalone and ginseng or shark fin. The other foods on the table would be usually 7 to 8 dishes within mostly pork, beef, fish, shrimp, goose, duck, chicken, (*frog*) and vegetables. Sometimes there would be steam egg, fried fish or steam fish. Chinese food do not values seasoning, but only oil, salt, soy sauce, sugar. The heavier ones would be spicy peppers, some type of liquor, or vinegar. In a very traditional family, sodas or juice are not allow in a family, and we are only allow to drink soup because it takes more than an hour to decoct. I think the Chinese culture believe that from drinking soups that decoct for a long time, with extracting the flavor from pork and other medicine herbs is healthy for our body. Also every night the proportion of eating vegetable is more than meat. Unless there is a holiday, we would make special foods with flours and other food. Or else, everyday the food is pretty much make with the similar ingredients.

When I came to the United States, my lunch is usually fast food for the purpose of convenient and speed (American way), and the dinner is similar as what I described above. But now I only eat with my sister and my brother, sometimes my mom. So we will have less food on the table and sometimes no soup. In the U.S., we do watch TV when we eat, and the dinner took around half an hour to make. Usually are still pork, beef, chicken, and some other vegetables like green pepper, cucumber, tomatoes, green shallot, celery, and egg plants. Everything is homemade, and we no longer have soup every night. We usually just drink milk or juice or soda to replace the drinks. Compared to the American way of making food, I think it is very different because we do not eat ham for dinner, turkey, corn, potatoes, cheese, burger buns…etc. for dinner. Also the Chinese food is all cooked, and the American way of making food is to put the vegetables together into a salad with some sauce. In addition to that, I think the people in the U.S mainstream make food or eat with a lot of sauce like ketchup, mustard, mayo…etc. What is very different was that the mainstream dinner for white Americans seems to be very independent and everybody is responsible for their own food (own dish). Also the process of cooking the dinner is fast and everybody just trying to get over with it. But there do have some similarities are that we do sit gather around the television, and we do eat together as a family. Also we eat white rice very often, too.

I think the Chinese culture of making food is very different from the American mainstream way of making food. Perhaps different cultures values different things while Americans concerns with the speed and convenient, and the Chinese concerns with more family interactions and manner. However, I think both culture do not really concern about is the food they are eating is really healthy or not although now a day everybody talk about organic food.