Transitional Food

Posted by admin on Feb 3, 2009 in Featured Articles | 0 comments

The adjustment of transitioning from her home in Mérida, Venezuela, to life in North America was significant for Adriana Salcedo. In Venezuela, she typically starts her day with arapas, a food made from freshly ground corn flour, cooked in a frying pan, and served with vegetables and cheese.

“Breakfast is not that important. Lunch is the best meal of the day,” she says.

Lunch is typically a combination of soup, rice, meat, or fresh vegetables. Adriana’s family never cooks with spices; they only use salt and pepper. Hot sauces are added only after cooking.

The food styles vary greatly across South America, Adriana says. “People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re from South America? You must eat a lot of tacos.’ It’s not really like that; the food is very different from one country to another.”

One of the biggest things that struck Adriana when she came to North America was the attitude toward food.

“People here don’t take the time to cook because there is no time…. [they] are planning, trying to catch up, doing lots, and they don’t take time to enjoy the moment,” she says.

At her home, almost everything is made from scratch or from fresh foods; families will linger over their meals for a long time. For many years, South Americans would stop their work from noon until 2 p.m. and go home, eat lunch with their families, and enjoy a siesta before picking up their work again.

Another significant difference between North and South American food habits is the pantry. In Venezuela, nearly everything is bought fresh at a local market or grocery store. Pantries have very few dry goods, and there are no prepackaged meals; families cook from scratch.

Unlike Adriana, when Kirk Pilapil moved to TWU from the Philippines, he did not find it to be a difficult adjustment.

“It is becoming Americanized there,” he says. “Asian food is common, but it’s more of a Spanish influence.”

Kirk grew up eating rice and fresh vegetables for breakfast, usually fried eggplant. In the Philippines, many of the people grow their own herbs, and cooking with spices is the norm.

“We have lots of seafood,” Kirk says. Because the Philippines are surrounded by ocean, the fish they eat tastes really fresh rather than “fishy,” like seafood around here.

In the Philippines, life is not overly fast-paced. “We have time to eat,” Kirk says; people like to take time to linger over their meals. Families eat together, and often eat the main dish off a shared plate, or if a plate is not convenient, they’ll use banana leaves.

Adriana echoes these sentiments: “We like fresh food…it is hard to eat here because everything is packed and ready or partly ready. The thing I love about my country, especially the food, is that people take the time to cook.”