Food

Food

Both my parents worked five days a week, sometimes for ten hour days, sometimes more. We were a family that lived off convenience food. My mother says every time we pull into a McDonalds and every time I order a simple double cheeseburger from the dollar menu, “I swear I wish your father never introduced you to those.” She tells me the story of when she rushed home from her job at red lobster during a lunch break and found my dad had taken off lunch as well. She was expecting to see the babysitter with carrots and peanut butter sandwiches and there I am with a quarter pounder bigger than my head (she’s exaggerating) ketchup smeared all over my mouth, and I’m happy as can be.

I really do not have any cultural influence when it comes to food other than my American upbringing right here in the Pacific Northwest. You can say that is a very bad thing or you can say that it is a very good thing. I enjoy sushi, but it’s California rolls which I am constantly corrected it is not sushi, and sea food, and Mexican food, and I watch Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel but beyond this I really have not branched out too far with my food except for grossing out a couple of friends by eating fried gizzards once.

I do enjoy oysters; this was my grandmother’s influence. At the age of six she took me out to a restaurant and asked me to try one, not thinking I’d like them, and I did very much. It impressed her. I also know that my grandmother was Jewish, so maybe this will spike the unusualness of my food culture, but beyond this simple fact we never immersed ourselves in any of her culture’s kosher customs. To be honest, I really did not spend too much time with her, and I do not think she followed her religion to the letter.

Overall, my food history is a pretty simple one, I am always a fan of trying new foods but my favorites tend to be the “classics,” whatever that the classics are.

Jakle, John A. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore, Md: John Hopkins UP 1999

Drucker, Malka, and Eve Chwast. Grandma's Latkes. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1992