On Cooking

One of my favorite places to go with my mother is the grocery store. Ever since I was a child, I loved going grocery shopping with her. There was something magical about the grocery store to me as a child. There’s all of these different flavors, colors, and textures. There are some food that you can just pick off the shelf and eat immediately. Then there are the different ingredients that can combined through the chemistry and magic of cooking to become an almost infinite number of dishes.

I always got the sense my mom enjoyed grocery shopping. She gets excited about different fruits that were fresh, she engages people at the seafood and the meat counter. She has a passion for food, and an imagination for what food can be. What’s amazing about the grocery store is that within, even in a store that has a limited “ethnic” food section, the potential for diversity, and representation that can come out of the ingredients in a grocery store is beautiful, powerful, and inspiring.

We have a complicated relationship with food in our culture. Americans love food. They love talking about food, they love eating food. There’s some strange, about how a person in our country who may hold racist views about Mexican, still loves a great taco. We feel shame about our fast food cultures, and the harm many feel it is doing to the health, and the youth of our country, but we have no problem admiring these companies’ capitalistic success.

These complications are reflected in how we cook. Americans want to know how to cook. They watch cooking shows, and competitions on television, and online. People buy cook books, and the growth of the “ship stuff to your house, and have you cook your own meal at home” industry has shown that cooking is something we value. However, it’s hard to find time to cook. And for far many of us, the tradition of cooking with our parents and/or grandparents the primary way most people learn how to cook has been lost.

Cooking for me is one of the most important ways that I show love to the people in my life and have received love from my parents. And I wonder what we have lost. People receive and show love in different ways. These ways have to be taught, and maybe, there has been some love that hasn’t been shown, because some of us don’t know how to do this through food.

My mom taught me how to cook. More than that she taught me how to think about cooking. There’s only a couple recipes I have written down from my mom. Mostly what she taught me were concepts, and ideas about how ingredients work together, the idea that flavors can change, and be directed. She inspired me to look deeper and find joy in exploring the mystery of the creation of food.

Things that are important to us connect others in our lives. When I’m at the grocery store, by myself or with my son, I feel my mom with me. When I’m cooking, and I’m tasting food, I think about her, and my identity as a Taiwanese-American. It’s a way that connection to her is felt, and I’m trying to make that association with my sons. Because by knowing the culture of food in our family, my boys will feel pride in themselves.

Not everything I cook is great.  But there are the moments when something I cook transcends my own skills, and something truly magical happens in the kitchen.  When this happens and a dish I cook is truly amazing, I always whisper to myself “thanks mom.”