EATS101

threes and fours

I spent most of Thanksgiving week writing the final paper for a class called EATS101, and fittingly, eating¹ a traditional American Thanksgiving feast in Boone, North Carolina. Boone is an incredible place. Before I get to that, let me speak on some recurring characters.

In Montreal, three years ago, I was surrounded by two of my childhood friends and my roommate for the trip, who I had become fast friends with. We had all hung out in random permutations of two or three throughout the trip, and we had sat together at a quick meal as the smaller section of a larger table, during which someone remarked “this is a mythic group”. As we crowded together in conference over a few crises,² things seemed to magically resolve for a second, and we all suddenly realised there was nothing left but to get dinner. And so we picked a place called Biermarkt. I can’t remember laughing harder in my life. Once we all dispersed for college, that dinner table faded into myth, and memory, and Messenger chats.

~

My EATS paper is long. There are other parts of the paper, but the idea I enjoyed writing most about is how Asian-American families express love. And, of course, one cannot generalise every Asian family in America, and so one cannot make this claim without reference to their own narrow slice of experiences, and thus I argued that m(an)y³ Asian-American⁴ family dynamic(s) are expressive less often.

Maybe it’s the influence of Interior Chinatown, or Stay True; but it’s no secret that I’ve thought a lot more about identity since coming to college. My “interest”, though, doesn’t feel sharp or enlivening like people describe their intellectual passions. My heart doesn’t beat faster, I don’t feel compelled to cover every area of the field. Still, when choosing EATS101 paper topics, I couldn’t really think of anything else.⁵

In fact, I’m actually not certain how it feels to have a genuine intellectual interest. I probably have interests, but there is an underestimated gap between “this is cool” and “I am interested in/I study/I have been thinking about this topic”. A lot of the people around me seem to quickly jump into these relationships, where I sometimes feel I’m on the pool deck, bewildered by their conviction. Some confounding factors — is this just socially trending, what am I trying to signal, explore vs. exploit, etc — make this even more unclear.

Anyways — did I mention the paper is long? The actual way I would describe it:

• Food is often seen as a form of love; in lots of Asian-American culture, it replaces verbal expressions of love. And it’s logical that different foods thus send different messages of love.
• With the classical “lunchbox” moment being the first point of cultural tension for many Asian-Americans, many immigrant children are taught to feel shame about their family’s expression of love.
• Some number crunching indicates the Asian American diet is more varied than one expects. The variance broadly points to more pan-Asian and American food influences.
• This also broadly indicates an evolution and homogenisation of Asian-American identity; food is central to how that identity has developed in individuals and across society; it also indicates Asian-American identity might be more of a new, standalone identity than a smushed-together hybrid.

It was interesting to write my paper over in Boone, because my time in these beautiful mountains was so incredibly familial. There were excursions and movies (both the likes of which I’ve never seen before).⁶The expressions of love were clear, with hugs and smiles and welcoming. I often went to bed each night feeling more cared for. And there were five of us. By contrast, my home in Toronto is rarely filled with conversation. The love is more quiet, more based around meals than anything. While I intellectually argued different foods change how we form identity and relationships, I do feel that my mom could make anything between turkey and char siu and the core of our gathering would feel the same. Still — and maybe this is because I read the communal⁷ East of Eden in Boone versus the solitary collection of Murakami novels in Toronto — something is different. One of these differences: my parents and I make three.

I say all this because a remarkable property about my “mythic” friend group is that once we reach four people, some critical threshold is crossed. Things are just more fun; but fun is an imprecise writing term; maybe the actual word to use is lively, or vocal, or eventful. With four people, conversations rarely die off because people can split off, which works particularly well when you’re all friends in duos anyway. I was reminded of this for a few hours around Lake Jordan. I was reminded of this with the Elliotts. I felt this in Montreal & DC & the Cookout parking lot. Things just happen more.

eating class

Many things could be said about EATS101.⁸ I believe the official title is something about food and sustainability. The actual curriculum is closer to something about becoming a better dinner guest. Over the course of the semester (and the summer readings, oh man⁹) I gained more appreciation for both my food — mechanically, chemically, environmentally — and for the humans around me, visible and invisible. And perhaps because better people are better dinner guests, I feel like the class grew me in many more inexpressible ways.

My best attempt at expression: I think I was obsessed with the concept of class — perhaps this is also one of those fabled intellectual interests — for much of my life. This traces from debate’s flirtations with Marxism to travelling different countries (which is a fast way to find out how significantly money changes quality of life). While I’m sure there is some etiquette guide out there that murders my blatant intellectual inaccuracy here EATS101 felt like the ultimate exercise in class.¹⁰ Trivially, we went to restaurants; the much more significant — and surprising — axis of comparison was that our cohort, which was built around a common sense of curiosity, openness, and warmth, incidentally began many “classy” behaviours. People would host extraneous gatherings, we all brought some kind of gift wherever we went, we wrote written thank you notes, we all decided to dress up (before Sam encouraged us to!), and so on. The classiest thing of all: for most Tuesdays and Thursdays, a bunch of us 20somethings¹¹ put down our phones for two, three, four, seven¹² continuous hours and talked to each other. Emily Post would not be proud of us, I’m sure; but rather than remembering who used their cutlery incorrectly, I remember the ways this group made me feel. I understand class, more than a set of ostentatious behaviours and idiosyncratic signallers, as a method of encouragement. EATS101 is this unique intellectual playground, where you can ask interdisciplinary thinkers any question that comes to mind, and exchange long, unhurried stories¹³ with the same people, and all pile into the same three cars. I felt encouraged to explore within these expansive limits, including with the limitless paper, ⁵ and I suspect that will be the lasting effect of EATS — class, as an attitude of welcoming everything that walks through the door.

One last thing. One of the ideas I liked the most within EATS was the idea that what we eat becomes part of us. This logic extends pretty smoothly: who we eat with, how we eat, when we eat also, intuitively, forms who we are. There have been a lot of puns, double entendres, and, likely, some resulting confusions within this section. I leave you, dear reader, with this section title as the final one.

rationalists

I’m currently (look, I was about to ask for your forgiveness for using the present tense, but that’s not the worst lexical crime I’ve committed, far from it; and also, since when has this blog ever adhered to any convention I find inconvenient?¹⁴) in Guatemala with a bunch of — okay, I need to find a term for these people, because rationalists is imprecise; but it’s the Atlas/TKS/ratcamp/SF-located/Socratica etc friends — friends.

Similarly to when I first walked into ASPR, I felt totally out of my depth when I landed at the Guatemala City airport. I’m not sure that feeling will ever go away, because this social environment is so abnormal to me where, for my newfound friends, it is more of an extension, at least I assume. But the dinners were easier.

Similarly, I think my favourite moment of ASPR was a later dinner, when David, Catherine, Bryan, Jam, and I just joked about various Asian-American things. It was elite. Part of the joy was having five Asian-(North)-Americans of different college majors/backgrounds bond over so much shared experience; part of the joy was watching David cackle when he had (unintentionally?) intimidated me for the entire week; ¹⁵ part of the joy was the interweaving of some absurd Mandarin sayings. I think, however, it was actually meaningful because I finally felt at home in an environment that was meant to be familiar (Asia, accomplished kids). I forward it’s probably not a coincidence that this moment finally arose over dinner.

Similarly, I enjoyed many of our EATS dinners, but for the first few, I (and likely others) felt some obligation to this spectre of class(y) behaviour. By the last dinner — an absurd, creative, multi-course Snap Pea experience that was somehow prepared in a corner of Graham Memorial lounge — the ease was more palpable. And my favourite dinner was actually an unscheduled, more informal one, where Noa and I had a longer conversation than just how many lines of Beowulf we had memorised¹⁶ and attempted to make a dent in far too much Italian food.

Recently, I’ve had to think a lot more about food than just “what should I order” and “where should I eat”. In recounting these dinners, however, I only fuzzily remember the incredible dishes; and in writing the EATS paper, I only fuzzily remember the food that I had growing up. What feels sharper — as I’m sure will be true of Thanksgiving, and the semester, and my college years as well — is specific things people said, and broad patterns of how I felt. Maybe that changes with what kind of food we eat; my suspicion is that it is actually who I share(d) the meals with that changed how I felt. Turkey and turkey trot alike.

Footnotes

1. And spending an equal amount of time — true to the form of American Thanksgiving — digesting in preparation for future eating. ↩

2. Unintentional pun, twice! Wow. ↩

3. I was so proud of this. Recently, I think this blog has just become way more fun to write, at the expense of more fun to read. ↩

4. Sorry, I’m Canadian, but we’ve digressed enough! ↩

5. Actually, I suggested two half-hearted other ideas, which Samantha (an angel in human form) quickly suggested I lump into my actual idea. But it was incredibly symbolic of the EATS ethos that I presented three ideas, asked for advice on which to pick, and got told to do all three. You don’t see that often in college. ↩ ↩²

6. In order: a Turkey Trot, buying your Christmas tree, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. ↩

7. In both senses. ↩

8. Of these, my favourite: it’s a class in a class of its own. ↩

9. I want to thank the people who left behind the hammock at Lake St. Peter, because I was able to finish Cork Dork only because of you. ↩

10. The puns are unbelievably tempting. Class in class, etc. ↩

11. There is a frontier year, which will remain unsaid, and also an ambiguous number of people past the frontier year, the specifics of which will also remain unsaid. ↩

12. The PDR of Nana’s, how incredible you are. ↩

13. Typically romantic, and set in Western European contexts. Isn’t it funny how those things work out? ↩

14. See, for instance, how many times you’ve had to read an aside in this sentence. ↩

15. David was one of my first conversations, and it was after he made some large group announcements. I happily said “oh, you’re from Toronto, me too!” and we somehow got to my aversion to tech culture within four lines, at which point we started talking about meditation, etc; and all this to say I was in awe of how intensely he worked, and how much better I felt after what would have been normal small talk with anyone else except David. ↩

16. Thank you Dr. T, for bringing together another mythic four of Noa, Asher, Alex and I. ↩