Food is very cultural. Our overall menu and sense of what is edible have built up over thousands of years, during which we've learned things like, "Gee, tomatoes actually aren't poisonous." A good thing to know. We've had massive changes in world food culture, such as those that came about after trade began between the Americas and the other continents of the world (chocolate!). What we eat and do not eat may seem "natural" but it is mostly the product of learning. It can become very extreme, and it is subject to fads, as are most other aspects of culture.
Here is an example that has been in my face lately with all our travel adventures. When I was little, a children's menu was a relatively new thing. I suppose it was the effect of the social "promotion" of children from people who should not be seen or heard to people who should be included at restaurants (a development I approve of). I remember that the children's menu typically featured smaller portions of adult meals. This was nice for those adults who didn't want to eat as much food (though some restaurants didn't allow adults to order from the children's menu). These days, though, the children's menu doesn't have smaller versions of adult dishes. It has what our culture expects children to enjoy eating. Chicken nuggets. Fries. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Pizza. Macaroni and cheese. Hamburger/cheeseburger. And that's about it. Can you think of anything else you've seen on a kids' menu? Fish and chips I suppose, at a stretch. I've given up looking at the children's menu these days because my children don't really like anything on that list except pizza and burgers, and they can't be eating pizza and burgers every time they go out.
The funny thing is, this kind of expectation is self-enforcing. Parents worry that their kids won't like vegetables and so they act all scared around vegetables and don't feed them to their children. Parents worry that their kids won't like spicy food, so they don't feed it to them - not even in mild doses. Suddenly the routine centers around bland non-vegetable food - so should we be surprised when that's what kids tend to ask for? I'm actually not here to talk about parenting and food, but you can see that this is an important piece of the entire food culture of a society. There is also science and health and how those relate to food choices... it's definitely a complex mix.
If you're creating a society, imagine what its people will eat, as a start. But consider also the food culture of that society. How food is grown, and where, will affect its value and availability. Then there is how important food is as a social activity, and as a ceremonial activity. I mean, how would anyone ever go on a serious date if not for food? Some societies place a special value on regional foods, while others have one big staple that rules the diet surrounded by other smaller ingredients. Some societies have tons of available spices and others do not. Would your people flavor their food predominantly with herbs? Or would they prefer the bland?
There are a thousand questions that can be asked, and if you can spend some time thinking about them, your world will become much more interesting.
P.S. This could easily become an entire dissertation or more, if I started talking about the quantity one is expected to eat, and how, and when, and eating disorders, etc. Suffice it to say that I encourage you to explore food culture to the extent that you can as you are creating your world!
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Culture Share: Food and Drink Customs in Greece by Dario Ciriello
This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Dario Ciriello discusses food and drink customs in Greece.
Food and Drink Customs in Greece by Dario Ciriello
In the course of a dinner party, or during a social occasion where hors d'ouevres are served, it's not unusual for me to catch people eyeing me with mild disapproval. It's true: even after twenty years in the US, I still forget that reinserting, or 'double-dipping', the same chip or carrot stick you have just taken a bite of into a bowl of salsa or dip is simply not done. While I doubt this would raise a hair in Europe (see Fondue), I've more than once seen people drilling their kids on this point.
I, on the other hand, find it distressing to see even the most well-mannered Americans pushing food--peas, say--onto their fork with their fingers, a cultural oddity which must have something to do with the Old West, or perhaps the Great Depression. Why on Earth can't they use a knife in their off-hand? It drives me crazy.
In Europe, we believe that soup should be served piping hot, something that is universally ignored in the US. Salad comes after an entrée, not before—the idea is that the fresh, crisp greens or vegetables clean your palate after a rich main dish. Dessert is something for special occasions, and a plate of fruit, and/or cheese, is a tasty and healthy way to finish a meal And why is water always iced in the US, even in winter?
In Greece, where my wife and I spent a wonderful year on the small island of Skópelos, customs concerning food and drink are even more different, and sometimes challenging.
If you have the fortune to be a guest at a Greek table, you'll find that bowls and serving dishes are set out family-style, but without serving implements. Diners simply use their forks or spoons to pick at the dish, a mouthful at a time. To someone who's at all concerned about hygiene and matters bacterial, this is easily as disturbing as the business of double-dipping.
The first time I encountered this, I surreptitiously noted where my hosts—all apparently healthy, but one can never tell—inserted their utensils into the various dishes, and tried to serve myself from in-between these 'hot spots'. At first, it was easy, like keeping a mental count of the last few numbers that come up on a roulette wheel. But between the growing number of dishes, the shifting patterns of spoon- and fork-insertion as gaps appeared on the plates, the difficulty of keeping up a conversation in a language which I only vaguely grasped the outlines of, and my frequently-replenished wineglass, I was soon forced to abandon my efforts and simply hoped for the best. I was in Greece, and would have to learn Greek ways.
Nor are Greeks shy about using their hands to serve food, as we discovered when we were invited to an Easter celebration. When, after several hours on the spit, the lamb was done, our host and his future son-in-law manhandled it to the table and set it down in front of Máhi, our hostess. Máhi made a couple of big incisions, plunged both hands into the steaming carcass, and began to tear big off big hunks, laughing as she piled them onto our proffered plates. We'd never seen meat served this way at a dinner party, but at least it must be tender.
Then there's the business of heads. At Easter, the lamb carcass on the table still bore the charred remains of its face, complete with pointy teeth and cooked, milky eyeballs, facing us not two places away, a sight that is still vivid in my memory. And if you order mezés (snacks) at an ouzería, you'll at some point find yourself confronted with fish which still have the head attached, and which you're expected to eat.
When it comes to drink though, Greeks (and Southern Europeans generally) exhibit a good deal more sense than Northern Europeans or Americans. Drink is never, never served without ballast to accompany it and cushion the drinker's stomach against the too-rapid absorption of alcohol. If you visit an ouzería or tsipourádiko (oúzo and tsípouro joints, though the terms are somewhat interchangeable), every round of drinks comes with a selection of different, strongly-flavored mezés, or snacks: vegetable and kalamári dishes, spicy sausage stews, or small broiled fish. So over the course of a few rounds of drinks, you end up eating a good-sized meal.
Another interesting custom is that traditional Greek tsipourádikos and ouzerías serve their shots in sealed 50ml. miniatures, which makes billing easy for the server—at the end of the evening they just count the bottles on the table. It also gives the customers a growing array of decorative little empties to play with. Retsína, on the other hand, is sold by weight rather than volume, and served chilled in a cheap aluminum jug. After a little while, ordering wine by the half-kilo seems normal.
Greeks also dine late, in keeping with tradition in Latin and European countries. The normal dinner hour is 10 p.m., and 11 p.m. is not unusual. Of course, when businesses close for four hours in the middle of the day, typically between 2 and 6p.m., this is understandable. Most people work until 8 or 8:30 p.m., but the emphasis is always—and correctly, I believe—on family and social life rather than work. So what if you regularly get to bed at one or two a.m.? At least you were having a good time, and the office doesn’t open until 9 or 10 a.m. anyway.
We could learn a lot from this culture.
Dario Ciriello spent a year living in Greece on the island of Skópelos, and has written a memoir about his experiences entitled Aegean Dream.
Food and Drink Customs in Greece by Dario Ciriello
In the course of a dinner party, or during a social occasion where hors d'ouevres are served, it's not unusual for me to catch people eyeing me with mild disapproval. It's true: even after twenty years in the US, I still forget that reinserting, or 'double-dipping', the same chip or carrot stick you have just taken a bite of into a bowl of salsa or dip is simply not done. While I doubt this would raise a hair in Europe (see Fondue), I've more than once seen people drilling their kids on this point.
I, on the other hand, find it distressing to see even the most well-mannered Americans pushing food--peas, say--onto their fork with their fingers, a cultural oddity which must have something to do with the Old West, or perhaps the Great Depression. Why on Earth can't they use a knife in their off-hand? It drives me crazy.
In Europe, we believe that soup should be served piping hot, something that is universally ignored in the US. Salad comes after an entrée, not before—the idea is that the fresh, crisp greens or vegetables clean your palate after a rich main dish. Dessert is something for special occasions, and a plate of fruit, and/or cheese, is a tasty and healthy way to finish a meal And why is water always iced in the US, even in winter?
In Greece, where my wife and I spent a wonderful year on the small island of Skópelos, customs concerning food and drink are even more different, and sometimes challenging.
If you have the fortune to be a guest at a Greek table, you'll find that bowls and serving dishes are set out family-style, but without serving implements. Diners simply use their forks or spoons to pick at the dish, a mouthful at a time. To someone who's at all concerned about hygiene and matters bacterial, this is easily as disturbing as the business of double-dipping.
The first time I encountered this, I surreptitiously noted where my hosts—all apparently healthy, but one can never tell—inserted their utensils into the various dishes, and tried to serve myself from in-between these 'hot spots'. At first, it was easy, like keeping a mental count of the last few numbers that come up on a roulette wheel. But between the growing number of dishes, the shifting patterns of spoon- and fork-insertion as gaps appeared on the plates, the difficulty of keeping up a conversation in a language which I only vaguely grasped the outlines of, and my frequently-replenished wineglass, I was soon forced to abandon my efforts and simply hoped for the best. I was in Greece, and would have to learn Greek ways.
Nor are Greeks shy about using their hands to serve food, as we discovered when we were invited to an Easter celebration. When, after several hours on the spit, the lamb was done, our host and his future son-in-law manhandled it to the table and set it down in front of Máhi, our hostess. Máhi made a couple of big incisions, plunged both hands into the steaming carcass, and began to tear big off big hunks, laughing as she piled them onto our proffered plates. We'd never seen meat served this way at a dinner party, but at least it must be tender.
Then there's the business of heads. At Easter, the lamb carcass on the table still bore the charred remains of its face, complete with pointy teeth and cooked, milky eyeballs, facing us not two places away, a sight that is still vivid in my memory. And if you order mezés (snacks) at an ouzería, you'll at some point find yourself confronted with fish which still have the head attached, and which you're expected to eat.
When it comes to drink though, Greeks (and Southern Europeans generally) exhibit a good deal more sense than Northern Europeans or Americans. Drink is never, never served without ballast to accompany it and cushion the drinker's stomach against the too-rapid absorption of alcohol. If you visit an ouzería or tsipourádiko (oúzo and tsípouro joints, though the terms are somewhat interchangeable), every round of drinks comes with a selection of different, strongly-flavored mezés, or snacks: vegetable and kalamári dishes, spicy sausage stews, or small broiled fish. So over the course of a few rounds of drinks, you end up eating a good-sized meal.
Another interesting custom is that traditional Greek tsipourádikos and ouzerías serve their shots in sealed 50ml. miniatures, which makes billing easy for the server—at the end of the evening they just count the bottles on the table. It also gives the customers a growing array of decorative little empties to play with. Retsína, on the other hand, is sold by weight rather than volume, and served chilled in a cheap aluminum jug. After a little while, ordering wine by the half-kilo seems normal.
Greeks also dine late, in keeping with tradition in Latin and European countries. The normal dinner hour is 10 p.m., and 11 p.m. is not unusual. Of course, when businesses close for four hours in the middle of the day, typically between 2 and 6p.m., this is understandable. Most people work until 8 or 8:30 p.m., but the emphasis is always—and correctly, I believe—on family and social life rather than work. So what if you regularly get to bed at one or two a.m.? At least you were having a good time, and the office doesn’t open until 9 or 10 a.m. anyway.
We could learn a lot from this culture.
Dario Ciriello spent a year living in Greece on the island of Skópelos, and has written a memoir about his experiences entitled Aegean Dream.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Diners, Drive-ins, Dives and how to tell them apart
I have to thank that show from the Food Network - first, for recommending Duarte's Tavern, where we went two weeks ago for dinner, and second for inspiring the title of this post. In fact, this does relate to science fiction and fantasy, as I will get to below.
When we first went to Duarte's, we tried to decide whether it was a Diner, a Drive-in, or a Dive. Drive-in was easy to exclude, because any restaurant that involves driving in and remaining in the car while receiving food is easy to recognize. However, we did spend a bit of time discussing the difference between a Diner and a Dive, and in the end we decided that alcohol was the key ingredient - to be specific, the presence or absence of a bar. Thus, a Diner would be a place that serves food but has no bar, and a Dive would be a place that serves food and also has a bar.
What I found interesting about this from a cultural standpoint - always the viewpoint from which I try to apply things to fantasy and science fiction - is that we were able to come up with such a systematic relation between different types of food establishments. Of course, this classification excludes certain other types of restaurants. But when you think about it, there are quite a few words for places where one consumes food - many of which have come from different cultures (off the top of my head I think of Restaurant, cafe, and bistro). So when you're designing an alien culture, or a fantasy world, it's good to think through what kinds of places people go to get food.
Inns are very common in medieval-style fantasy - like the Prancing Pony in the Lord of the Rings. I've encountered alien restaurants of various sorts in my reading. But as you're putting a world together it's worth considering how culture influences the way the people eat, and in what contexts.
Conceivably one could have a culture where eating food was a very private activity that should be kept in the home - and in such a culture you might have clandestine eating establishments (much as you can find brothels in ours, for a different kind of private activity).
Possibly you might imagine a culture in which food consumption was a highly competitive activity. Maybe eating establishments would be ranked on a tier structure, and competitions of various types might be used to decide who could go to which tier. Perhaps the greatest delicacies would require some form of combat - either a physical combat, or a combat of words and manners - to determine who got to eat them.
Or to elaborate on the concept behind the Diner/Dive divide, maybe there might be a particular type of dish or drink that might be served in one kind of restaurant but not in another, and this distinction could have social significance. Or possibly some activity like dance, or smoking, might be associated with food consumption in one type of establishment but not in another.
It's something to think about.
When we first went to Duarte's, we tried to decide whether it was a Diner, a Drive-in, or a Dive. Drive-in was easy to exclude, because any restaurant that involves driving in and remaining in the car while receiving food is easy to recognize. However, we did spend a bit of time discussing the difference between a Diner and a Dive, and in the end we decided that alcohol was the key ingredient - to be specific, the presence or absence of a bar. Thus, a Diner would be a place that serves food but has no bar, and a Dive would be a place that serves food and also has a bar.
What I found interesting about this from a cultural standpoint - always the viewpoint from which I try to apply things to fantasy and science fiction - is that we were able to come up with such a systematic relation between different types of food establishments. Of course, this classification excludes certain other types of restaurants. But when you think about it, there are quite a few words for places where one consumes food - many of which have come from different cultures (off the top of my head I think of Restaurant, cafe, and bistro). So when you're designing an alien culture, or a fantasy world, it's good to think through what kinds of places people go to get food.
Inns are very common in medieval-style fantasy - like the Prancing Pony in the Lord of the Rings. I've encountered alien restaurants of various sorts in my reading. But as you're putting a world together it's worth considering how culture influences the way the people eat, and in what contexts.
Conceivably one could have a culture where eating food was a very private activity that should be kept in the home - and in such a culture you might have clandestine eating establishments (much as you can find brothels in ours, for a different kind of private activity).
Possibly you might imagine a culture in which food consumption was a highly competitive activity. Maybe eating establishments would be ranked on a tier structure, and competitions of various types might be used to decide who could go to which tier. Perhaps the greatest delicacies would require some form of combat - either a physical combat, or a combat of words and manners - to determine who got to eat them.
Or to elaborate on the concept behind the Diner/Dive divide, maybe there might be a particular type of dish or drink that might be served in one kind of restaurant but not in another, and this distinction could have social significance. Or possibly some activity like dance, or smoking, might be associated with food consumption in one type of establishment but not in another.
It's something to think about.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
My grocery store in Tokyo
Our grocery store was called Kitamura, and to get to it we could either ride bicycles or walk (we had no car, and it would have been highly impractical to have one). It was down a steep hill from our apartment building, on the main road of the neighborhood which was lined with cherry trees.
There were two halves of Kitamura: the food half, and the dry goods half. These stood across the street from one another, and both were very small - but enormous compared to the buildings around them.
The dry goods half included basically everything from toilet paper to pots and pans, clothing, hardware, etc. It also contained a bookstore section, which was where I got my Japanese cookbook. I walked in there shortly after we arrived and said (in Japanese) "I'm looking for a cookbook of Japanese food with lots of pictures." When you don't know the basics of ingredients or of cooking terminology, the pictures are very important. I ended up walking home with a little book from the "new housewife series" called "Yummy! Simple!" (oishii! kantan!) It would have been embarrassing except that it was so exceedingly helpful.
I bought this cookbook for two reasons. First, because I like Japanese food, and second because I wanted to save money.
Food is very expensive in Japan. When I was living there you could buy a box of strawberries - all precisely the same size and shape - for about $7. You could buy a monster apple about five inches in diameter for about $5. The shocker for me was that rice cost so much more there than in the US. I would buy five kilos of rice for about $25. If I'd wanted to try to cook American, the prices would have been much higher than for cooking Japanese food.
So I explored. The store had a whole case dedicated to fish and seafood, which might not seem amazing except that it took up so much shelf space relative to the total size of the store. If you wanted to buy a whole chicken (not one previously carved into cuts), you'd have to special order it, but you could easily buy a whole squid, and take it home while it stared at you out of its styrofoam dish.
By the way, the carts at this store were made to fit the size of the aisles: they were metal carts with spots to put baskets. Since the baskets were about the size of the American over-the-arm shopping baskets, the cart effectively doubled your hauling capacity. Given that you then would have to carry everything you'd bought up a very steep hill on foot (or bicycle), it made sense. You just had to go to the store more often.
You would go through the checkout lines, which were in general very quiet. Nobody in line ever started a conversation with me, and neither did the checkout staff. I, being American in my heart, I guess, started conversations with them, and they didn't seem to mind. Then you'd take your baskets to a counter and bag them yourself, all plastic bags, for the purposes of getting them home.
I love my experiences overseas because they acquaint me with different values on parameters of life that I have never considered. So for all you worldbuilders out there, give some thought to how your people get their food, what markets look like and how much of their total budget they expect to spend on food and lodging. It'll deepen the world, and be fun at the same time.
There were two halves of Kitamura: the food half, and the dry goods half. These stood across the street from one another, and both were very small - but enormous compared to the buildings around them.
The dry goods half included basically everything from toilet paper to pots and pans, clothing, hardware, etc. It also contained a bookstore section, which was where I got my Japanese cookbook. I walked in there shortly after we arrived and said (in Japanese) "I'm looking for a cookbook of Japanese food with lots of pictures." When you don't know the basics of ingredients or of cooking terminology, the pictures are very important. I ended up walking home with a little book from the "new housewife series" called "Yummy! Simple!" (oishii! kantan!) It would have been embarrassing except that it was so exceedingly helpful.
I bought this cookbook for two reasons. First, because I like Japanese food, and second because I wanted to save money.
Food is very expensive in Japan. When I was living there you could buy a box of strawberries - all precisely the same size and shape - for about $7. You could buy a monster apple about five inches in diameter for about $5. The shocker for me was that rice cost so much more there than in the US. I would buy five kilos of rice for about $25. If I'd wanted to try to cook American, the prices would have been much higher than for cooking Japanese food.
So I explored. The store had a whole case dedicated to fish and seafood, which might not seem amazing except that it took up so much shelf space relative to the total size of the store. If you wanted to buy a whole chicken (not one previously carved into cuts), you'd have to special order it, but you could easily buy a whole squid, and take it home while it stared at you out of its styrofoam dish.
By the way, the carts at this store were made to fit the size of the aisles: they were metal carts with spots to put baskets. Since the baskets were about the size of the American over-the-arm shopping baskets, the cart effectively doubled your hauling capacity. Given that you then would have to carry everything you'd bought up a very steep hill on foot (or bicycle), it made sense. You just had to go to the store more often.
You would go through the checkout lines, which were in general very quiet. Nobody in line ever started a conversation with me, and neither did the checkout staff. I, being American in my heart, I guess, started conversations with them, and they didn't seem to mind. Then you'd take your baskets to a counter and bag them yourself, all plastic bags, for the purposes of getting them home.
I love my experiences overseas because they acquaint me with different values on parameters of life that I have never considered. So for all you worldbuilders out there, give some thought to how your people get their food, what markets look like and how much of their total budget they expect to spend on food and lodging. It'll deepen the world, and be fun at the same time.
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