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I was born on an island, and many people have invaded it through out its history and tried to lay claims to it with different names.
But honestly it belongs to the indigenous people there, except they don’t think of owning the land as we do in concept. As an immigrant to Canada and later the United States of America, my earliest memories of “other” Chinese food felt familiar yet distant, they were not the taste of home or childhood. Rather, it was more like trying to reimagine what home was and settle for whatever was in front of you. Even as an adult I look for that taste of home in random Chinatowns across the world with the majority of the experiences being somewhat disappointing, but sometimes it’s surprising to discover something different. New memories are here then born, and perhaps an identity, too. Maybe Mexicans, Salvadorians or Guatemalans can relate to this search for memory in the new land they now call home as they discover each other’s cuisine. Is it the same? It is not the same. Is it tasty? Yes. Is it home? No, it is not home. So the question I am asking today is: What is food really other than the basic needs of survival, cultural heritage, identity, memories, a witness of history, the preservation of legacy or brutality (depending on who you ask) or is it more? It is everything and yet nothing.
As our bodies age, the long history of negligence starts to show its nasty little head. It mocks us as we ingest food that we lay claim as the foundations of our childhood. Take fast food for example: countless children across North America share the common memories of a routine lunch or first date, all held on the premises of fast food establishments. We are raised and fed on food that is full of hormones and preservatives that, when consumed on a daily basis, begin to mutate and transform us into 600 lbs. of human being, rendered immobile because our knees cannot withstand the weight. But it’s become obvious that the processed meat, cheese and buns that are pumped full of preservatives and god knows what else that we were fed as children is actually rotting our insides. This is NOT an article championing healthy organic eating habits that most people in this world cannot afford, co-opted by new energy and corporations. But rather, it asks the question, why do we continue to poison ourselves in the name of memories, nostalgia, comfort, sold to us cheap by corporations that own our past as children, in the name of identity and culture? Are we really what we eat? Besides socio-economics and corporate manipulation what else is at play here.
Upon every return to the island where I was born, the minute I step out of the airport I start gorging food like a hungry ghost, slurping beef brisket noodles, wolfing down pork belly on top of white rice with marinated seaweed, intestines, pickled vegetable side dishes, a bowl of steamy clam soup with slices of ginger, momentarily followed by fried savory doughnuts flanked inside sesame flat bread with a pan fried egg drizzled in soy sauce and chili paste, topped off with a cup of icy sugary soy milk. Maybe some glutinous rice with pork floss and pickle fillings to go.
Later in the evening, there will be a cup of boba milk tea, a variety of night market street foods that range from basil fried chicken nuggets, gizzards, to pancake batter baked in the mold of various animals, a motorcycle or, if you fancy, a pistol. Truly all the hallmarks from the memories of an 8 year old boy that is full of superficial male bravado materialized through consumer products and mass produced food. It could only have come from a different era, or maybe they’re just selling you different shit under the guise of something else now, who knows. If this pain my stomach is feeling will give me a sense of identity, I’d be more than happy to be a martyr for it. It makes you wonder what other stupidity human beings are capable of in the quest for identity, political or not. Watching me writhe and smile in pain from overeating, a concerned friend looked at me half in disgust, half in curiosity. “Why do you do this to yourself, eating all this stuff that is full of processed sugar?” He asked. I replied, “can’t help it, it brings back so many childhood memories.” He responded dryly, “But you are not a child anymore.”
I froze when I heard his comment. Maybe because following that realization, I was flooded with thoughts of the countless bad decisions I’ve made in life. These experiences similarly contributed just as much joy as they did pain, both emotionally and physically. Human beings create themselves through the wreckage of their destruction; I believe Franz Wright said that. Perhaps there is something to be said about the history of our eating habits. Over the course of our existence on this planet, we’ve foraged, scavenged, hunted, farmed, industrialized, fucked, shat, pissed and raped this place we call home from the sky to the land to the sea. Quite an achievement, really, the sheer stupidity of it all. How much of our food culture are merely holdovers from the “good old days” as nations of starving souls in post-war depressions relied on tried and true recipes to survive? How much of it has been manufactured as marketing ploys to make us buy products that we’ve never before consumed, resulting in new dietary consumption behaviour without the data of long term effects?
How much of it is the result of colonizers bringing their eating habits with their invasions of foreign lands, leaving the colonized trying to appease their “guests” with local produce and protein – which over time came to mimic and match a menu from a distant land of different climate and agriculture? How much was the result of immigrants trying to recreate dishes back home using ingredients that were alien to them? It is everything and yet nothing, as I look around the people of my island.
The very idea of who we are as a people and the food, culture and pride that forms around it makes me question the very notion of who we think we are. There is no shared common history between the invaders and the invaded. There is only the official statement taught in school textbooks of who came and “discovered” the land and built it into what it is today. If we look at history, it will tell us what has happened, except it will always be skewed, depending on whose narrative it serves. So what does that say about our reality? Of where we come from and who we are, where does that put us as a species, as human beings? Other than murderous apes that torched the earth, stabbing a flag over a land that used to belong to nobody but a group of people who knew how to co-exist with the land, the sky, the sea and all of its living beings.
Throughout history, we have seen an exiled people arrive on a new land and project their inner turmoil and fear into unfathomable acts of violence onto the “other”, the indigenous people of said land. As they displace others in this so-called consciousness of a New World they created, they’ve displaced their own collective unconscious into a vast void of uncharted darkness, haunting every generation that will come to follow. God speed to those who blindly tread the dark lands and dark seas of the abyss, for everything is long gone within this floating world. There is no shared collective common memory of this land. We are in an isolated projection of realities independent of one another. In this dark space, there is no up or down, left and right; only a choir of loud voices and an insatiable appetite that conjures the fear of nothingness continuously constructing and consuming “something” for comfort – to exist. Who are we as a species, as human beings? Is it everything that we had dreamed of or is it simply nothing? Human beings create themselves through the wreckage of their destruction. 
