Foods in the Immigrant Diet _ a Personal Struggle?

yearshappy

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Preface

Australia in recent decades has undertaken some dramatic social changes; leading the field is the subject of multiculturalism; no doubt because one third of Australia’s population were born overseas.

The latest Australia Bureau of Statistics 2016 shows the Chinese born residents to be the most prolific among those with a non-English speaking background. Being a Chinese migrant myself one of, if not the greatest issue of mine, upon settling down and calling this new land my home was food, precisely the differences between the food of the land of my birth and that of my newly adopted home.

Recently I conducted a research project to discover if other fellow elderly Chinese immigrants found difficulty in accepting the food of our new land as opposed to that of culturally familiar food. Through this project, I have learned a great deal about food as well as myself and Chinese culture. It has also helped me to gain a better understanding of how immigrants from other ethnic backgrounds accept such differences.

This forum provides me with a quick and convenient way to share my experiences and research findings relative to food culture with the members of the Chinese immigrant community throughout Australia. I would also like to hear from you as well.

What are your experiences relative to culturally based food and culinary practices in this land of Australia?
I’ll share my story short afterwards.

牧马人

My brekkie. The dark spread on toast was vegemite. How adaptive am I!

yearshappy

Have a look at two popular threads below:

https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1299574-1-1.html 大家来说各地的小吃、中吃、大吃 by @kevin妈妈   ；

https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1299422-1-1.html 散文 · 简餐 (浮生若梦）by @MICHELLE07  

And, @yping88  this's a big question for me https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1300331-1-1.html Why have you fallen in love with Australia?



@yping88 @MICHELLE07 @牧马人  @mason00 @Serin @语之玫瑰 @mite @KYLIE2008 @指纹 @hedgehog @幸福妈妈 @OZCherry

Is there anyone else interested in food? Everyone is more than welcome to join this discussion.

kevin妈妈

yearshappy 发表于 11-10-2018 12:28
Have a look at below these two popular threads:

https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1299574-1-1.html  ...

我英文很渣，无法参与英文讨论你们聊

MICHELLE07

yearshappy 发表于 11-10-2018 12:28
Have a look at below these two popular threads:

https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1299574-1-1.html  ...

Thanks yearshappy for inviting me   
Pleasure
Firstly let me call a new friend to join in this discussion @带你湖  
he or his gorgeous wife may have something to share

My experience with food in a new country:
1. No difficulty at all
2. Cooking what we want at home, all ingredients are available with good qualities
3. Eating out often -- there're plenty of nice restaurants
4. Having lunch with colleagues - enjoy different types of food
5. Stick to healthy food and always try something new
6. What exactly is the land of my birth? .. ..not sure.  I naturally adapted to whatever was offered to me when I left my hometown for the the first time.

yearshappy

牧马人 发表于 11-10-2018 11:54
My brekkie. The dark spread on toast was vegemite. How adaptive am I!

How often do you have a typical Chinese breakfast?
(The definition of a 'typical Chinese breakfast' is of your choice)

yearshappy

@@带你湖    It'd be fantastic if you can join the discussion.  

牧马人

yearshappy 发表于 11-10-2018 12:59
How often do you have a typical Chinese breakfast?  
(The definition of a 'typica ...

As often as I travel back to China, having classic Chinese brekkie with tears in my eyes.

yearshappy

A personal Struggle in the Kitchen

In the early years of my migration to Australia, I often stood in the kitchen, looking around helplessly in a struggle to determine what food to cook and how I could prepare my dinner to suit my taste. I was trying to find a sense of home, but it just wasn't there yet.

That was a typical Australian kitchen and the apparatus, the cutlery, electric appliances were foreign to me. There was neither a wok nor a soymilk maker; instead what I saw was an oven and a toast maker. Opening up the built-in cabinets I searched but could find no trace of the Chinese soy sauce. There was a bottle of Worcestershire Sauce which I found its taste weird. There was no garlic chives, no Chinese choy sum either; what was offered to me was oregano, brussel sprouts, vegemite and butter.

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Serin

I have no problem with most of the edible stuff. I told my colleagues that I was a typical Chinese and that meant I ate everything with legs except chair. I found vegemite quite appetising with a thin layer on a buttered toast or a small dip on crushed cucumber. The devil is in the quantity.

What I am not quite clear is what Australian style of food is. I often see sausage sizzles, lamb cutlets, BBQ ribs associated with Australian style but most of them strike me as red meat or processed meat high in fat, sugar and sodium. As much as I love bacon et al, I always have to refrain from being greedy.

Being a people brought up in FST(Free-Shipping Territory, 江浙沪包邮区), one thing I especially missed here in Aus is fresh bamboo shoot.

MICHELLE07

Serin 发表于 11-10-2018 14:10
I have no problem with most of the edible stuff. I told my colleagues that I was a typical Chinese a ...

I ate everything with legs except chair

yearshappy

Personal Troubles, Public Matters

It seems I was not alone in this matter and that similar struggles are evident with the members of other migrant communities worldwide. In the United States, Emily Kim with the online name Maangchi (Korean in origin), has found herself by creating a Korean kitchen in New York City and becoming a popular blogger. She said to the New York Times that she had ‘a taste from growing up in Korea.’

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Serin

MICHELLE07 发表于 11-10-2018 14:34

Haven't tried that so can't comment.

带你湖

Thanks for the invitaiton. I love my Shanghai cuisine very much. Living abroad for the last 15 years, I have had the pleasure of eating good quality Chinese food. Although my wife is Persian Canadian and generally loves Canadian cuisine, she has developed strong appreciation for Chinese food since we married.
My wife is also a food blogger and has a massive followers. Please check the link below.

she has a food blog called https://www.aheadofthyme.com/

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带你湖

sorry if my comment has gone a little off topic.

妮南

I enjoy toast with avocado and a cup of tea for breakfast .

I love dumpling,rice and noodle

Chinese food is still my favourite.

yearshappy

Show me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are

Samples from my photographic data collection

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yearshappy

The Significance of Chinese Foods for elderly Chinese Immigrants

Although my research involved only a small number of mature aged Chinese migrants, two of them prepared similar foods in the same manner. Culturally familiar food and culinary practices is for these Chinese immigrants the keystone to their future happiness and well-being.

By creating familiar food in a familiar kitchen, then migrants of any persuasion can state, “If the food tastes like home, then it is my home.” These are the feelings that were articulated by two participants while showing me their kitchen and their gardens where the leafy Chinese vegetable plants were thriving. Both of them appeared bright and optimistic with one commenting that earlier Chinese migrants in the era of the gold rush and afterwards were not lucky enough to have such ready access to Chinese food.  

Food is not simply only an entity of nutrition it carries memory and tradition and reflects identity. Culturally familiar food for people who are far away from where they grew up, can instantly trigger a series of emotions which can have impact on their physical well-being, as the Ghanaian migrants in the United States expressed ‘I haven’t eaten if I don’t have my soup and fufu.’ The pleasure, satisfaction and the fulfilment obtained from familiar food at a new home certainly assists the positive transitional experiences of these participants of my project.  

Would you have weetbix or bacon and eggs or soymilk and porridge for brekky?

yping88

MICHELLE07 发表于 11-10-2018 12:58
Thanks yearshappy for inviting me   
Pleasure
Firstly let me call a new friend to join in t ...

No matter where you end up, you would make it your own!

yping88

牧马人 发表于 11-10-2018 11:54
My brekkie. The dark spread on toast was vegemite. How adaptive am I!

A friend of mine once told me: If you try the vegemite, you will either love it or hate it, there will be no feelings in between!

Obviously, you love it! Good start to settle in!

yearshappy

..

What we are is shaped by Social Factors

Why do we want to eat what we eat?

Why is one man’s meat anotherman’s poison?

In an understanding as to why people eat what they eat andhow they become what they are, two theoretical frameworks may be helpful: the sociological imagination and the habitus theory.

The former was coined by Charles Wright Mills (1916-62) inhis publication The Sociological Imagination (1959) which teaches us that we cannot separate the individual from society; to understand one, we have to understand the other; we have to see an individual within a social and historical context.

The other is the habitus theory which was developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), a leading French sociologist who observed that our preferences, such as in food are the interactions within social and material worlds and are determined by social factors including class, education and culture. His work, ‘Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste’, although based on the middle-classes in French society has significance that extends into today’s world.

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yping88

yearshappy 发表于 11-10-2018 12:28
Have a look at two popular threads below:

https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1299574-1-1.html 大家来 ...

Thank you for bringing this up, @yearshappy

This should be the topic on which @牧马人 and I would find each other have so much in common with!

Of course, we all love the land that we have made our permanent or long-term base in, please, join me and share your fondness for this land!

https://freeoz.org/ibbs/thread-1300331-1-1.html

yping88

牧马人 发表于 11-10-2018 13:03
As often as I travel back to China, having classic Chinese brekkie with tears in my eyes.

What is your classic Chinese brekkie? I would like to understand your tears!

yearshappy

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Integration & Culture Reproduction:

Finally call it Home

Acculturation in contemporary societies has shifted its objectives from the situation whereby a single dominant culture has broad control of indigenous peoples into the formation of a culturally pluralistic society where ethno-cultural groups have combined in order to live harmoniously together.

Professor John Berry from Queen’s University of Canada, inhis 2005 paper, claims that these mutually agreed adaptations of combining ethno-cultural groups may be a long-term process taking place over years or possibly even generations. At a social level, matters such as political, economic, historical and cultural factors may impact upon the adaptation process and at the individual level some may find it easy while others challenging. However, by progressive contact with other cultures and engagement in differing socialactivities, even the individuals who find integration difficult will discover that they will slowly adapt and accept the changes.

In my project, while two of the participants have lived in Australia for 8 and 11 years, the third informant has been absent from her birth country for 38 years. My data shows that the first two participants clearly practise the Chinese way of cooking, however, one of them also shows a strong interest in learning how to cook local food. For example, as well as her Chinese cooking appliances she also had a toaster and a full set of cutleries. During the interview, the third informant expressed that she had no issue with western food, particularly for the breakfast, as she and her husband often had weetbixor toast; however, it could be optimistic to think that mature age Chinese immigrants will, over time, readily adapt and even adopt this new culture and warm to the new cuisine available to them.

I, the participants in my project and many others are merely part of the process of culture reproduction. In time, we will finally call this land home.

Epilogue

This small project is only an attempt to disclose how the personal issues of mature aged Chinese immigrants have a public face.

yping88

Serin 发表于 11-10-2018 14:10
I have no problem with most of the edible stuff. I told my colleagues that I was a typical Chinese a ...

I don't think I can ever have enough of the deep-fried sticky rice cakes, which I desperately longed for as a child and abused on as a revenge in my adult life!

牧马人

yping88 发表于 11-10-2018 21:38
Thank you for bringing this up, @yearshappy

This should be the topic on which @牧马人 and I wo ...

Oh dear. I reckon only contentious topics can get me intrigued. So what now then?

yearshappy

牧马人 发表于 11-10-2018 23:18
Oh dear. I reckon only contentious topics can get me intrigued. So what now then?

so you're a fighter

牧马人

yping88 发表于 11-10-2018 21:40
What is your classic Chinese brekkie? I would like to understand your tears!

Chinese deep fried breadstick and 豆腐脑(who knows the English for it?)

As a Northerner I have to make it loud and clear, the 豆腐脑 has to be salty. Any sweet 豆花 is not only waste of food but also anti-human. Everyone must stand up to it.

牧马人

yearshappy 发表于 11-10-2018 23:26
so you're a fighter

A proud fighter for the sacred name of 豆腐脑

yearshappy

牧马人 发表于 11-10-2018 23:27
Chinese deep fried breadstick and 豆腐脑(who knows the English for it?)

As a Northerner I have  ...

savory tofu pudding would do