Gastropod

gas•tro•pod (noun)
a group of animals, more formally known as Class Gastropoda under the phylum Mollusca, that are characterized by their slimy foot. Gastropods are invertebrate animals and, as the phylum suggests, belong to the larger group known as mollusks. Creatures in this class include snails, slugs, and nudibranchs (OMG SO CUTE! I love nudibrachs <3).
Origin: Greek (gastros = stomach, pod = foot; gastropod = stomach foot; named thusly for the slimy "foot" they use to move across substrate which leaves behind a slimy trail)

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I was trying to look for a good word that would work with my topic today, but this is the closest I could come without using endocytosis, pinocytosis, pr phagocytotsis, which I've already sort of touched on. But first, comments about your last post.

Thanks for agreeing to put the blog and Thread on haitus for the exam season; I really needed to hunker down and concentrate on my studies. This past semester has been really wonky for me. Now that I'm done (and you're finishing in less than a week) I feel like we can start things up again.

Your last post was interesting; I have always found the banjo quite, as you say, twangy, but it can be a very nice sounding instrument. I never played Banjo Kazoie, frankly because the characters looks like rednecks, which really freaked me out as a kid (and to be honest, still freak me out), but the intro was fun. Sufjan Stevens' (which, btw, is quite an interesting name; I wonder from which language does it originate?) song was nice, but I felt that the banjo was a tad too twangy for the song, and I couldn't hear the lyrics. I quite enjoyed the Mumford and Sons song, but I really didn't like the last one. For reasons which will be made apparent over the course of our lives, I really have an aversion to these sorts of songs; another topic to add to the long list of things about which we have to converse over the summer.

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So today, I want to talk about this:

I want to talk about food.

Yes, food.

Being an Asian, food is a very big part of my life. As you know, food is so ingrained into Asian culture that a traditional greeting is to ask not "How are you doing?" but to ask (loosely translated as) "Have you eaten yet?" or "Is your stomach full?" implying that one who is well fed is one whose life is happy/going well.

Food (and tea) is a major part of my life, one of the greatest joys I have in living. The list of (non-living) things that I will never get enough of goes 1) Food 2) Sleep 3) Pokemon 4) Math. Allow me to explain myself.

Food has become the central focus of Asian culture. There are two major reasons for this.

First of all, food was (and still is) a sign of wealth. It makes sense when you consider the historical context: China has one quarter of the world's population yet only about a tenth of the world's arable land, so food has always been relatively expensive. One must be relatively well off to be able to feed one's family well. When it came to the Emperor and the royal family, there are special dishes that are only known to the imperial chefs, passed down in secret from generation to generation. The royal family even ate on special porcelain with special imperial designs that were only allowed to be printed on porcelain used by the royal family; archeologists have found mounds of smashed porcelain in ancient potters' workshops consisting of all the dinnerware painted with imperial designs that developed impurities during the baking/kiln/firing process.

Secondly, and most importantly of all, food is tied to the family.

Asian culture values family very, very highly. In ancient China, one of the only ways for a family to climb the social ladder was to become a government official (such as a judge or a magistrate or a doctor), which was only possible if you were educated and passed government exams. Entire peasant  families would work very hard to pay for a tutor so that one family member could be educated in the hopes that if he passed the government exams, the entire family would rise in status (which is also the reason why Asians value education: in old times - and even not so old times; this was still being done in my grandfather's generation) and the entire family would lead a better life. It interesting to note that the government issued many levels of examination, the highest of which was invigilated in the Forbidden City by the Emperor himself.

I speak for Asian culture when I say that to me, food does not hold value JUST in its taste or JUST in its nutritional value; food is valuable to me not because I find pleasure in gluttony. Food is very important to me because it is the vehicle that brings me happiness; it is the unifying factor that brings me closer to the people I love; it is the thing that facilitates the strengthening of bonds.

Of the fondest memories that I have of my family, easily more than half of them occur in the kitchen, at the dinner table, or just before or just after a meal. Easily the majority of the best conversations I've ever been a part of have taken place over a meal or just following a meal. Food is not just something I prepare or eat: it is something I experience. It is not just the act of eating good food, it is the act of eating good food together, the act of sharing good food. I just find that it is much easier to get along with people and talk to people over a meal. Of course, the fact that food stimulates the release of endorphins (chemicals in the brain that signal happiness) helps. But still, I find myself more relaxed and able to enjoy myself while eating or on a full stomach. Conversely, I can be very irritable when hungry.

 Food does this in two ways: in both its preparation and its consumption.

The preparation of food is in many ways just as important as the consumption of  food, especially for the large dinner events throughout the year. As they say, cooking is a labor of love.

For normal, daily dinners, in my family, cooking is usually done by one, maybe two, seldomly three people. It is usually a quiet affair, but having the house smell like good food puts everyone in a good mood. Cooking for large family events is a whole different story.

When we do family dinners, and we are cooking, we go all out. This year, we celebrated Chinese New Year's on a Saturday. My father began cooking for it on the Wednesday. The day before Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, he begins cooking at about 9/10 pm, cooks until the wee hours of the morning, sleeps for maybe five hours, gets up, and starts cooking again until dinnertime, and even when we have started to eat, he is still in the kitchen cooking for a good 20 minutes, finishing off some of the other dishes while we start on what's already finished.

But cooking is not a solitary activity. At these large dinners and parties, the host will be cooking in the kitchen, and as the other families, arrive, everyone bee-lines into the kitchen: those who can cook (usually the Aunties and myself) begin helping with the preparations, and those who cannot, linger around. There is always a crowd in the kitchen, and there is always a conversation to join. Whether it is because you are preparing the same dish together, or using the same facilities (sink, stove, counter, etc.) there is always someone to converse with, and people who are not cooking usually join these conversations. While white people may quilt together, asian people cook together. It is a great time to catch up with people's lives or discuss recent events. It gives us something to do with our hands while we chat. I find that cooking brings us closer together as a family.

The other factor, of course, is the meal itself.

In the context of normal dinner with my parents and sister, it is a quiet affair. We all sit together and eat and talk about our day/lives. It is a chance for us to bond as a family, to laugh together and be happy together. It is so easy to be home as a family, but not interact with each other that dinner becomes a time when we are together as a family, which is increasingly rare as we get older. I remember that growing up, it was an unspoken rule that the family eat together, and that it was very disrespectful to leave the table in the middle of a meal (the ONLY exception was to get up to get condiments from the cooking area). It was also an unspoken rule that we sat together at the table until the everyone was finished eating. Of course, as I said earlier, the consumption of the food makes it that much easier to get along.

In the context of large dinners with extended families, food, be it lunch or dinner (breakfast is a smaller affair because we, being Asians, are night people and usually not everyone is awake until it is near lunch time) is an extravagant pageant. One the food is served and Grace said, we eat. We cook not only good tasting, food, but very large amounts of food. We will sit down and eat one serving, then two, all the while talking and laughing, sharing stories, our lives, connecting, bonding. The initial meal portion lasts about an hour, followed by about an hour of nibbling at the food, followed by about another hour of just sitting at the table with our empty plates and leftovers on the table in front of us, still chatting, still laughing. Then, after clean up, if we just ate dinner, about an hour later, we get together for dessert, which is just as extravagant as the dinner itself. We usually like making fruit and gelatinous "cake" (for the lack of a better term; they are more like pudding than anything else) dishes. Usually there are three, four, maybe five dessert dishes in all. Sometimes there will be actual cake. And then we all gather and sit for another hour or so to eat dessert.

Family meals are a long, drawn out spectacle. As you can see, easily four hours or more of our gathering is spent revolving around food. Like I said, it is the mode that brings us together; it is the thing over which our family becomes a family, not just a bunch of people who share genetics.

This is something that I've tried to bring to our group of friends. I want to share this kind of experience with you - the wonder and the sheer joy that comes out of cooking and eating together, of working together to create something that we can then all enjoy and experience together. This is why I love food, and why I will never get enough of it. It is not the taste or flavour that I crave - it is the feeling of belonging and the joy of being together with people I love that comes with food: that is what I will never be able to get enough of.

I'm tired and it's midnight, so my writing may not be superb, but it'll do for a blog post. Good luck with the rest of your exams, Clay! I can't wait to see you again (I'm almost going into withdrawal XD).

Chat soon,
Tim

PS - I find it funny that you came back from Trinity for Easter and I left Ladner to spend Easter with my extended family in Chiliwak =P