During just about any holiday, a large family sits in a house barely able to hold the amount of people in it. Children screaming, their mothers attempting to quiet them down by shoving candy in their faces. My family is neither Christian, Catholic, nor Jewish. Yet at just about any holiday, you can find us gathered somewhere, the excuse of a holiday fueling an overwhelmingly large feast in someone’s home. My house was built upon sharing. A huge pot of fettucine, stuffed grape leaves, rice pudding, or fried chicken sat on the stove at all times. Family members came in and out, everyone helping themselves to anything. Eating food equated to an inclusive sense of intimacy, as it was the only activity that brought my rather overpopulated family together (even the smokers who spent nearly the entire night outside in the cold).
My family (as in, my mother) ate strictly halal, which is a religious requirement to many Muslims. Therefore, getting food from fast food restaurants didn’t occupy a large part of our lives. We went out to eat as a family, but still mostly Middle Eastern food. My mother can also make just about any meal, from Middle Eastern to Chinese to Italian, which makes convincing her that getting something from a restaurant is ever as good as if she had made it herself. As a result, our house always had a plethora of foods from all around the world. I grew up in the Northside of Chicago, one of the most diverse areas of the city, so my mother became familiar with making foods from vastly different areas. My family is Lebanese, so staples such as olive oil, olives, Labne, pita bread, raw liver, stuffed intestines, and raw red meat were always served, as well as burgers, chicken tenders, stir fry, homemade pasta, and even homemade sushi. Despite this diversity of options, however, my mother had some rather strong opinions about many foods she refused to bring into the house. She believed (and still does) that SPAM, Smucker’s Goobers, and white Wonder bread were just about the absolute worst foods ever made, amongst some other American staples. This made me realize that the majority of my diet and opinions that similarly formed about food had been dictated by my mother. My father ate just about everything, from non-halal to white Wonder bread, yet my mother never allowed those things in our house, so they were never necessary. As a child, I resented this way of living. Yet growing up now, I realize that most halal meat is raised and killed more ethically, and is cleaner (which my mom would make sure of because she watched the butcher cut whatever part of the animal she told him to). Even the thought of forbidding canned meat to enter our bodies is absolutely justified in my mind today. This is where cultural discrepancies between myself and my friends begin to show. All of their families bought packaged meat, a concept my mother is simply unfamiliar with. They had significantly less people over for dinner, while we had extended family over for dinner almost every night. They didn’t care what we ate when we went out while I did, since I was raised to believe that this way of killing whatever I was eating was better. This lasted long enough, until my rebellious demand for a later curfew and endless rides to the mall began to take place. Middle school then became a very liberating time. When a preteen starts hanging out with friends after school, the only places to go are mini marts and local fast-food chains. The idea of “hanging out” meant going to get gyros from Hub’s, getting Dunkin Donuts before class, or getting an Arizona tea, a honeybun, and a bag of Hot Cheetos every day after school. It gave me liberty to dive into a world of indulgence far away from the shackles of the real food my mother made. This went well into high school, especially when my friends started to drive. The city of Chicago became a place of adventures to different late-night soul food and buffalo wings spots. Recognition of these extremely unhealthy eating habits didn’t settle in until I moved to Dearborn my senior year of high school, where the stark contrast between city and suburban life made me realize how my restlessness in a big city all my life had created eating habits I no longer desired to maintain. My senior year of high school, the clock struck midnight on January 1st and I, along with millions of Americans, made the resolution of leading and maintaining a healthy, clean diet. To my surprise, I actually did. Looking back to that time, it was the first resolution I’ve made on New Year’s Eve that I’ve managed to maintain, and it was possibly the best decision of my life yet. I began grocery shopping with my mother for healthier foods. I began to cook for myself, eating sautéed vegetables as my family stuffed their faces with mama’s chicken tenders at the same dinner table. I didn’t notice myself slipping into someone with a very different taste in food than I had only a few months ago. Very soon, pop became unthinkable, hot chips despicable, and the thought of drinking two tall sugary Frappuccinos a day unbearable. I began to have complete control over my diet and what I allow in my body at what time. I began to enjoy foods such as licorice, dark chocolate, sparkling water, black coffee, and mushrooms just as my mom had, a place of preference I vowed I would never reach as a child. I began understanding the values and benefits of eating clean. As a result, I got in shape and began to enjoy cooking, as it offered me new ways to experiment with this newfound love for food that’s been present in my life in a very different way. I began to long to know what was in my food. Now, as a college student, I recognize this transition. My mother’s food was fresh. Middle Eastern food is generally healthier than American, yet she added variety that made the assembly of these foods refined to make them fattening and delicious. She didn’t care about the healthiness of the ingredients she used to assemble a meal. She cared about the ingredient itself, where it came from, and how much we all enjoyed it. Now as a college student, I began to meal-prep and make sure I consume the least amount of refined and processed food as I can. I long for my mother’s cooking, but the act of going home and gathering around the table I dreaded as a child became a delicacy, something to cherish because it is no longer always available. This independence gave me control of my body, it made me cherish the way my mother raised me to view food as a source of intimacy between others. It’s an activity that has been associated with love and tenderness, the quality of food enhanced by whoever is making it. Yet it’s also bittersweet, where pleasure from having control over my diet coexists with longing for a time when my eating habits were not my responsibility, a time of simply looking forward to waffle fries from Wolfy’s or mama’s Tabbouleh, hummus, and fried fish afterschool. FOOD AUTOBIOGRAPHY (REVISED): During just about any holiday, a large family sits in a house barely able to hold its own weight. My family is Muslim, and during every season, you can find us gathered around a table, the excuse of any holiday fueling an overwhelmingly large feast in someone’s home. My house was built upon sharing. A huge pot of fettuccine, stuffed grape leaves, rice pudding, or fried chicken sat on the stove at all times. Family members came in and out, everyone helping themselves to anything. Eating food equated to an inclusive sense of intimacy that brought my rather large family together. My family (as in, my mother) ate strictly halal, which is a religious requirement for many Muslims. Therefore, getting food from fast food restaurants didn’t occupy a large part of our lives. We went out to eat as a family, but still mostly ate Middle Eastern food. My mother can also make any meal from Chinese to Italian, which makes it hard to convince her that getting premade food is nearly ever as good as making it at home. I grew up in the Northside of Chicago, one of the most diverse areas of the city, so my mother became familiar with making foods from vastly different parts of the world. As a result, our house always had a plethora of foods that she altered in some way. My family is Lebanese, so staples such as olive oil, olives, Labne, pita bread, raw liver, stuffed intestines, and raw red meat were always served as well as homemade burgers, chicken tenders, stir fry, pasta, and sushi. Despite this diversity of options, however, my mother had strong opinions about many foods she refused to bring into the house. She believed that SPAM, Smucker’s Goobers, and white Wonder bread were the worst foods ever made. This made me realize that the majority of my diet and opinions that formed about nutrition had been shaped by the way my mother treated the choice and preparation of food. My father ate just about everything, from non-halal to white Wonder bread, yet my mother never allowed those things in our house. She cherished the act of making meals over buying them, always emphasizing the intrinsic value of knowing how one’s meal was assembled. Her repulsion of most heavily processed food came from the recognition of a vast difference between her childhood eating habits and our own, since hers was marked by the task of making food as opposed to its current immediate availability. Growing up in war-stricken Beirut in the 70s, she described to me how making food was the most positive aspect the day. My grandfather owned a butcher shop and a pepper garden that made meal preparation essential to their lives over anything else, especially due to the lack of schooling during the civil war. Similarly to the women described in Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven, my mother felt an obligation to feed us food she prepared herself. Perhaps this was a faulty cultural and societal standard she held herself up to as a working woman, but nevertheless it ensured her own creation of almost every meal. It was never about health to her as much as love. Food is an extension of her affection towards us as a mother. As a child, I resented this way of living when cultural discrepancies between myself and my friends began to show. All of their families bought packaged meat, a concept my mother is simply unfamiliar with. They had significantly fewer people over for dinner, while we had extended family over for dinner almost every night. They didn’t care what they ate at restaurants while I did, since I was raised to believe that this way of killing whatever I was eating was more aligned with our views as a family. It was natural for my mother to abide to it, but among the world of boxed lunches and fried food I saw on TV and in my friend’s houses, the idea of daily food preparation seemed exhausting and unnecessary. I lacked an understanding of the importance of the art of making food. I didn’t get why we had to eat halal despite the number of times she explained the ethics of the process as it relates to us. I underestimated how important it was for her to extend her own values about nutrition and the ethics of eating to her children. As a result, middle school was a very different time. Mini-marts and fast food chains became a daily part of life. Hanging out meant getting gyros from Hub’s, Dunkin Donuts before class, an Arizona tea, a Honeybun, or a bag of Hot Cheetos after school. These foods were a part of a world separate from home, where my mother warned me about my eating habits but ultimately let go, realizing that my own food choices were beginning to form. This went well into high school, especially when my friends began to drive. The city became a place of adventures to different late-night soul food and buffalo wings spots. Recognition of these extremely unhealthy eating habits didn’t come until my family and I moved to Dearborn, Michigan my senior year of high school. The stark contrast between city and suburban life made me realize that I had created eating habits I no longer desired to maintain. My senior year of high school, my views on food shifted. Since I was still adjusting to the hush of the suburbs, I spent the majority of my time at home. I didn’t care to make friends. I didn’t want to go out. This led to a dormant life, one that was detached from everything I had been used to before. I began spending more time with my mother at home, which inevitably led to grocery shopping together. In an effort to clean up my diet, I began to cook for myself. I wanted to establish a connection with food that was my own, one dictated by own taste as opposed to the mere influence of others, including my family. Something about a life of fast food was no longer satisfying, maybe because it wasn’t natural for me growing up. Something about my mother’s cooking seemed careless in its adherence to health despite her perfect assembly of it all. I started eating sautéed vegetables that I’d prepared myself as my family stuffed their faces with mama’s chicken tenders at the dinner table. I didn’t notice myself slipping into someone with a very different taste in food than I had months ago. Very soon, pop became unthinkable, hot chips despicable, and the thought of drinking two tall sugary Frappuccinos a day unbearable. This could be because the oversaturation of those foods turned into disgust, but it was mostly the liberation that came with having control over how my food is prepared and what went in it. My skin got clearer and my mental and physical health improved, which made me realize that this shift was beneficial for my well-being. My own values began to take shape through this independence. Today I long for my mother’s cooking, but the act of going home and gathering around the table is something I cherish because it is no longer always available. My struggle with this shaping of nutritional independence wasn’t strictly for my own health, though. My AP Language teacher taught a unit on conscious eating and factory farming in high school. That exposure to Food Inc.and The Junglescarred me. I immediately became a vegetarian for nine months simply because I felt awful and disgusting. After those nine months, however, I ultimately resorted to eating strictly halal. The problem I had wasn’t with killing animals for food, it was subjecting them to torture and breeding them for failure for the sake of consumption. A code of ethics began intertwining and clashing this semester when this problem was addressed by Jonathan Safran Foer in Eating Animals. Foer’s example of Kafka’s encounter with fish and the association of meat-eating with a sense of personal invasion sparked a feeling of guilt for my current eating habits, regardless of what kind of meat I ate (Foer 37). Our mercy for certain animals over others seems alien to me, yet my mind cannot fathom the equivalence of a dog to a cow. The debate we had in class made me long for the opposing team to simply say “killing animals is wrong,” and to present a strong and emotional ethical obligation on our part as their argument. But because I was raised to believe that certain animals serve a purpose the same way we do, the barbaric nature of eating animal flesh doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should. There always seems to be a barrier despite my feeling of shame that Kafka deems as the forgetfulness of a part of oneself (Foer 37). I would like to agree with Foer and Kafka about our unfair denial of humanity to animals due to their inferiority, but as long as I’m still consuming meat I cannot do so. When Foer later adds the layer of obligation we have for the sustainability of our planet, my ethics were challenged even more. The urgency of the matter is clear, but the cultural baggage Foer suggests reshaping is probably the hardest part for me to let go. Food to me is bonding, and the lack of certain foods in my home will take away from that sense of intimacy I was raised to experience through my mother’s cooking. Today my efforts lie in decreasing meat consumption as much as possible as opposed to eliminating it altogether. Eating all kinds of different meats growing up shaped my immune system and helped me develop a taste for myself that is bred upon a specific cultural cuisine. Although I could not completely abandon this, the idea of vegetarianism is no longer simply black and white because of this class. Learning the impacts of meat consumption and how it has affected me was eye-opening, especially since meat seems to fit so naturally in our diets despite its current unnatural state of production. Shifting to a life of less meat seems to me now to be the only way to lessen the impact of this threat we’re constantly posing upon nature. My upbringing has shaped my views on the ethics of food but I am continuously evolving due to my increasing exposure to the truth of it all. There seems to be a disconnect between my food and I that results from processed food, which I've never been aware of until I reflected upon my evolving relationship with food. Now that I am aware of what is good for me and what is valuable to me, my choices have to extend beyond myself. I have a social obligation to protect what I care about, which includes both my body and the planet. I hope that one day I will be able to divorce the ethics of meat eating from the state of meat production today. Knowledge is a great foundation to change, but action is even greater. My role as an advocate for that change just begun.
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