A Love Letter to the Food That Raised Me

Written by Brendan Gieseke

Apparently, since birth, I was a difficult child; not just with the usual tantrums to midnight awakenings, but in the sense that I’ve always had a specific taste palette that was… well, (you could say) unusual for most children. I grew up in a multicultural family: a Japanese mother and a Midwestern father. My mom immigrated to the country when she was roughly my age to live with her aunt. 

In honesty, she describes her departure from Japan as an "escape"—sometimes joking, sometimes not—merging from feelings of entrapment and a dire need to experience new cultures. Yet, despite the gaps between my mother and Japanese society, she raised me into a person with a passionate sense of both two halves of my identity. In fact, I’ve been told that as a kid, I used to eat nothing but Japanese food, would reject typical "childhood" delights like pizza and Mac & Cheese, and still to this day can automatically go on streaks of only eating Asian food for too long that I have to remind myself to keep a multicultural palette! 

But, in all seriousness, I wanted to write a type of momento thank-you letter to my mom and write about the impact of her Japanese dishes on my identity and discuss why it’s so important for people to use food as a way to connect with their ethnicity and cultures. 

Beyond being more than supportive of eating my cultural cuisines at restaurants, my mom has always taught me about my culture through the meals she would make. One of my favorites was Bento Boxes, which can be understood as a Japanese version of lunch boxes. Except, it feels much more avant-garde than—no offense—a pack of Lunchables. It’s common to be perceived as a meal that your mom makes in the mornings and lets you take to school for lunch. These can often come with that sentimental feeling of your mother’s love and cute illustrations of characters like Hello Kitty in the rice. It ties nicely into Japan’s culture to be attracted to obsessively cute characters and the history of hard-working ideologies that tie together work, meals, and family connections. 

Alternatively, some bento boxes are perceived through their historical associations with our Shinkansen (bullet trains) and the way salary workers can enjoy a solid meal while on the train. Today, it’s even widely available within our kombini (convenience stores) and supermarkets—though just as nutritious and delicious, these don’t carry the equal weight of emotion that homemade bentos culturally represent. 

While the bento boxes represent one example of the many ways my mom has taught me about Japanese culture, I want to convey the effectiveness of staying in tune with your ethnicity and culture through the lens of food. When I eat bento, taking this example, I feel closely related to my culture. It feels that I’m not only completing an ethnic obligation, but envisioning the years of ancient Japanese agriculture that eventually led to the need for bento; I envision acceptance into a community of Japanese citizens who also find serious importance in the meal’s tradition; and most importantly, I find the cruciality of food to be that it’s a way to prevent the forgetting of your culture.

I’ve talked to many Japanese people who have grown up in the States and seem more disconnected from their ethnicity. And, while they are in no way at fault for growing up in an environment that makes the remembrance difficult, my gratitude for having home-cooked Japanese meals extends to my sense of identity, pride of being Japanese, and feeling a connection to my roots. It is with this that I feel the need to vocalize the dire value for immigrants to continue to make traditional foods and teach about culture. Food is arguably a part of a culture, and to be an immigrant, to me, becomes a passionate lifestyle that begs for the value in doing your best to stay true to who you want to be; and if your identity should include your ethnicity, then it is more than beautiful. 

Thumbnail Credit:

https://www.pexels.com/photo/delicious-asian-bento-meal-with-soup-and-rice-35211814/