Some Food For Thought
This happened about a year ago now when I was in high school. My calculus class was very chill. About 20 kids who were all friendly with each other, a laid-back but enthusiastic teacher, and a light enough workload that we could afford to goof off in class but still learn and do well. At some point in the year, I got really into cooking. It’s my stress reliever.
My family couldn’t possibly eat the amount of food I made, so I started bringing it in to school and “hosting” Friday parties in my calc class, with my teacher’s approval of course. Now, I’m Vietnamese and I live in a predominately white town. This is only important because it meant that most kids from town only ate American or European foods, and weren’t used to eating other ethnic foods.
Last year around Lunar New Year, I wanted to bring in some Vietnamese foods to celebrate. It is a very important time of year for my family. I ended up making a bunch of Bánh Da Lợn, a steamed layer cake, and a traditional Vietnamese dessert. Some of my friends from class found out I was going to bring in a traditional dish and brought in their own traditional dishes from their own cultures, whether they celebrated Lunar New year or not.
We had different Indian, Korean, Filipino, and Spanish desserts. It was great and I was really excited that my friends wanted to celebrate with me. Apparently, this was an issue for one girl in my class. I would say Bánh Da Lợn is an acquired taste, so when not a lot of people ate it I wasn’t offended. I knew not everybody would like it. There was a lot of other food anyways.
During our lunch period, one of my friends (who wasn’t in our class but knew I brought food in) overheard a girl from my class complaining about the food while on the lunch line. Apparently, she was saying really negative things about how I “forced everyone to eat weird Chinese foods.” Later that day, I texted her just saying I heard she didn’t like the food and wanted to know why.
I don’t really care when people don’t like the food (I make it for myself and bring it in when I have extra anyways), but her calling it “weird Chinese foods” (when she knows I’m Vietnamese) didn’t sit right with me. Welp, she texted back something worse. She said that it was rude of me to bring in “weird ethnic foods” that nobody would have liked except for me and said I should know better since most of the class was white.
I told her that I bring in food to share because I feel like it and that I don’t have an obligation to cater to her tastes. If she has an issue with it, she literally does not have to eat it, and other people can bring in food too, so if she wanted to, she could bring in something more to her tastes. After that, she just told me that I shouldn’t bring in ethnic and foreign foods and stick with American foods, “because we’re in America.”
Excuse me??? Like??? How much you wanna bet if I brought in jambalaya, which originated in Louisiana, she would call it a “weird foreign food.” But fine. She only wants to eat American foods? Then she can eat American foods. The next week I brought in a bunch of Oliebol, a Dutch doughnut, and started passing them out at the beginning of class.
When I got to her desk, though, I pulled out a loaf of Wonder Bread and plopped it on her desk, saying, “Sorry but these are Dutch, too ethnic. Here you go, all American cuisine.” Later she texted me asking what my problem was, so I told her that almost every single food I brought in this year was ethnic and that it made me angry she only had an issue when it wasn’t European.
She’s entitled to not liking Asian foods but if you’re going to complain about it being ethnic, then you better have that same attitude when the ethnic food is white. And especially don’t call another person’s culture weird. She didn’t complain about the food again.