Monday, September 29, 2008

Food for thoughts

The author suggests that we can understand  a foreign culture by examining a food they usually eat. It means that what they are reflects on their food. He lists some countries with their food which show their status and international relations, as well. He concludes that we can notice what a country think it's important, the country's history, and even about the future through learning about their food.

It's worth trying to analyze a country's food in a sense, and it seems interesting. However,  it's just a kind of observation report, not a standard or good criteria to understand a country's culture and international relationship between contries. It's obvious to make influence each other if they are adjacent or they have a history to fight each other, politically or socially.
And it's not a balanced manner to write a country's cuisine culture scorning with his own taste, because a country's cuisine culture stands for the country itself in a sense.

It's not a matter of agree and disagree, it's a matter of comfort and discomfort when reading.

I'd like to pick up the most embarrasubg question rather than the most interesting question.
It's the last one, 'Can food attitudes in different countries be an indicator of future conflicts or resolution of current ones?'
It's because the author seems to do wordplay with food.

4 comments:

Leomi said...

I'm with you. It's an interesting topic indeed, but to a certain extent, nobody choose the topic is because it is not worthy to link food and nations relationship together.

We cant deny that food could reflect the cultures. But it seemed making a fuss to stess the importance of food's role of the international relationships.

Woo said...

I agree with this sentence you mentioned in your entry "It's not a matter of agree and disagree, it's a matter of comfort and discomfort when reading." Yeah, I think it is not a problem whether agree or not.

And I can understand easily what you are talking about.

Alyssa R. said...

I also really like your comment, "It's not a matter of agree and disagree, it's a matter of comfort and discomfort when reading."

I wonder how comfortable or uncomfortable you were reading this compared to an American. It makes me wonder too, who do you think the intended audience was for this article?

Adel said...

you have some vocab that I didn't know, but still a good summary.
maybe it is better to make a glossary for some hard words.