It All Comes Back to the Plate: Food’s Role in Understanding Culture

Like a waving flag and the rhythms of language, food is one of the key aspects of understanding culture. When looking to understand people and their history, one can scour libraries and study books. Yet a story exists not found in old tomes, but instead on the dinner table. Through ingredients, tastes, smells and colour, we are told tales of struggle, love, pride and passion.
It is through the dinner plate that we can deepen our understanding of different cultures.

To appreciate food’s role in understanding culture, we must go back to food’s essential utility in societies around the world. Beyond sustenance and basic nutrition, food is social. In every civilization around the world, humans use food as a tool to bond, socialize and connect.

From our primordial ancestors eating communal meals around the hearth as their social focal point, to modern celebrations such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and birthdays, food binds us together and serves as the backdrop for our relationships.

We eat family meals, a moment in the day for us to come together and share stories, struggles and successes. We help our friends get over breakups by coming over with ice cream, giving lovers chocolates, and celebrating weddings with grand banquets. Some of our religions’ most important ceremonies and practices centre around the indulgence, or abnegation, of certain foods.

We build deep, meaningful connections with each other, food serving as the gel. It’s the way we’ve evolved, making social eating deeply important for our psychological health. A study by Oxford University asserts that ‘communal eating increases social bonding and feelings of wellbeing’.

Yet, in today’s Western world, we have somewhat lost this awareness of food’s symbolism.

Due to the increasing demands on our attention, time and schedules, we often eat meals by ourselves. We’re on the go, getting takeaways and quick snacks. Sometimes we’re not aware of the food itself, our attention elsewhere, perhaps on a box set. The same Oxford study notes:

‘A third of weekday evening meals are eaten in isolation, and the average adult eats 10 meals out of 21 alone every week. Busy lives and hectic work schedules are the main causes of this solitary dining trend.’

Perhaps this is indicative of a wider trend: of our society slowly becoming more isolated and less social in general.

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As humans used food to socialize, unique cultures formed, around which food served as the bedrock. When looking at a country, a region, or a people, food is a physical expression of its cultural fabric.

The base ingredients represent the topography, such as an East Asian soybean, a Mediterranean olive or American maize. The dishes they make up tell tales of class, attitudes and history, such as the journey of lobster from a poor man’s meal, washing up in abundance on the USA’s East Coast, to haute cuisine symbolic of luxury.

The distinctive ways in which we eat help us in understanding cultural stories too. In India, it is common to eat certain dishes like a roti with your hands (but never with the left), while such a practice is unheard of in the West. In Japan, where waste is shameful, it is respectful to finish the food on your plate. However, in nearby China, finishing your plate is rude, implying to your host that they did not feed you enough.

Food, and the way we eat it, has become synonymous with our respective cultures. A dish as iconic as pizza is just as ardent a representative of Italy as any Olympic athlete competing on the world stage. In the same vein, as humans migrate and travel, cultures blend, giving birth to new, magical dishes.

Swiss chocolate, Chicago-style pizzas, and even classic dishes like fish & chips. Did you know the British staple actually came from elsewhere? During the Sephardi expulsion from Iberia, Portuguese Jews came to the UK to seek refuge, bringing with them their recipe of battered white fish, which preserved the fish to last during Shabbat, their day of rest where no cooking is allowed.

We can look at new cuisines created from the blending of cultures, telling stories of cultural amalgamation. Nikkei is a cuisine born from Japanese migration to Peru, where cooks use Peruvian ingredients prepared with Japanese methods. In this cuisine, we not only experience delicious, new flavours and textures. We gain an insight into the cultural history of Japanese migration.