everybody grows up eating food from
their culture it becomes a part of who
each of us are on an individual level a
lot of people associate certain foods
with memories from our childhood or our
family get-togethers or community events
it causes us to hold food at a special
place in our hearts and give it personal value
food also holds value in a
cultural context that's why it's a part
of anthropology traditional cuisine is
passed down from one generation to the
next operating as an expression of
cultural identity people bring
traditional foods with them from one
country to the next preserving their
culture even when they may move to new
places food can represent a culture's
unique history lifestyle values and
beliefs even as it moves across borders
and as the world becomes more globalized
it's easier to access cuisines from
different cultures the foods of the
United States for example reflect its
history and culture the indigenous
populations of North America have their
own foods as well as cooking and eating
practices the European colonization of
the Americas introduced European
ingredients and cooking styles as time
went on the influx of immigrants from
all over the world developed a rich
diversity in food preparation throughout
the country to look into the how this
plays into the area that we live Tara
Trent and I decided to go around to
different people in Forest Grove on and
off campus and ask them to illustrate on
a small piece of cardboard some food
that holds some significance for them
culturally or for their family traditions
and in the end we all put it together in
some sort of collage of food culture and
considering our college budget of
approximately zero dollars it went
pretty well
do you have cardboard that's fantastic
that's exactly what I need
I don't have any hands left
still love the door
sick put it in this box alright  I'll be on my way
alright I should have
give me a I need to I need to rearrange I gotta put something down alright
alright so I went around to a
handful of friends and I managed to get
this much cardboard there's like six
boxes here of varying sizes and today is
Wednesday and it turns out that on
Tuesday the sanitation workers came by
and picked up all the recycling and all
the trash so we have a lot less to work
with today than if we would have started
sooner which kind of sucks but we make
do with what we got and we'll be
collecting through the end of the week so
hope for the best
hi it's 1:00 a.m. and I have collected
six more boxes I believe I told like one
friend I needed cardboard and all of a
sudden like 10 people were like "I have a
box" so you know the power of community
engagement anyway I thought that getting
boxes would be difficult but this is
actually going along pretty well
so kudos
so Danny what you making
take a guess you'll never get it
this doesn't look that great cause I'm a horrible artist
anyway it's something my grandpa used to
make with my dad and then my dad made it
with me it's something Italian and I
don't remember the name it's a tomato
with either spinach or basil leaf
depending on what you want and then
there's cheese and vinegar on top
Danny  talk about yours taco bout it taco bout it
so I got a taco need I say more
I'm Mexican
and we like tacos so I painted a taco cuz
you know what I like tacos
this is a meal called
kicked up beans and rice it's basically
rice beans kielbasa sausage and tomato
sauce it's basically just like a staple
of my family it's what we brought to all
of our dinners to all the potlucks all
that stuff and people always asked us
for it or where it was if we never
brought it and we brought something else
so it just reminds me all those memories
growing up and spending time with my
family and going out and doing things
I'm gonna draw an egg right now
an egg
I drew an egg and little rice grains and
spam because me and my grandma used to
make kimchi fried rice with spam this
this is pho a traditional Viet dish
my family always made it from scratch
but when we got lazy or when we came
back from like family trips and things
we would go out to eat pho
is that supposed to be syrup yes me and my
brothers would spend the weekend at my
aunt's house when parents went out of town
one special thing she would always do is
make us a huge plate of chocolate chip
pancakes
and she also made us lots of latkes when
we celebrated Hanukkah with her but as I
said before latkes are too hard
to draw
this is a pastie pie that has meat and potatoes and
rutabaga and onion and it's important to
the family because it's a traditional
Welsh dish and my great-grandparents are
Welsh so we kind of eat this off like a
reminder of where we come from and it's
super super good and it's always like a
good time just reminisce over our family
this is cream of wheat
my grandma used to make this
for me all the time when I was a kid and it  reminds me of when I lived with my grandparents
this is a bottle of wine from my
vineyard back home for every sort of
event or outing we do we always bring a
ball of wine I grew up on a vineyard so
we just always had wine for dinner
and all meals every memory I remember
since I was like seven years old I could
pour wine for my parents properly so
this is a ginger man or a ginger woman
this is significant for me because my
family all my members are in the medical
field so a lot of time we weren't all
home for the holidays so it might have been
like December second or third that we'd
all get together and make gingerbread
people and it was just a way to get us
together and get into the holiday spirit
even though we couldn't all be together
all the time so I drew hot and sour soup
so this is how our soup is culturally
so I drew hot and sour soup so hot and sour soup is culturally
relevant to me because it reminds me of
my hometown because I used to live right
next to a Chinese restaurant
this is funeral potatoes this is the one
dish that my family has at any event
like any of it it's also the dish it's
called funeral potatoes so it's also the
dish that was always brought to for the
after so many of the funeral but then
also just ended up becoming a dish
that's I agree I think a big family
event
I drew ramen noodles I ate it a lot
when I was a kid because we were kind of
poor and so and ramen noodles are really
cheap you've ever tried cracking an egg
into it no but that is a traditional way
of making it with egg and vegetables and stuffon top
I drew Udon it's a Japanese food and
it's kind of like ramen the noodle
is white and made a bit wider and also
soup it's based on soy sauce
I drew a pork tamale because my stepdad is
Hispanic and so we have a lot of Hispanic
family that comes in for all the
holidays they always will bring us
tamales that they made fresh and we'll eat those and it's good
yeah definitely when I was younger I never thought America had a culture
I thought America was just culture-less and every other country had a culture
and we were just here like bums
that's literally when I was a kid I didn't think that we
had culture we were just Americans and
then every other place had their thing
but we as Americans were just Americans
and that's what that's ethnocentric
that's using your culture to basically
define the standards of everything else
and that's as a kid that's essentially
what I did because what we did was normal
but what everyone else it was special
yeah like that definitely came through
when I came to asking people to do these
things especially with people whose
closer relatives weren't from other
countries or who were from many generations in
America or especially white people too
that I asked we're very like "but I don't
even have a culture like what do you
want me to do McDonald's" you know the
thing is is like we're so surrounded by
that that we kind of think it's stupid
not cultural you know
and to be like "my cultural food is a
hamburger" like that doesn't come across
right like it doesn't feel right adding
the whole family tradition thing into it
kind of showed that aspect of it for
example like the Mormon funeral potatoes
it's like you don't really think that
that's cultural you're calling them
funeral potatoes funerals in themselves
as a very like cultural situation and
then having a specific food that goes to
it to the point where we name that food
after the event yeah like that's like a
big example of a cultural thing one
person I interviewed Yuri the Japanese
international student when i asked her just to
do a food she just did the casual food you get
anywhere which is Udon noodles like living
in Japan I feel like you just go to a
ramen shop and order that super easily
where here you can go to McDonald's and get a burger or
any burger place literally and get
food whereas in Japan you probably got to a ramen shop and just get ramen literally
it's fine it's a different culture other
places and they probably
have that same sense of it's just normal
here this is just how we are
I think that we did pretty good I mean it's all
recycled materials like sustainable
and we didn't buy anything we got some
community involvement going to reach out
to everybody and be like y'all
participate let's get some different
viewpoints in on this I think that's important
culture is good food is better that's my final words
