A bite of life

I spent my summer in San Francisco, a city where California avocados are truly
local.

The city where kids trade in Chipwich’s for local It’s-Its, an oatmeal raisin cookie ice cream sandwich enveloped in a thin layer of chocolate; where Mission burritos pack one-and-a-half pounds of carne asada, beans and rice into entities that stand up vertically on their own; where you can find a ramen shop next to a Salvadoran pupuseria next to an In-N-Out Burger.

In San Francisco, food is more than sustenance — it’s an essential part of the city’s culture.

Growing up with a working father and a mother that preferred to express her creativity through painting rather than cooking, I familiarized myself with mixing bowls and the oven at an early age. And while I was sometimes resentful, finding myself in the kitchen out of necessity, I developed a passion for mixing ingredients to create different flavors.

Before I was old enough to ride a bike without training wheels or do long division, I knew something about food that some go all their life without knowing — that food wasn’t just nourishment. Food could tell a story about the chef, a specific moment or even the ingredients.

And 10 years later, I found myself living in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, making ginger scones for minimum wage at Sandbox Bakery and fact-checking Anthony Bourdain’s submission at my internship for food quarterly Lucky Peach, a
publication that centers on the intersection of food and culture.

In my free time, I ate as much as I could.

San Francisco boasts a very ethnically diverse population, and because I believe the best way to learn about a culture is to eat its food, that’s what I did. The Burmese fermented tealeaf salad didn’t just offer me some of the most delicious, complex flavors I’d ever experienced — it offered me a look into Burmese and San Franciscan culture.

You don’t have to stroll through street markets with Andrew Zimmern in Southeast Asia to eat foods that seem “unusual.” Any dish can tell a story.

I’m bringing that knowledge back to Bloomington.

Now that I’m back home, I seek to not only learn more about food in general, but about how it fits into this town’s culture. I’ll continue to study food anthropology, to learn about Japanese cooking from a local chef and to work for Lucky Peach from afar — and then I’ll probably write about it.

I hope you’ll stick with me as I continue to devour what’s put in front of me, and hopefully, I’ll spit out something that isn’t too gristly.

­— acarnold@indiana.edu. Follow columnist Amanda Arnold on Twitter @Amanda_Arnold14