Cuisine valuable for cultural understanding

A few days ago, I returned from a week-long mission trip to Nicaragua, and the thing that I miss… A few days ago, I returned from a week-long mission trip to Nicaragua, and the thing that I miss most is the food. The trip was truly a life-changing experience, and I could talk for hours about the community of people we met living in a trash dump, or the kids we met living in a children’s home, or the beauty of a volcano among mountains or even about when I tried surfing.

But instead, I’m going to talk about the food. And why, when travelling internationally, you should make it a point to eat international foods.

Nicaraguan food is delicious. Really, really delicious. The spice-filled flavors of Nicaraguan cooking stimulated my palate and had my mouth watering before every meal. From each breakfast, when I was greeted with fresh fruit, to each dinner, complete with heaping spoonfuls of rice, I enjoyed nearly everything I ate in the country (except one dish in which I had an unfortunate encounter with some sort of plaintain-cheese-crepe-looking thing).

The first reason you should eat international food is to broaden your own palate and learn about new tastes and flavor combinations. I was unsure about whether I would like Nicaraguan food because I had never had anything like it in the U.S. I needn’t have feared. Now when I go to restaurants or try a new recipe, I know that I have a whole new list of flavors and tastes to add to my meal possibilities. You may find that you really hate a different kind of food, or you might be pleasantly surprised to find that you really like it. But for the sake of possibly broadening the field of flavors you enjoy, you might as well try international foods. Then, you can at least be familiar with a wide variety of flavors and their home countries.

Another reason you should eat international food is because it is the first step to truly experiencing a different culture and community. If you are trying to understand another culture, you first have to start at its most basic needs. A culture is composed of people, and all people desire food, drink and sleep. By tasting the food of another culture, you can share in the basic human need for food and gain an understanding of the culture in the process.

One thing that I’ve noticed in many of my international experiences is that many cultures use similar products to create their food. While Mexican food and Nicaraguan food taste extremely different, they both basically use rice, beans, chicken, beef, vegetables and other basic ingredients. You can find these in almost every international food group. In its most basic form, many cultures’ foods have very similar elements. It is in this similarity that we can grow in our understanding of the commonalities between various cultures and find ways to relate to the global community. If you can find similarities in food, you are one step closer to finding similarities in dress, manner or even language. When your mindset is put into a mode to find similarities from your meal at the beginning of the day, it will continue to do the same throughout all of your experiences.

At the same time that many ingredients are similar in different food genres, many international culturesare still drastically different in the methods they use to prepare their food, the spices they use and even sometimes how they eat food. If you’re eating the authentic food of a country, you are eating something that is perfectly unique to the place you are. Just as food can help you recognize the similarities in a culture, it can also help you realize the differences. In Nicaragua, I noticed the unique spices on most of their foods, and the next thing I knew, I was paying attention to the fact that women don’t wear shorts, even in the heat, and that men don’t grow beards, only moustaches. Because we can celebrate the differences between communities in different countries, studying the food differences can be a good start to celebrating the cultural differences as well.

Ultimately, my advice to you is to eat international foods just to have the experience. If nothing else, you will have done something outside of your comfort zone and tried something new for a while. Life is composed of new experiences, one after another, to grow and to shape your identity. But those new experiences cannot be had unless you are willing to chase them. You might as well start with something as simple as eating a new food. Then, once comfortable, you can graduate on to more exciting or physical experiences. First I was eating Nicaraguan food, then hiking the hills of the city, and then I was surfing (poorly) in the Pacific Ocean. These moments build off one another to create a whole cultural experience.

If I had eaten at a McDonald’s in Nicaragua, I would have lost out on the cultural experience that grew from eating authentic food. I ate it every day, and was blessed by all that I learned from it. When you travel internationally, it’s vital that you eat the food there and, if possible, for every meal.

So the next time you are in a new place, be it as close as Nashville or as far as Nicaragua or even farther away in Hong Kong, start your new experience by eating the food. Embrace the food, and you will embrace the culture.