HUM 221 223 -- culture and cuisine

Here's something to think about as we consider the cultural values that influence artistic expressions as different as blues, jazz, hip hop, powwow dancing, Native American poetry and storytelling. Culture also determines what we like to eat, as BBC News correspondent Richard Black notes in this account of why the Japanese consider whale a delicacy. Black reports:

... I was in a waterfront cafe in Shimonoseki, a long-time whaling port.

In front of me was whale meat, from an animal which it is simply unthinkable to eat in Britain - so unthinkable that I had to promise my daughters I would not touch a morsel of it during my time in Japan.

Yet once in Japan, nothing seemed more normal.

This leads him into some fascinating interviews, with a retired Japanese whaler, with an Australian who hunts kangaroos for sport ... well, read it, I can't do it justice in a summary.

Which in turn leads Black into some heavy-duty philosophizing about what we eat -- and don't eat -- and why:

Back in Tokyo, I sat one evening in a sushi restaurant dining with a young, modern urban Japanese lady who was tucking into some raw whale.

I asked whether she would ever eat dog. She looked shocked. No, no, she told me, it would be unthinkable - but her whale was delicious.

A few years before, in Vietnam, I had seen restaurants with cooked dogs hanging up outside, much as Chinese restaurants in Western cities display cooked ducks and slabs of roast pork.

So would Vietnamese people ever eat whale? Apparently not, I am told - it would be unthinkable.

So why the contradiction? Why is it OK to eat horses in France and Italy but not in Britain? Why do Finns proudly serve reindeer, and Icelanders puffin, while others recoil at the thought of eating them?

Does every society concoct its own list of what is acceptable and what is not?

Does every individual do the same? Is it just culture? And if it is, is there any hope of securing agreement between different camps on issues like whaling? Is it even right to try?

What do you think? Ever eaten grasshopper? Rattlesnake? Frog's legs? Ever think about what goes into a hot dog? How does our culture determine what we eat -- and don't eat -- and what we listen to and don't listen to?

Disclosure. I probably shouldn't admit this in public, but I've eaten whale. In Norway, which like Japan is a whaling nation. It tasted a lot like beef. (Which came as a surprise, but shouldn't have. Whales are mammals.) I've had reindeer sausage, too, in Alaska. Not bad. It tasted about like summer sausage.

HUM 221, 223: Fr. Michael Oleksa on culture

Fr. Michael Oleksa, Alaska educator and Russian Orthodox priest, has a talk on cross-cultural communication on Alaska LitSite. It's an edited transcript of a speech he gave at a conference on The Future of Alaska sponsored by the Alaska Humanities Forum and the First Alaskans Foundation.

I need to link it to my syllabuses for the interdisciplinary humanities courses.

Some highlights:

• A definition of culture. What’s your culture? It’s a hard thing to define, isn’t it? Look it up in the dictionary -- Webster is of absolutely no help. They’ll start with bacteria for one thing … But when we ask, “What is your culture?” how do you define that? How do you conceptualize it? Talking about your own culture is one of the most difficult things to do, because your culture is the air you breathe. It’s the aquarium into which you were born, and it’s very hard to imagine what life would have been like if you had been born in a lake or in the ocean. Your aquarium is your world. That’s one way of thinking of culture, but that’s limiting.
  
  I’d like to think of culture as the way you understand the game of life. All games have certain rules and regulations that govern them, basic skills that have to be learned in order to win. If you were born into the culture that organizes conferences like this, you were born into a culture that takes time very seriously. It measures time. You have proverbs like “time is money,” and “don’t waste time.” You talk about time as if it were a quantity or a location. Time is something you can be on or ahead of or behind, and that’s why you have to kill a lot of time before it gets you.
  
  If you were born in rural Alaska, however, you don’t necessarily have that sense of time at all. It’s a different ball game, and that’s the first point I want to make. If your culture is the game of life as you play it, because it’s the only aquarium you’ve ever been in, we often assume that our ball game is the only ball game there is -- that everyone plays life the same way, according to the same rules, with the same presuppositions and with the same goals. Then, when you go to another culture, you’re suddenly up against another ball game and you realize not everybody’s playing on the same field with the same equipment, using the same skills to score the same points.
  
  


• A sense of place, culture and story ... For a newcomer to Alaska flying over our gorgeous wilderness territory, one mountain’s the same as another. They’re all pretty, but none of them strike the viewer, the tourist, as more significant than another one. But ask the Native population who lives in that ecosystem about that terrain, and some places have greater significance than others. There are stories behind those mountains. There are stories on that lake, on the lake shore.
  
  A few months ago at a conference out on the Alaska Peninsula, I tried to get some guys to talk about their village and why it was important to them. I asked them, “Tell me a story about a place near the village.”
  
  One of the men in the group said, “I’ve got one. When I was a boy, I went out on my first moose hunt with my uncle and he took me to a particular place down the river and such. We got to a certain location and we looked further down, and on the hill beyond us a moose emerged from the brush. My uncle said, 'It’s yours, this is your moose hunt, this is your moose.' So I raised my rifle and I shot the moose. It went right down and my uncle was so proud of me. He congratulated me on my first successful moose hunt, and we started moving our boat closer, but the moose stood up again. My uncle slowed the boat down. He said, 'You better shoot again.' So I shot a second time, but we couldn’t believe that moose was that strong to survive the first shot. We got to the hill itself, and as we were climbing the hill, that moose stood up a third time. My uncle said, 'Well, better do it again.' The third time, the moose went down and stayed down. When we got to the top of that hill, boy, were we surprised -- three moose!' No one’s ever written that story down. He said, “Every time I go past that bend in the river, every time I look at that hill, I think Three Moose Hill.”
  


• Language, culture and schools Public schools were founded over a century ago to assimilate the immigrants who were pouring into the United States, passing the Statue of Liberty, being processed in a day or two at Ellis Island, and flooding the east coast of our country. These immigrants spoke, but probably didn’t read or write, their native languages. Almost none of them spoke English. They were of diverse languages and cultures and religions, and had very little formal education and few job skills. Public schools took them at the turn of the last century and helped their children become Americans who could function as productive citizens in society.
  
  That was the focus of public education at the turn of the last century. If we could do that then, what we need to do now is focus on helping us bridge the gaps, respecting and delighting in each other, understanding that we all have something to learn from other people precisely because they don’t play the game of life the same way we do. They don’t see reality the same way we do. We don’t want to stamp that out of them. We want to be enriched by it. It’s a very different approach -- from the melting pot to the salad bowl.
  


• Melting pot vs. 'salad bowl' The melting pot, by Supreme Court decision, had to be abandoned. The melting pot declared one particular culture to be the national norm -- it was White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male. If you could be that or pretend that you had actually come on the Mayflower instead of recently through Ellis Island, you were in. If you couldn’t, you were out.
  
  Finally, by the 1970s, our country reached the stage where it quit trying to put the whole salad into a blender and push the liquefy button. We recognized that we need to take delight in the fact that, in our salad bowl, the onions are onions, and the green peppers are green peppers, and the cheddar cheese is cheddar cheese, and the Romaine lettuce is the lettuce, and the tomatoes are the tomatoes -- and they all have to be themselves, because they all add flavor and color and texture and make it a better salad. But then what holds it together?