Diasporic Flavours: How Ethnic Food Traditions Keep Us Connected To Our Culture
Growing up in a multi-ethnic household (Thai father and Italian mother) in the western setting of Australia, brewed me an extremely special cup of diaspora.
Being a first-generation immigrant is funny like that. The yearning you feel for your homeland feels idiopathic, as it stems not from your own memories, but rather the relationship you build with your family members who have firsthand experience there.
So what happens when you take this existential feeling and double it?
That’s right, growing up as a diasporic multi-ethnic child was a perfect recipe for a good ol’ identity crisis.
Though my parents didn’t bestow me with the language conventions to connect with my cultures (thanks for crushing my polyglot dreams, mum and dad), the one thing they did give me was the gift of food.
After listening to the stories of the Asylum Seeker Research Centre’s (ASRC) hero cooks, Noha and Nige, I realised just how powerful that cultural item is. And so, with their annual Feast for Freedom happening soon, I decide to reflect on just how important food is to me and my multi-ethnic identity.
The language of flavour
This might seem trivial to some, but for most immigrant families, the best way to communicate with the ones that you love is through the language of food.
When my father first immigrated to Australia, he took up work as a chef, using the communicative nature of food to fill in the gaps created by his limited English. Coming from an asian background, my father isn’t naturally emotionally expressive, but cooking together has always been what connects us the most, furthering that connection back to our Thai heritage. To this day, my conversations with my dad are almost always over food. It’s the unique circumstance that I’ll hear stories about his time growing up in Thailand, each dish connected to a memory of his youth.
Something as small as the smell and flavour of a particular Thai dish has the power to connect me back to my diasporic homeland. Certain scents remind me of special cultural moments, such as the Moo Ka Ta (Thai-style BBQ) that I shared with my family one Lunar New Year in the front yard of their Chiang Mai home. Although they all speak limited English and I, little to no Thai, my aunty peeling me a prawn or my uncle pouring me another glass of Chang was enough for me to feel this sense of cultural belonging beyond our language barrier.
These sentiments are things I search for in food rituals here in Australia, sharing these practices with my family and friends as an act of cultural pride and connection.
While my connection to my Thai heritage stems from striving to seek and share new cultural experiences, my Italian side lives in nostalgia.
Memories in a pot
My Italian heritage has always lived close to home, literally and figuratively. As this side of the family all emigrated to Australia, I spent a good portion of my childhood in the kitchen and garden with my Nonna and Nonno. My fondest memories with them lie within traditional food rituals such as making passata, wine, olives and our very own salami.
Similar to Thai culture, the Italians use food as an essential expression of their heritage. In fact, my late Nonna was notorious for greeting you with two things: “Hello”, and “Have you eaten yet?”
My Nonna’s cooking connected us all deeply while I was growing up. She simply would not let you leave her house without a meal, a coffee (accompanied by an array of bickies, of course) and a tower of Tupperware containing a myriad of traditional Italian dishes (always reliably housed in Aldi’s vanilla ice-cream containers).
With her recent passing, I’ve found myself recreating the dishes she fed me as a child. Like most ethnic matriarchs, my Nonna never explicitly gave out her recipes, but instead, you had to watch and learn. Tapping into these memories and recreating those flavours she effortlessly served us throughout her life reminded me of how important food is to cultural legacy. These are the flavours from my Italian family that I hope can be served for many generations to come.
Connecting through food
It seems clear to me that food is much more than a source of sustenance; it is a foundation for identity. One that is made even more important for those who have left the comfort and traditions of their home to build a new family and future somewhere else entirely.
In reflecting on my connection to culture through food, I was surprised at how emotional it made me; a testament to just how important food is to my sense of identity as someone who experiences a complex version of diaspora.
It has reminded me just how important sharing my heritage through food is to the connections in my life — almost as if it’s the ultimate form of passing down the traditions I’ve grown up with. This is the very sentiment that I resonated with in the ASRC Feast for Freedom, an initiative that lets you host a dinner to raise money for people seeking asylum.
As simple as signing up for a kit, your dinner can help people seeking asylum and refugees access food and housing so that they can continue to pursue a better life that still maintains their cultural identity.
There couldn’t be a better opportunity to celebrate your cultural food traditions while also helping to keep someone else’s alive.
You can sign up to host your Feast for Freedom here.
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