A World of Food Exploring Gastronomic Xenophobia by Sinead C.
Photo by Sinead Carolan
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merica is known as the cultural melting pot of the world. We are a nation built from immigrants, all with unique cultures, and foods. Even LASA draws from across the city of Austin, bringing a medley of students each with their own backgrounds. However, despite the ease with which we could all expand our culinary palettes, my peers have a stunning tolerance for eating the same thing everyday. Imagine living in a world where everything tasted the same. “Not so bad”, you say, “Maybe as long as it all tasted like apple pie.” Now imagine eating the same food over and over, bland to you after a while, and then
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abruptly being presented with a heap of pungent natto (soybeans fermented in bacteria). No wonder so many of us adolescents are more comfortable with eating the same thing over and over. It is what we are used to. This point was clearly illustrated in a study published in the journal, “Appetite” performed by L. Brown, a post graduate student at Bournemouth University, and his peers while conducting research in England. After a series of interviews they concluded that the majority of student participants traveling abroad had strong attachments to the food native to their home country, often because of its familiarity. Although this study looks at only students on foreign exchange, it also applies to the rest of us, staying in our home towns. We aren’t bothered enough to venture outside our individual and varying comfort zones simply because many of us have grown up with eating habits that repeat themselves day after day. This striking aversion to unusual foods, unusual being subjective to the individual in question, has also been looked at in a study performed by the Food Science Department at the University of Denmark in early 2008. During its course participants were provided with eleven different dishes, many leaning towards the way of atypical. Participants were