5 April 2025 Saturday

I’m laying bed, it’s a warm spring day out, and I am sipping a hot cup of coffee. Strictly speaking, coffee is a foreign food. It is not created domestically, therefore it is foreign. It’s so difficult to tell in this world what is foreign and what is not, some of the most familiar every day items we eat are foreign. So, this word, foreign, has lost a great deal of its meaning. Foreign means for many of us, anything that is unfamiliar.

I think many people would consider the Paw Paw a foreign food, even though it is the native fruit of Ohio. We’d much sooner eat a banana, even though bananas cannot be grown anywhere in the continental United States. With shipping methods, new routes, methods of preserving foods, there is no foreign. Everything is domestic in a sense in this global world. It has in fact always been global, it’s just that we didn’t know it. Many still don’t know it.

One of the best things about being an American, is that everything we eat is part of American cuisine. How many times a week do you eat Italian, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Thai, German, Korean, or Japanese food? I bet at least three of these make it to the table every week, maybe more than once. I eat Chinese food three or four times a week. When I say, “let’s get Chinese”, I am saying “from our endless variations on world food, I want to taste the one that aligns with the flavor profile of China.” Most of our grocery stores have an Asian and/or Latino aisles with all the ingredients in that nation’s flavor profile. It’s a very American thing. I eat American every day.

Now, I am not saying that all the foods from other countries need to be “Americanized” in terms of flavor or cooking methods, we’ve really come around to eating more spicy and what do you call it, non-Yankee cooking. We eat Chinese food in an American fashion, with napkins on our laps, drinking clean water, with fork and knife, (or chopsticks, made right here in California) and in the context of our own culture. For instance, we are more likely to eat kimchi at dinner when our palates are ready for something spicy. In Korea, kimchi is eaten at all times of day, including a wonderful kimchi soup often eaten for breakfast. Most Americans who love kimchi would probably not eat it for breakfast on a regular basis. We make it an American food by interacting with it on our terms. Kimchi for dinner, not for breakfast.

Another use of the word foreign is with regard to things that shouldn’t be where they are. Foreign actors you may hear them called. Traces of a foreign substance were found in a sample of cereal, for instance. There are food cops out there all the time blowing the whistle on things found in food that shouldn’t be there. The Girl Scout cookie thing recently, where they were found to contain heavy metals, and all sorts of other not-Girl Scout cookie things. Everyone went nuts for a few hours, until the next paper concluded that you’d need to eat 73,000 cookies a day for those metals to harm you, so you’re in the clear.

No, this picture was not taken on another planet, this is Earth. You can’t see the pollinators, the foreign invaders that are the bees, but they are there in full force, making life continue.

Anyway, don’t forget to savor and enjoy all of those everyday, normal foods that are a “foreign” part of your daily domestic diet. The climate may not be able to sustain them, and you and I may no longer be able to afford them. And if you’re in Ohio, maybe start eating Paw Paws.