Before the start of this class, a lot of my friends, including myself, almost scoffed at the idea that there was a course about noodles at Emory. Our small minds could only encompass “noodles” as “thin long strings of carbs, mostly used for pasta.” With just a week into class, my perspective of the noodle had changed, and it continues to evolve every moment spent thinking about its multifaceted identity.
Part of what the noodle encompasses, is its ability to influence a whole society. As Dr. Li explained in a class lecture, one can tell a person’s characteristics based on where they are from. This comes from how the different ingredients of noodles are cared for in different regions, and how the methods shape the people who tend them. In Thomas Tallhelm’s “Rice Theory,” the people of the southern and northern regions have very distinct personalities. The Southern people are generally more interdependent and cooperative. This is contributed to the fact the South grows rice as its main crop. Growing rice in the Southern mountains requires much more intensive labor than growing wheat. It needs a lot more cooperation between people, which is why Southerners are more of a people-person. The Northern region is different; it grows wheat as its main crop in the flat plains. Due to that fact, northern people are more independent, analytical, and sometimes even more aggressive. Growing wheat doesn’t require people to collaborate or interact with others on the field in any way. One can just own a small piece of land and feed your own family. The noodles, in this way, very much reflect the culture, regions and the people that cook them. It’s almost like a cuisine footprint, in which it records the exact nature of the people that once created them.
During one of our breakout room discussions, I realized that noodles, although an extremely staple cuisine in both countries, has distinctly different meanings to the Chinese and the Italians.
The meaning of noodles is clearly evident in the portrayal of noodles in the story Crossing the Bridge. As we read in Durack’s “Noodle,” the boy who constantly gets distracted from his Imperial exams moves away across the bridge so he can focus on his studies and pass the exam. With his hot bowl of noodles from his old nanny across the bridge, he is finally able to finish his studies after successfully taking the exam. This story highlights that the noodles were vital to his studies, a component that helped his pass the exam. It didn’t become a distraction nor a simple portion of fuel. Instead, the noodles provided the essential nourishment for the boy that prevented the bad spirits from bothering him and eventually helped him focus and study. As shown in this story, noodles in China are like a miracle cure food. It brought comfort and concentration to the boy, something he desperately needed. Noodles are able to bring forth the very essentials a person consuming them needs. Noodles also play a very integral role in China as one of China’s staple cuisines, of providing people’s needs through the warmth of the love by the others who have prepared the dish. The noodle has the power to bring people together in front of a table, and its ever-evolving nature continues to excite people who consume it.
For Italians, noodles also mean more than just food. Pasta, the Italian equivalent of noodles, is an all-time comfort food. These comforting qualities may be from the fact that pasta is a staple Italian cuisine or that it’s catered to the tastebuds of Italians, but the most comforting quality of pasta is how little it has changed over the centuries. The pasta people eat today are very similar to what ancestors ate in the past; it, with its long and multicultural history, is a significant culinary connection to our past. It’s as if we are consuming the historical evidence left by our ancestors. As Dr. Ristaino explained in her lecture, people can be constantly connecting with family when they eat pasta. The food becomes not just fuel but a pillar for culture in Italy, that was once erected hundreds of years ago. And the way it still stands today plays a mother-like role in encompassing all the culture that happens surrounding Italian pasta.
Noodles definitely go beyond the dictionary definitions in China and Italy. Even the most basic ones cannot even grasp the smallest portion of what noodles actually mean for the people in these countries. I think the biggest problem in the clinical definitions is that they become too technical. The clinical definition includes the ingredients and the shapes of a specific type of noodles; yet, “noodles” cannot be limited to one ingredient or one shape, even in the same town, let alone the same country. I personally think the definition should be embracing more of the culture-influencing aspects of the noodle. Here is my best attempt:
Noodles – “a substance of food produced with as much creativity as the history and the present allows, and encompasses culture and history in each different pattern and taste it is made to be”
Image (Able to explain why this picture was chosen in class discussion)
(https://chelseakrost.com/owning-a-home-requires-top-ramen-and-a-budget/)