Author: Eunho Seo

 

Ageing Master Craftsmen

Eunho Seo

Blog 2

CHN 375W/ ITAL 376W

 

In Tokyo Japan, there was a master craftsman of knife making. He was 70 years old and he was running his small and worn forge with his young son. The blacksmith’s workshop has been inherited by his father, grandfather, great grandfather… and so on. And he was also planning to hand down the forge and recipe for his reputable knives to his son. He was already excited about his son working with him, hammering the molten metal together to produce the masterpiece. The secrete method was nothing but putting more effort and time to repeat hand hammering for numerous times, which other blacksmiths simply replaced the process with machines. Still, his knife was respected by the renowned chefs in Tokyo.

Even though the blacksmith made his knives with full pride, his son always complained about the slow and arduous process of making the knives. One day, the son told the blacksmith, “I want to get a job in the knife factory and learn the easier way to make knives. This way, we can make more money and supply more knives to people.” Despite his father’s persuasion, he was very stubborn about his plan and started to pack his belongings. The blacksmith was extremely upset with his son’s idea, but he had no power left to run the forge alone. He got sick from sadness and decided to stop producing the knives.

One of the chefs in Tokyo visited the blacksmith to purchase a knife. The chef was very famous in Tokyo for making the best sushi in Japan and he owned 8 restaurants only in Tokyo. And the chef has been only using the knife that he bought from the blacksmith but this time, he realized that the old man can’t produce the knives anymore. The blacksmith told the entire story about how his ancestors started the business and ran it till today but it had to be closed because of his son’s different perspective on making knives. The chef quietly listened to his story and told the blacksmith that he will return at night when the blacksmith’s son come back from work at the knife factory.

Later that night, the chef returned to the blacksmith’s place as he promised. He brought his cooking tools and some raw ingredients. He quietly set up his cooking tools in the blacksmith’s kitchen while the son was excited to see the famous sushi chef in his house. Oddly, the chef brought two knives and he started to slice the tuna with one knife and made a sushi. The son asked, “What is the other knife for?” The chef didn’t answer; he instead used the other knife and made the same tuna sushi on the other plate. He bluntly said, “Taste both sushi and tell me how they taste.” With curiosity in his eyes, the son ate two sushi as the chef instructed.

“They taste differently! How is this possible? I thought they were made out of the same ingredients. The one I ate first tastes much better than the other one.” said the son. He started to browse among the cooking tools but didn’t quite find the answer for the mystery. The chef finally opened his mouth, “The first piece you ate was the one that I cut tuna with your father’s knife. But the second piece was cut by the knife that was produced in your knife factory.” The son still looked bewildered. “Convenience is important. And mass production is also important to lower the cost. But the key recipe for making anything, like sushi that I make, is the earnestness of the producer and that is why I became the best sushi chef in Japan. And your father’s knife also has his soul in it and that is why the first piece tastes better than the second piece.”

In the early morning of the next day, the son started fire on his father’s small and worn forge. The blacksmith looked at his son through a window and took his hammer with a huge smile on his face.

From the story, we can learn that not everything made with modern technology is the best way to produce especially for things related with food. Throughout the course, we learned that food conveys lots of meanings. There are history, family, and culture behind the food and machine production may lose some of the messages that are embedded in the food. In the class video, ‘The Art of Making Noodles by Hand,’ it talks about how young people in the town of China prefer machine produced noodles as it is more convenient and therefore no young people in the town wants to learn how to make noodles by hand. After watching the video, I felt bitterness about disappearing traditions in the world. Through globalization, the originality of a nation tends to mingle with another country’s culture. And I personally feel anxiety whenever I witness the disappearing traditions.

While I was creating this story, I leaned about the young culture of China, which prefers convenience than effort. I understand this changing culture as it is also seen in my own culture. In Korea, there are lots of traditions endangered such as Jaesa, the ceremony to respect spirit, is performed by less and less families. Additionally, Korean national holidays such as Chooseok (Thanks giving) and Seolnal (New Years) merely seems to be like vacations without any cultural meanings. Whenever I witness these evidences of extinguishing ethnic originalities in Korea, I felt inconvenience as if my cultural DNA is also disappearing because of my laziness. By writing this story about the blacksmith in Tokyo, I tried to convey the importance of protecting our cultural DNA from mutation. Technological improvement is significant for the globe, but I hope it doesn’t deteriorate our originalities.

Noodle Metamorphosis

Eunho Seo

Blog 2

CHN 375W/ ITAL 376W

 

 

In the story Crossing the Bridge, written by Terry Durack, we can see how food is not merely a necessity for human survival. The boy, who never passed his Imperial Exam, immediately passed his exam after his house cook made an array of the boy’s favorite foods. What boy ate that day was not only the noodles, meat, or shrimps but also the effort of the chef and the boy’s memories regarding the foods. Throughout the course, my perspective upon food has changed: What I eat represents what I am. I learned that the food is a pretty accurate reflection of our society. From this blog post, I want to discuss how noodles in China and Italy reflects their societies in various aspects.

The most obvious trait of food is that it demonstrates the culture of a society. By learning about a country’s traditional food and customs relating to the food, we can learn the country’s culture. For instance, in the article The truth about pasta, it tells how Italian pasta is a food that gathers people from the process of making pasta to eating it. Since making pasta is such a time-consuming work, Italian people tend to gather around and make it and eat it together. From this story, we can learn how Italian noodle brings its family, friends, and neighbors together. Additionally, noodles play significant role in celebrating cultural events. In China, people eat longevity noodles on birthdays, eat noodles with gravy at the time of marriage and moving homes, and eat dragon whiskers noodles on the day of lunar February 2^nd. It is interesting how Chinese people put meanings into the noodles they eat in different events and make this tradition as a part of their national culture.

Moreover, noodle is a perfect example of how local food represents each region and cities. Both in Italy and China, there are numerous different types of noodles. And those differentiated forms of noodles are the outcome of different regions. For instance, it is shown in the article History of Pasta, how different noodles of Italy were invented by different regions, mostly influenced by foreign invasions. People in different regions of Italy had dissimilar preferences and it is reflected in their pasta. Also in the book Noodles, traditionally and today, the author informs the readers how China is divided into East China, Southern china, Central China, North China, Hongkong and etc. .. And each regions use different ingredients and cooking styles of noodles, such as boiling and frying, resulting in completely different styles of noodles. Hence we can conclude that noodles reflect the preferences, history, and even culture of each region in Italy and China.

By looking at how noodles reflect several aspects of Chinese and Italian societies, we can deduce how significant noodle is to Chinese and Italian people. Two countries are similar in a way that they consider noodles as their staple food. It is their most common food (an average Italian eats 60 pounds of pasta a year), hence carries a lot of meanings to Chinese and Italian people. Both nations have been eating noodles over centuries regardless of whether Marco Polo brought noodles from China and Italy or not. Hence, noodles have been embedded in their history. Living with noodles, many stories and songs related to noodles have been published and I was able to take an insight into what noodle means to Chinese and Italians. For an example, Chinese people in especially for babies and elderlies, people eat noodles for their birthdays. The long-life noodle story tells us that noodle represents long life for them. Similarly, Italians believe that noodles will bring them long life through well nutritiously balanced properties of noodles. In the article The truth about pasta, it is shown how Mediterranean diet, including pasta, is very effective and Italians consume pasta to maintain health. In conclusion, for both countries, they believe their staple food, noodles or pastas, are healthy food that will make them live longer. This is one example that shows how Italians and Chinese perceive noodles. However, there are numerous noodle stories that provides us an insight into what noodle means to Chinese and Italian people.

Since noodles were constantly popular and most commonly eaten food in China and Italy over hundreds and thousands of years, it played significant roles in cultural formation. For Chinese food culture, they emphasize the balance in foods such as nutrition and tastes. And noodle was the food that can be easily manipulated to qualify their food principles as it can be cooked in numerous different versions with diversified ingredients. Therefore, the introduction of noodle brought variety of choices in the history of Chinese food culture. There even was a cook who serves noodles for emperors and high-status people. In conclusion, the gradual formation of Chinese food principles, especially the balance, was hugely influenced by the variety of noodles in China. Another example for Italy, pasta is a food that is cooked conveniently. According to the article, History of Pasta, the spread of pasta in Italian food history was mostly due to its convenience and convenience became the key in Italian food culture. From this, I understood how noodles played major roles throughout the history regarding the formation of food culture in China and Italy.

After leaning so many about noodles, the overarching question that needed to be asked was ‘What exactly are noodles?’ I tried to look up the perfect definition of noodles after the class discussion about it, but I couldn’t find an accurate definition of noodles. Therefore, I came up with my own definition: Noodle is produced with the mixture of any form of flour or grain that can be treated with different methods (boil, fry..), which is commonly later cooked with other ingredients. What I personally wanted to emphasize in the definition of noodle was variety. Since I learnt that there are countless types of noodles, I didn’t want to limit the transformation of noodles. Also, in definitions of online dictionaries limited the shape of noodle to be thin and long, which isn’t true, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake. The unpredictable nature of noodle made itself a hard word to define but I personally believe that such complication is what makes people love noodles.