Stepping Out of My Comfort (Food) Zone

Many of our family photographs catch someone, somewhere, chewing. Much family energy was spent arguing the merits of this vegetable or that fish. Food offered a way for my parents to communicate their love for us when words failed. It became a passion we could all share and we took our family's preoccupation with food for granted. What a surprise to find out as an adult that not everyone shared our outlook. One way I know I'm still Chinese is because of my attitude toward food.

~ Ellen Blonder, second generation Chinese American, in her book Every Grain of Rice

When I first read the wonderful cookbook-memoir, Every Grain of Rice in 1998, I felt like I could have written about my childhood memories of food in a very similar way. I know I am still a Filipino-Chinese-American because of my own perspective on food. To be Asian is to know, appreciate and love food.

Food brings people together; it also sets us apart. Food means so many different things to so many different people. It's not simply food that's on your plate: it's individual or collective memories from your past; trying something completely new; dietary restrictions for medical or religious or personal reasons; flavors that provide emotional warmth and comfort; it's sampling an entirely different culture from your own; it can signify social prestige; it's the taste of national pride.

A whiff of Filipino barbecue on a stick is enough to bring a flood of memories of countless backyard parties and birthday celebrations from my youth. The smell of canned beets transports me to my pre-school's lunchroom in the Chicago suburbs. Just a tiny cloud of freshly spun cotton candy on my tongue reminds me of how much I loved it when I was a tween, and how it made too many trips to Showtime Pizza (one of my brother's favorites) bearable.

What's great about certain foods as comfort is also what makes them boring after a while. I realized not very long ago that I basically cook the same dozen or so meals over and over again and have been doing so for at least a dozen years. Why? Everyone in the family likes them and will eat them, I have all the ingredients all the time, and I know how to prepare them quickly and easily. And not only that, I also realized that some of these foods weren't exactly the healthiest things we could be eating, although certainly not the junkiest either.

Moreover, I felt like I needed a complete and total body do-over. "Baby weight" from two pregnancies and middle-age spread slowly but surely crept up on me in the past 10 years. I was feeling tired more frequently than I should. When I looked in the mirror, I was often shocked at the face and body that stared back at me--who was this person and where did the real me go?!

So I said a firm but wistful goodbye to my comfort foods, those of my childhood as well as my current favorites, and decided to try the Clean program by Dr. Junger. I've blogged about this on our family blog recently, but I was hooked after reading his book. I liked the whole philosophy behind the program, that it's not just a diet but a new way of life and thinking about food and health. And not just our personal health but the collective health of our planet and everyone on it.

I'm almost all the way through the 3-week program, and I can honestly say that it's changed the way I think and feel about food and eating forever. I'm not an immediate candidate for the raw food movement quite yet, but there are foods I used to love and crave that I may never want to eat again. During Clean, you pare everything down to a minimum and then have time to really think about and savor the foods you eat. You appreciate the flavors and textures of your one solid meal per day. You try new foods you've never even heard of before, and love some of them immediately. You miss some of your old favorites, but not so much that you can't live without them. Even cooking, and this time from scratch for each meal, has become enjoyable and fun again. Total irony since I've cooked more in the past 3 weeks than I ever have before!

I now know that I love kale, steamed with garlic. (I don't love kale smoothies. Yet.) I also love kale chips made by a high school classmate who I serendipitously reconnected with during this diet. Carrot-Pineapple Juice is wonderful. So is my homemade hummus, which I hadn't tried to make in probably a decade. Buckwheat noodles, which I had never bought before, reminds me of the texture of Asian noodles I ate as a child. Tuna steaks are amazingly versatile; I thought I disliked them before, but I was wrong. I drink quite a bit of water now, and I've never liked just water before.

I've really, really stepped way from my comfort zone during this program, but strangely enough, some aspects of it have also reminded me of my food beginnings. Many of the Clean recipes rely on the flavor of wheat-free tamari, which is basically like soy sauce, sesame oil and quickly cooked fresh veggies, by stir-frying or grilling. I grew up with stir-fry meals and soy sauce, of course, so I've often felt like a kid again when I eat these meals. Perhaps I was fated to find my way back to some of the tastes of my Asian childhood. I confess that when I grew up and lived on my own, Asian cooking was never a priority for me. I was too eager to try all the foods I didn't eat growing up--Indian, Mexican, Texan, etc.! Asian cooking also intimidated me; I couldn't do it as efficiently and easily as my Mom and Aunts because I didn't know the recipes or have all the ingredients (or couldn't even pronounce them.) Now I feel like I have a new comfort level in preparing dishes with Asian flavors, ones that are healthy versions of things I've tasted before, if not completely traditional ones.

Food is not just food, just as this diet I'm finishing is not simply a diet. The food we eat, or don't eat, says volumes about us. I choose now to eat purposefully and thoughtfully, for the betterment of my own self and hopefully even beyond that.