When Joon, Elliot, and I lived off campus during the first full COVID academic year, we had very distinct cooking styles. I loved exploring ingredients, and did not mind tossing counterintuitive hodgepodges of items into the same pot. Elliot made an effort to not cook meat, and found his fondness for using a wok at some point in the preceding summer. Joon cooked maybe three times each semester. Instead of trying to decipher recipes, he subsisted on a monthly subscription of Soylent, with each half-a-liter bottle supposedly replacing a meal every day. At some point he also purchased Huel, which came in powder form, but the digestive effects of that alternative were beyond his capacity to handle. We kept a running joke on Joon’s insistence on maximizing his caloric efficiency, as long as the foods are not straight up carcinogenic.
Soylent bottles boast a prideful list of nutrients, whose listed chemical compositions less than 1% of their consumers check. Nutritionally it is insignificantly different from the foods I otherwise consume; if anything, I am provided with more information about what goes on in a bottle of Soylent than when I do grocery shopping. The service charge is, to some people, commensurate with the marginal costs they would pay to fit meal preparation into their hectic schedules. In short, I get it. I get why Joon might also resume his subscription after college.
When I moved across the world, I did not have that many fears. My high school education was quite Westernized in comparison to what the shared educational experience in Vietnam is like, and I was socially, linguistically, and somewhat culturally, in tune with how the American salad bowl works. People thought I would soon miss my family. I did not think I was fully craving to return, but there was no working theory on why I would or would not yearn for home. I wanted to leave more than stay; I wanted to be changed by way of self-reflection.
My college does not do a good job of exemplifying the interpersonal relationships of the Western world, but I was given a taste of its flavor. I detested my culinary experience in college dining halls; when I landed in Hanoi my first winter break, my mom exclaimed at how much I enjoyed steamed white rice and braised pork belly, just because they had better seasoning than anything I ate my first semester. I enjoyed a handful of restaurants, but they are unsustainable for my daily intake demand. During the semester when COVID rocked the world, I lost so much weight because I could not bear to eat any of the pre-packaged food in dining halls, then gained them back when I got to stay with a friend’s family for the summer in coastal Maine. I documented the particularities in the way I wanted food. It cannot be anyhow spicy, too bitter, or too sour. Vegetables can be sauteéd, but I prefer them boiled in broth. The fruit selection needs to be tropical, discovering how much I have grown past rotation of watermelon, cantaloupe, and melon every Sunday ‘brunch’.
As I learn to live by myself while intensifying my involvement on campus, I budget my mental capacity by choosing to care about certain things and yielding my control over others. No Yale students were allowed any cooking in dorms beyond a microwave, so I had to adapt. I needed to try if oatmeal and salads could also taste good, if I could constrain myself to just eating bananas for snacks, and if my culturally informed gustatory tendencies can be diversified with cuisines from other corners of the world. And it worked, to some extent.
But I think it worked because I forgot to remember how food in Vietnam tasted like. I have never resided in anywhere outside of Vietnam before college, so the smells of phở, bánh đa cua, and cốm have never been a limited resource people of my ilk economize. I did not have to relish in each bite of the charred meatballs that I dipped in diluted fish sauce after the garlic odor diffused through layers of fat. I even picked out some of the peppered mung bean inside bánh gai, whose sticky exterior had been blackened as it was steamed overnight in a special leaf covering. It is hard for me to miss Vietnamese food because all I needed to memorize were the artisanal steps the women in my extended family took to cater dishes to our several annual gatherings. I did not register how I felt eating them.
I tried really hard to trace the emotions of cooking whenever I had time living off-campus. I was visibly ecstatic when I found gizzard in the local meat store, asked my mom to video call me as I sliced lemongrass, and typed Vietnamese words into Amazon for want of the Vietnamese diaspora’s shared culinary aspirations. Sometimes I succeeded. Most of the times, I felt a hollowing sense of fraudulence, shame, and guilt in my failure to prove that I can supplant the richness of what was seventeen years of life I lived and centuries of civilization my ancestors nurtured.
I have a friend who was an internationally acclaimed child athlete, who gave it up for academic pursuits in middle school. We became close in 9th grade as she was also in my specialty, and gained a lot of weight in high school due to her newfound interest in all the delicacies Vietnam has to offer. When she was working with her college admissions counselor in our senior year, the counselor criticized her outlook on food. He believed that food should be treated as a liability and not a hobby, and that nutritional science is borne out of necessity to help people maintain standards of health while achieving their own bigger goals. To this end, he is on one extremum of food constructivism, and I would theoretically concur—I typically believe in outcome optimization. Somehow I end up on the other side of the spectrum. To appropriate Foucauldian analysis, pleasure-seeking is counter-conduct to the biopolitical subjugation over how our physical bodies should be understood. Food, and the virtuosity of food-making, communicates a cultural history that the valiantly productive American society every so often sidesteps, homogenizes, and erodes.
Today, I went inside to CVS to cash in my 40% coupon that expires every Wednesday. I habitually opt for protein-rich comestibles, and picked up a comical Soylent bottle that now comes with an undisclosed amount of caffeine for maximal efficiency. I did not mind for the taste: it was not my purpose of purchase. There are many ways that I embody the genuflexion and victimhood to finding a life-worth-living that is irrespective of my earthly ventures, an unfortunate condition that is through no fault of my (or Joon’s) own. For as long as my presence here is transient, surveilled by the expired visa stamped on my lost passport, all I could do is carve out a space for myself to savor the artefacts of how food, or music, or beauty in general, makes me feel. To live artfully, and to push every act of existence to its artful utmost, fills me with the copium I need to navigate my worth.