I inherited my parents’ taste in food. I had a high demand for food quality because my mom is unbelievably good at cooking, and my dad is amazingly good at looking for quality restaurants. I would travel an hour just for a good meal. My determination in finding delicacies can be time-consuming, but I have never given up on it. I have had countless tasty memories, and a good amount of the food was “the food from Heaven.” I find true happiness when I enjoy a delicacy. Satisfying my taste is such an accomplishment; however, the number of tasty memories have been decreasing recently. I think I am losing my sensitive taste in food and become numb. I think I would accept any kind of food as long as it tastes somewhat edible. During my busy school year, I would call a meal at an American-Chinese restaurant a pretty good treat to myself, which would never happen a few years ago. 
Since I was a freshman and was away from home, my mom, an awesome housewife, had one less person to feed, so she had more time to pick up her own interests. One of them was the cooking class she had been looking forward to joining when I was still in China. The day after she just started the class, my text message box was filled with the pictures that my mom sent me; however, oddly, when I called my mom, she sounded like she took a class of history instead of a cooking class. She would tell me the stories lie behind each dish: what kind of background was it when this dish was invented, and even why did people give a certain dish its name. Sometimes, even a certain step in a certain dish has its own special meaning. Shopping for materials is not an easy task either. In order to make a dish taste better, a certain material should be transported from a certain region; however, as our pace of life becomes faster and faster, nobody would care whether the mushroom comes from Yunan or not, or if the beef is from Chaoshan. We just want to be as quick as we can. Time is money and people think that if they spend time on figuring out how to cook a meal with that much considerations, it is a waste of time and money.

The restaurants that earn a pleasing amount of profits are fast food restaurants recently. I remember I watched a TV show and a young man wanted to open a sushi fast food restaurant. He said that he wanted to fuse a traditional food with the fast pace city. This idea sounds horrible to me. In my mind, sitting in a quiet place is the right way to enjoy sushi. Tasting the texture of the meat and rice slowly seems the right way of eating a sushi. While eating sushi, we are supposed to feel Zen and feel like we can hear the water as it runs down the stream. We don’t have to actually be in a nice environment to taste sushi, but at least we should slow down and take our time to taste it; however, with the fast pace of the city life, we are eating sushi instead of tasting it. We simplify the tasting process and try to swallow the whole sushi without even chewing it for more than five seconds, much less tasting the texture of the materials. With making sushi a fast food, we are losing the most critical part of tasting a sushi. Then it is not sushi. It is just a rice ball with some meat on it. It doesn’t mean that city people do not deserve delicacies. It is just they are eating them in the wrong way, which makes the tasty food not as delicious or meaningful as it should be.

Especially after coming to America, I feel the importance of the preservation of culture. Culture is the base and this is what makes me different from people of other countries. Food has the most culture in it. Culture represents my home, so when I am searching for a certain dish, I am also looking for a taste of home. I tried to find Chinese food in America that I can taste the Chinese culture from, but barely any of them impressed me. There was always something that tastes wrong, except that one time. I went to a very small and poorly renovated restaurant to try their famous dish called “Dongpo pork.” Dongpo was a statesman and poet during the Song Dynasty. This dish was named after him to accommodate his accomplishment in Hangzhou. The sauce on the pork is red which is a color that represents happiness and success in China, so I think it does make sense that the sauce is red and it makes the pork looks shiny. Only this restaurant has the sauce so perfectly red. Other restaurants are satisfied with the brown colored sauce. This makes the pork look less shiny and I don’t think people would relate this dish with something happy. Maybe we should just slow down and figure out the right way to make it, so that we can bring the story behind the dish back.

By simplifying either the procedure of cooking or the tasting process, we are taking away the most important part of food: culture. So much culture is concentrated in the food. Since culture represents my home, when I am tasting a dish, I am also feeling the culture. My food is my culture, and my culture is where I live. The meals we have are no more a fusion of culture and a seeking for perfection. They are just a necessity to survive. We are changing the important spirit that our ancestors passed down to us to fit our lifestyle. There is actually nothing wrong with changing ourselves to fit the environment. It is actually what we should do; however, we still need to find a way to preserve our cultures instead of just trying to simplify everything. If we have the chance, try to seek for that perfection and dig into the story. Otherwise we would just be numb and think everything tastes pretty much the same because they are all just food. They are not just food. Maybe some food are just food that was invented to help you survive, but there is so much more out there that have such a beautiful history. We need to find time to slow down and taste the food, and not just eat the food. Use the correct materials to make ourselves a meaningful meal. Feel the texture and taste the stories behind it. In this way, food can be a true joy and can also appeases the anxiety of living in a world that runs in a high speed. If we just let the meanings behind each dish fade away, future generations would have less and less acknowledgment of the culture behind each dish. We shouldn’t try to get rid of the stories and give up seeking for perfection because we live in our cultures, and we live for preserving them not only for us, but also for our following generations.