Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

After reading “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” by Geeta Kothari I quickly realized that in America she only wanted to fit in. In order to do this she felt it was necessary to separate herself from her original Indian culture and adopt one of American descent. This is evident in the whole essay and especially clear when Kothari speaks about her yearning for American food and how she is fed up with the traditional Indian dishes her parents prepare. As a young Indian girl growing up in the United States, Geeta was sure to be faced with several different challenges while adapting to her new culture. She would undoubtedly have to deal with stereotypes of Indian women, making new friends, and attending a new type of schooling. However, she uses food to show the transformation because it relates the reader to the story and shows the greatest contrast between her old life and her new one. American’s make up a largely red-meat eating nation. India on the other hand finds the red meat of most animals sacred and they do not prepare such foods. Geeta experiences culture shock when she sees her classmates and fellow townspeople eating the foods that are taboo in her country. Rather than looking at their eating practices as taboo however she gains a deep interest to adopt these practices and even goes as far as to mention eating hot dogs and bologna; the opposite of what her mother wants for her. Although she does eat some of the American food present to her, her parent’s culture from the homeland is still implemented in the home. Kothari’s mother is the biggest advocate of maintaining their culture and at times it irritates Geeta because she wants nothing more than to be like her American friends. Geeta begins to neglect the food her mother prepares and yearns more and more for American food such as the brown bread her father learned how to prepare from a coworker. The Indian food is like a punishment to her as time passes and it becomes more and more of an issue for Kothari. Geeta’s continued complaining about the food she is used to leads the reader to believe that she does not want to maintain any of her Indian culture. However, when the family returns to India on vacation from the United States she seems to find her own little piece of heaven in her uncle’s Indian restaurant. Back in the states however it is a totally different situation in that she does not want to eat her native dishes. Tuna fish is one of the foods allowed by Geeta’s mother and Kothari is anxious to taste the tuna fish that she sees her classmates eating during lunch. When Geeta and her mother open the can of tuna to prepare their first tuna fish salad sandwiches they are disgusted at both the consistency and the smell of the fish. Geeta is crushed at the idea that the tuna is gross and her classmates enjoy it so much. Little do they know that tuna fish needs additional ingredients if they want to achieve the tasty sandwiched of her schoolmates. Eventually she learns from a friend at school how to make the tuna salad sandwiches and falls in love however her sister never comes to terms with the dish and craves the foods her mother forbids; the bologna, sausage, and hot dogs she is not supposed to eat. Geeta still barely fits in at best. Eventually she is sent to boarding school in London because her parents feel that she will fit in better there since they were once subjects of the British Empire in India. Once again she is subjected to new smells and different tastes. On one of her first days in fact she is heckled by a group of girls because she is unfamiliar with steak and kidney pie. Soon she is a self proclaimed vegetarian although she doesn’t know why. As time passes she finds herself ordering Indian dishes and wanting the taste of her childhood to return, but no meat is involved in these meals. She marries a meat eater, who accommodates her diet with several meatless recipes. None of which can she replicate and this is her biggest personal problem. Meanwhile her mother has taken classes to learn to prepare traditional American dishes and Geeta is still left behind without knowledge of what she likes to eat or how to make it. Surprising is her cabinet in her own home; full of Indian spices and ingredients with a few American plates such as pasta and sauce. Her whole childhood method of fitting in by eating what her friends ate came back to her adulthood of preparing what she had eaten for her whole life; the things her mother prepared back home in India. All in all, Geeta Kothari felt that in order to fit into a culture you must eat that culture’s food. She strived to and was even disappointed when she could not eat what the other kids ate because her mother was just as clueless as she. When she went away to London to attend boarding school she found that the food she ate did not shape her identity and rather was just a portion of it. At the end of her journey she found herself right back where she began only this time she ate the foods she knew and enjoyed and not what everyone else ate to fit in.