Your Families' Foodways

My family enjoys cooking even if it’s for a 1000 people we will come together and cook a storm. The people that I lived with went through many stages of food. It went from eat “whatever you please” to stop it because you allergic to it, the whole concept of cooking change. My mother would cook the things that I and my sister would be able to eat. My mother is a diabetic, so this change of eating was a habit that we all grew together. In the Dominican Republic, we have our dinner around 3:00pm and light meal around 8:00pm and that’s how it always been. When my family members would have to live in my house they would bring that routine.  I could be hanging out and I come home there will be dinner waiting on the table. But this wasn’t the routine all the time in my house; this was when I was younger. As I got older my mom showed me how to cook and after a while I was making meals for myself because my mother will be working. When a family member came I wouldn't have to cook, there will be someone in the house to cook.

I would say the generation in my family feeds on starch rice, bread, sweet potatoes and plantains we are also meat eaters except for my sister.  Every dinner that I have, there is rice and meat, most of the time corn. If there’s no rice then somebody will be upset, and rice will be cooked (It’s just rice all day) and then one day we might get tired and cook tacos or pasta. My grandmother favorite foods were a sweet potato, that’s all she would talk about and that’s all she ate. If you were sick she makes you a sweet potatoes soup.  She will ask me if I got sweet potato in my plate and if I didn’t she would go make me get a piece at least. Instead of have mashed regular potatoes my mother would smash sweet potatoes.  This is probably why I don’t like regular potatoes as much.

When I was little, vegetables weren’t a problem I liked eating broth from the beans, broccoli, corn and eggplant. My mother would smash the beans so I wouldn’t know they were in the rice after a while I got use to it and became a bean lover. Eating different foods became natural to me my mother never told don’t eat something because she thought it didn’t taste good, it would be left to my dissention .There is always a saying that most people in my family say “Don’t mention anything that would upset the person while eating”. It’s important for the person to be connected with their food, so if have situation happened wait until later to talk about it. When this was told, I thought ‘Food is important and what’s eaten effects how I feel’.