english essay 1

I wrote this for my english essay entitled 'Food Culture'. i think it is crap and maybe reading it feels like a bit of bitch slap. but at least it is real and not something i googled up. X)

The moment I got this assignment a few months ago, I knew that it wouldn’t be an easy one to finish. It wouldn’t be easy to meet my sp especially because he wouldn’t be around during my summer break and I would have to start my block rotations pretty soon. Although it took me a week to set up a proper date to meet him and 25 minutes of cycling to reach him, I can now say that I am truly glad to have attended a dinner with him in his house. I was back to a familiar place where I first met him for the first assignment. The other tough part of this assignment is really how factual a topic such as ‘Food culture’ is and it is often difficult to sit down for a long period of time just trying to get enough points out on the table to complete a 500 word essay.

Culture is something that a person has to experience with their senses. It is not something I could personally write about just by hearing from other people’s past experiences. Craig told me about many wonderful things about wedding dinners, ‘Aberdeen Morning Roll’ and the typical and exotic foods in Aberdeen, but how much of it can I actually imagine and convey in fine words? The answer would be ‘very little’. So, the following paragraph of words would be an account for all that I’ve experienced on this lovely dinner that I had.

Dinner here certainly is different from back in Malaysia. My family use to take snips of food from the same dish bowls with a pair of chopsticks. This is certainly something not typically seen in Aberdeen. The great part about chopsticks is the ability to grab something metres away, which would otherwise be impossible to reach if a spoon and fork method was used. That may be the reason why the dishes have to be passed around the table this evening. You see, eating a Chinese meal is all about being efficient. Chopsticks in Mandarin literally mean fast fingers. On top of that, we’ll never need to pass bowls around because our typical Chinese dinner table has a separate revolving part.

This evening’s dinner came out one by one. We started off with some pork and bean stew and then moved on to desert which was vanilla ice cream with cherries drenched with alcohol. The dinner ended with a cup of hot tea. I was told that dinner here usually starts with a starter like a shrimp cocktail, then a soup, the main course , dessert and finally coffee or tea. After having experienced such a wonderful meal, I feel unfortunate to say that Malaysia has a markedly different method of presenting food. In Malaysia, all the dishes usually come at about the same time and this means that our food chills out before it reaches our tummies. Desserts are not a frequent thing unless it’s a special occasion or rarely on a weekend. We’ve enough sugar in our daily meals and drinks and we have decided that desserts will only be another reason for our undiagnosed diabetes.

Dinners, no matter in which part of the world it is, is rarely about the food. It is neither about the type of utensils used nor the way we sit around a table or on a floor. It is ALL about the people. It doesn’t matter if it’s held around a round table, square table, long table or no table, people always sit next to each other during the dinner. That is the only ingredient needed to cook up a few moments of joy, comfort and sense of belonging.