Food Website for East Asian Foodways

[Jennifer Smith]

I teach middle school students all of whom are familiar with ramen. While they are familiar with ramen, few know of Momofuku Ando or how the instant ramen they are familiar with was created. To help them better understand, I plan to use the Nissin website - Nissin | About Us - Momofuku Ando’s Dream (nissinfoods.com). The website includes information about current products and even a link to information about transparency in supply chains. I would have the students visit the About Us page first so they can read a brief history of Ando and examine some of his quotes about noodles.

Another page that caught my eye was this one by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Japanese Candy Has an Amazing Taste and Appearance | Web Japan (web-japan.org). It provides a very brief overview of the history of candy in Japan. It includes fantastic pictures and would be an interesting starting point in a longer research project about candy.

[Amy Stamm]

Website review: https://www.asianfoodgrocer.com/collections/munchies

This website is a visually very well-organized, easy-to-navigate site that is an online source for nonperishable Asian groceries. They charge a flat $5.00 shipping fee for all orders over $30.00. The website is divided into the following categories: noodles, munchies, dranks (sic.), eats, smarts, wants, and sake & beer with visually pleasing icons. I counted 224 varieties of instant noodles offered from Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam.

The Munchies section opens with 12 flavors of Japanese Lay’s chips, and one fun activity to do with students could be a blind taste test to see if they could identify any of the flavors. Students could be provided with a list of the possible flavors after a round of blind tasting, as well as surveys of their reactions to each flavor. It would be interesting to solicit students’ opinions about why different groups of people are drawn to such different types of flavors. A follow-up project to this might be for students to research the culturally specific adjustments that global chains like MacDonald’s make to their products to suit local tastes. Groups of students could choose a country and present their findings to the rest of the class, and then the teacher could facilitate a discussion about why students think these particular changes were made in each place. This might require students to research the cuisines of their chosen countries to uncover local food histories.

Back to the munchies section…it is filled with a wide variety of chips, crackers, dried fruits, cookies, small cakes and other sweets, puffed rice snacks, a variety of peas and peanuts, and candies. Students could compare the visual design of two chosen snacks and make an argument about which one they think would sell more based on visual elements of design. Similarly, students could compare drink packaging design, which the site depicts in a variety of forms, from plastic bags to hard plastic characters to aluminum cylindrical cans. The drinks include teas, coffees, sodas, juices, yogurt drinks, brown sugar pearl milk, and tapioca drinks, among others.

The eats section focuses on rice, grains, cooking ingredients like seaweed, sauces, oils, and seasonings, as well as some cakes and breads. To mimic a Japanese convenience store, the smarts section offers notebooks, pencils, origami paper, and decorated tapes from Japan, China, and Taiwan. The wants section focuses on thermoses, mugs, pencil cases, stuffed toys, and other items like rice cookers. The sake and beer section is self-explanatory.

The website is so organized, visually pleasing, and full of tempting products that I it made me very hungry and thirsty to try its products.

 

[Angela Lee]

I had looked at several recipe and food blog sites, and had come across this one called Chinese Food and History which is a blog from Professor Miranda Brown, who is a Chinese Studies professor at University of Michigan. 

Since I am a world history teacher, I wanted to find a food history site that I could point my students to if we were to do some units and lessons on East Asian food history.  This source would be one that I would feel comfortable sending my students.  The site seems to have several collaborators who are all coming to their entries with a historical lens and context. Besides providing some good recipes in some of them, many of the entries also include a short history of the food, or the migration of people to an area that would give rise to new foodways as they incorporated the cultural and new food commodities to their recipes. 

In particular, I am interested in migration history and how that might have influenced foodways throughout the world.  I remember a food historian had shared with me about his travels to Peru and his discovery of Chifa cuisine, which is a mix of Peruvian and Chinese food.  This entry about "Chifas in Argentina" caught my eye as I was browsing because it extended the story even further with Peruvian migration to Argentina, they brought their foods to another part of the South America. 

The blog even highlights well known food historians like Jeffrey Pilcher, who wrote a post about the "Original Chinese American Food" and how it came with the Spanish Manilla Galleons as early as the 1600s , not necessarily with the Chinese laborers who came in the mid-1800s to find their riches in the gold rush or in building the railroads. 

There are a lot of historical gems in this food history site for anyone who is interested! 

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