TV Dinners and Requests for Japanese Cooking

I had lived in Sapporo city for two and a half years before I came to the States. Except for the first few months in the city, I lived alone in an old apartment room. It was an old and cheap but large apartment room that was located only 3 minutes walk from my work place back then. It was also close to a two-story supermarket that I used to go almost everyday.

On weekends, I would go to the supermarket and would buy groceries for a week. I did rice cooking for a week on weekends, too. I usually cooked rice at the full capacity of my compact rice cooker. Then a bowl-full amount of the rice was taken out of it and was put into a plastic bag. The bags of rice were kept in the freezer. I took out the bag one by one and put into the microwave every night. I ate them with some vegetables, meats or fish usually canned or precooked and sold in small packages. Or retort foods like curry could go with the rice also. This was the way I ate every night.

In the morning, I had bread, milk, some yogurt. I had some catered meals for lunch at the work place. I have been conscious of what I take in terms of nutrition. But I have not been interested in joy of eating. I could have had exactly the same menu every day, if it were nutritious enough to maintain myself. I do not go spend my time and money trying famous cuisine at some restaurants. I dare not spend more money than usual to taste some new food on topic. In short, eating is not rated as high priority in my life. Some people are really in for just driving cars. But probably few of them can get enthusiastic in process of fueling the cars or what to fuel. To eat is just like it to me. The place I lived had many “bento” shops, or lunch-box-type meal vendors nearby that opened till midnight. I sometimes went these shops to buy myself meals. I tended to select one of my few usual picks out of the wide variety of menu. This way I did not have to invest my time into the thoughts over what to eat

Once I visited Kyoto and Nara when I was 20. I was traveling alone. I enjoyed visiting famous temples and other sight seeing spots. I took frequent looks on the map and found routes to where I wanted to go. I stepped into the intended places, felt the atmosphere, and took pictures. How people lived there and how people spoke there were the objects of my great interest. I called my mother one night and described what I had seen. My mother was listening for a while, then she asked what I had eaten for the past few days. I had rarely eaten. I was so absorbed in seeing things there as to forget eating. People often say that eating local foods is the major joy of traveling. It is absolutely not for me.

I do hope that some day food would be replaced with some cheap tablets so that I spend only limited time and money in eating. Then people will have chewing gums to keep their chins functioning. Unfortunately this kind of tablets have not been marketed yet. I saw some Americans swallowing more than a dozen of tablets and capsules of various vitamins at McDonald’s. The prescription would help body maintenance but they just play supplemental roles. Body maintenance requires wider variety of things than could be brought in with several kinds of tablets. So I am still eating though I am very much indifferent to it.

When Americans visit Japan, they usually find some troubles in eating raw fish, or rarely seasoned plants, particularly at family dinners. But the Japanese-style cuisine would not bother the US people very long, if they stay in the mediocre cities. There must be McDonald’s, Subway or Kentucky Fried Chicken somewhere in the cities. And some junk foods that are popular in the United States, like Cup Noodle or Maruchan Noodle, are obviously available in the country of their origins.

Well, was it true to me as a Japanese in Klamath Falls also? Not exactly. Thus my indifference to overall food helped me survive with the American food, after coming to the United States. Since I found meal tickets were still expensive to consume every day, I could replace cafeteria meals with Quaker oatmeal notorious among Japanese exchange students. The oatmeal, of course, is not nutritious. I could take it because I ate at cafeteria on other days. I could barely balance nutrition and cost with limited replacement with oatmeal.

If you don’t care much for something, which means neither you like it nor you hate it, your vocabulary in the field will not increase at all. That’s a problem. I do not have much Japanese vocabulary about food. I, naturally, must not have had English vocabulary about food. What was worse, the Japanese food is often too special to find in the United States. There is no way that I could possibly explain to the friends in the United States what I had normally eaten in Japan.

But for some reason, people really wanted to talk about food. I didn’t mind listening to them. I didn’t mind having meals with them either. But when they caught my face over the table, they could not help expecting me to tell something new to them that was about food. Then they found me without sufficient words to keep the conversation going, and often proposed me, “Why don’t you cook some Japanese food for us? We wanna have that.” Now this was definitely the big “No-no.”

I usually replied, “I don’t cook.” But silly ones would remain persistent to ask me an unfeasible favor. In this kind of cases, I would refuse saying, “I hate cooking. It is not worth my time. I did it, only because I had no other way to eat and had an easy access to needed groceries. But here, I have no reason to do what I hate and there seems to be no Japanese food shops around here. Do you think that you are something enough to force me to entertain you?”

I came across with these stupid people every now and then. More than a half of them were persistent enough to be yelled at by me. People are said to be different from each other in the United States. They are of different mixture of races with different cultures and religions. They are said to respect and value the difference each other. However, the interest in eating may be intolerably universal to them after all.