By definition, third culture is blending another culture with your parent’s culture, so your culture ends up neither one nor the other.
I think we blend foods too – at least I do. For example, I grew up eating fresh tofu (as opposed to packaged supermarket tofu, ugh), since my mother’s third culture was Japanese/Hawaiian and that got passed down to me. Actually, I lived in Hawaii for awhile too. Anyway, she’s also Dutch, and chocolate is a very big cultural food with the Dutch, so I also grew up having chocolate sprinkles on my buttered toast in the morning (hagelslag), as this is a Dutch breakfast tradition.
The TCK part begins when we’d mix Japanese with Dutch – we used to take fresh tofu, and pour chocolate syrup and sprinkles on it and eat it with (gasp) a knife and fork for dessert. The first time I told a Japanese person that, they were horrified and disgusted. Chocolate and tofu? Eeew eeew yuk! They actually doubled over and looked like they were going to vomit… I never told another Japanese person about it after that….
And, we eat sardines straight out of a can with fork or chopsticks, horrifying our Filipino friends who eat sardines but always in recipes and never straight alone.
It must be a TCK thing, eating other culture’s foods, but not quite properly, or mixing them in strange ways with our own culture’s foods. Anyone else do strange TCK concoctions like my chocolate-syrup-and-sprinkles-on-tofu dessert?
Popularity: 4% [?]