Context

At the Seattle Food Bloggers get together last month, the topic of "context" came up.  At that time we were discussing people’s expectations for certain types of food and I expressed my view that a lot of what we are "missing" in Seattle is due to the lack of ethnic concentration in this area.  Yes, we have lots of Asians and by and large some great Asian restaurants.  But if you are looking for something that is typical of a European, South American or African culture you might be disappointed. 

If you think about how the West was settled this makes sense (at least to me!).  When people moved West during the 1800s they sometimes traveled with family or cultural units but much more often they traveled with other adventurers from many different heritages along the Oregon Trail.  Along the trail people were concerned with survival not culture, and by the very nature of the mixture of people in each wagon train cultures started borrowing and learning from each other.  Add to that the scarcity of whatever those cultures would consider to be typical foodstuffs and you can see why cultural or ethnic traditions were lost or mutated along the way. 

There are other factors, too, such as how far removed from the "old country" people were.  For instance, the contrast in my parents’ families can illustrate this.  My maternal grandfather was born in Italy although he moved here at a very young age.  My maternal grandmother was born in the U.S. but all of her older siblings were born in Italy.  Both of their families moved to New York and settled in primarily Italian communities that had been established for some time.  And extended families came over together.  So it wasn’t just my grandparents’ immediate families that came over but the aunts/uncles/cousins, too.  While in New York their food was all Italian all the time.  Many of the older people spoke only Italian.  It wasn’t uncommon for my Mom to have conversations that were half English and half Italian.  She’d speak English, her Aunts would answer in Italian.  They were submersed in Italian culture even though they lived in the U.S. 

My Mom’s family moved to the west coast during WWII, when my grandparents came to Vancouver, WA to work in the shipyards.  At that time they moved away from their community and that’s when they started to become more Americanized. 

On the other hand, it was my Dad’s great-grandparents that came to the U.S. from Germany.  Although they started on the East Coast the family eventually moved to Illinois since they were primarily farmers.  Farm communities are much more spread out and while there may still be communities, most often the farmers rely primarily on their own family units.  And when you are farming the emphasis is mostly about making the farm work.  So the first cultural dilution happened when they moved to the Midwest and then was multiplied by the fact that they lived a much more isolated life.  And the fact that they had been in the U.S. a longer time also contributed to the loss of cultural influence.  You can see some adherence to culture in that both grandparents were German so that was part of their community but the concentration of German ways was missing. The next step in that evolution was another uprooting from community when my grandparents moved to Oregon, leaving their extended families in Illinois. 

So when I think back on my grandparents and my impressions of them I think of my maternal grandparents as Italian since they still held on to much of their background even though time had eroded some of it.  But when I think of my paternal grandparents I know they were German, and there were definite personality traits that remained, but I mostly think of them as having a farming heritage.  The rituals I remember were based more around that.  Things like huge lunches – actually dinners – at noon and smaller but still substantial meals in the evening (suppers).  These were based on the hard work of farming not the rituals of Germany. 

Since the migration during the 1800s I would venture to guess (and this is a huge supposition on my part) that we’ve (Seattle) never had an influx of Europeans such that people would all tend to settle in the same area to maintain a "Insert country here" Neighborhood, with one major exception in Ballard where the Scandinavian fisherman originally settled.  There were some areas such as "Garlic Gulch" but these were very loose communities and didn’t have the density that areas like New York or Chicago have.  We have, however, had a large influx of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indian and other Asian peoples.  For a city of our size the International District (formerly Chinatown, for those of you new to or not from Seattle) is pretty big.

So this is not an excuse for why we don’t have more authentically ethnic foods or restaurants just one possible explanation.  And personally, I kind of like the idea that we don’t have everything that every other big city has – it just makes eating while you travel all that much more fun!

Related to this idea of Context is the idea of Expectation.  Something I’d actually been thinking about prior to our meeting and a topic I’ll dive into in the next day or so.  I’ve been thinking a lot about it as I "dined" at Outback and around Phoenix this last week.