Traditional Food

         Christmas is a very an important festival in American. The families get together and enjoy a great dinner. In China we have a similar festival called Spring Festival. During this festival every family will go to the children’s grandfather’s house and have a delicious dinner. In this meal we usually have chicken, duck, fish and pork. Because is it the beginning of the year, we should have a great start. The most important food in this festival is dumpling which is the traditional food in the Spring Festival. The dumplings have a folk story about why we should eat dumplings. Long time ago, there are no people on the planet. A beautiful lady called Nvwa want to let the planet full of vitality, so she uses the loess to make human. But the weather is very cold, so the humans ears are fell off from their heads. Then Nvwa uses the thread through a little from the ears and put the other end of the line in to the humans’ mouths to stable the ears. In China the word “thread” and the dumplings’ filling are the same pronunciation. In order to commemorate the Nvwa’s merit, every year people dumplings. We can see the shape of the dumplings look like the gold ingot in the ancient China, so it is a very sign for the new year. Sometime we also put a coin in one of the dumplings, anyone who eats the dumpling with the coin will have luck for the whole year.

In this year’s Spring Festival, I stay in American because the winter vacation is a little bit short. Even though I am not with family I still cook some dumplings with my friends. Because this is the first time to cook the dumplings by ourselves, the taste is not very good and the dumplings’ shape looks strange. But this is a great meal for me because I can feel I am at home. For every student who studies abroad, it is the first time to far away from home and you should do everything by yourself. In this Spring Festival, the students get together just like a huge family. This “family” can make people feel warm and comfortable.
Besides the festival there is an other important event in one year which is the birthday. When I was nine years old, our family celebrated the 84^th birthday of my grandfather. I can still remember at the end of the meal my grandfather had a bowl of noodle and the noodle’s shape just like a word “life” in Chinese language. I asked my mother why my grandpa ate noodles at his birthday. My mother told me the long noodles represent a long life, so when we had our birthdays the Chinese people always had a bowl of noodle to wish had a long life. I also notice the age number on the birthday cake is 83 but not 84. I asked my mother why this thing happened. Is it because someone not good at math? Of course not, my mother told me when old people had their 73 or 84 years old birthday, they usually put 72 or 83 number on their birthday cake. Because there an old saying which is when the old people in their 73 or 84 years old they will have a tough year.

Though these two things we can say the food and culture are inseparable. We can see the culture though a country’s food. If you know the country well you can tell which part the country a person comes from. Take China for example, in the north of China people like the cooked wheaten food and the south part people like rice. In Sichuan Province and Hunan Province, people like to eat the spicy food, but people from Shanghai Province like the sweet food. These are all the proofs that the food and culture are related each other. So if you want to know a country’s culture, go to their country’s restaurant and “taste” their culture.