Cultural Food Doesn’t Mean Unhealthy Food

The summer before moving back to Davis for my second year, meaning I’d be living off-campus, was dedicated to learning how to cook so I would be able to feed myself. The plan was to get all the hands-on experience and recipes from my mom, but that didn’t really end up happening. Instead, breakfast and lunch were mainly my experimentation time to get some practice in. Not knowing where to start, I decided to look up “healthy easy college student meals,” which gave me a ton of rather interesting recipes like peanut butter energy balls, quinoa salad, buddha bowls, and the famous overnight oats. I mostly experimented with overnight oats, some breakfast smoothies, and tried out avocado toast with egg for the first time.

I have a feeling the lack of avocado toast in my life might be a sin to some of you, but it definitely was not a staple in my very Mexican household. I fell in love with these small and quick meals and by the time I moved into my apartment, I was looking up even more recipes to try out. I started to love cooking and food, and to notice changes and feel great the more I learned how to fuel myself. I spammed my family with photos of all the dinners I made, eagerly had my housemates taste my food, and was overall excited each time I made something. I even cooked quinoa at one point, but I probably need more practice with that.

The more I read and learned about nutrition, the more I was fascinated by what was considered “healthy” regarding portions of food groups and how certain foods fit in these groups. I was proud of making this shift for myself, but I started to miss the meals I easily took for granted and got sick of back home because of how often we had them. Out of all the foods my mom cooked for us, ranging from beans and rice to sopa de fideo and albondigas (meatball soup), I managed to only experiment on cooking her white rice that featured the famous Knorr consome (bouillon). With Davis being a majorly white community, it’s so easy to feel distant from my culture, and the fact that I was straying away from Mexican cuisine made me feel even more distant. It also didn’t help that I have to drive to Woodland to find any authentic ingredients or certain staple food brands.

After a year of experimentation, and the additional time that COVID provided, I started asking my mom for all kinds of basic recipes. At this point, I was so fixated on trying to be “healthy” that I was nervous that I would somehow digress by eating these dishes again. The fact that I had these feelings made me realize how nutrition is so focused on eurocentric dishes, where burrito bowls are the closest dish related to my culture that I would see mentioned as a “nutritious meal.” I realized all these dishes shouldn’t be the singular definition of healthy nutrition.

Nutrition tends to be so eurocentric to the point where people from multiple cultures are ashamed or worried that their cultural dishes don’t line up with health standards and that they have to them go. My mom experienced this when she learned people in the U.S. don’t eat tortilla and rice together, so she started to stray away.

If you ask me, my ejotes con huevo (green beans with egg) and my all-time favorite dish, ceviche, are pretty damn healthy and I do not want to keep them out of my diet again. Beans and rice together? That’s a complete source of protein, baby. Guacamole? Avocados are a healthy fat! My culture is FULL of healthy options and I’m sure that’s the case for yours, too. There’s a ton of useful nutritional information that can help us out, but it shouldn’t be taught through a singular lens. Now, I have a blast figuring out how my dishes align with all of this information, while also sneaking in a Gansito once in a while because, you know, balance is key.

• college life
• cooking
• healthy eating
• nutrition