Vietnamese narrow-mindedness about food

I can't speak about the pool of people you hang with, but mine are all for anything foreign, including Japanese and Korean food. It's all anecdotal here anyways and I'm a pretty fussy eater so I can't say I don't sympathize a bit.

Japantovietnam wrote:

I can't speak about the pool of people you hang with, but mine are all for anything foreign, including Japanese and Korean food. It's all anecdotal here anyways and I'm a pretty fussy eater so I can't say I don't sympathize a bit.

I was once the fussiest eater you EVER saw, then I had to make an emergency trip to Singapore about an immigration matter and I found myself served unfamiliar food .. realized that if I spent the next two weeks picking through my food I was going to enjoy the trip a LOT less, and decided, that ends right here, right now, and ate everything, and loved it.

There are a few things I "don't care for" but aside from moral reason. e.g; reptiles and dogs, the only food I can't eat is mushrooms,  My mouth just says SPIT THIS OUT NOW.

Last week I treated my caucasion tenant and his son to a Vietnamese restaurant. They hardly ate any of their food and even bought outside food and brought it into the restaurant.

Later he told me he prefer Canadian food like steak, eggs and potatoes.

A while back I brought some Hennessy to my country folks. They didn't see anything special about it and preferred their rice wine.

Some people just have their comfort zone and are afraid to move out of it.

khanh44 wrote:

Last week I treated my caucasion tenant and his son to a Vietnamese restaurant. They hardly ate any of their food and even bought outside food and brought it into the restaurant.

Later he told me he prefer Canadian food like steak, eggs and potatoes.

A while back I brought some Hennessy to my country folks. They didn't see anything special about it and preferred their rice wine.

Some people just have their comfort zone and are afraid to move out of it.

I was with a Chinese partner when we tried phở.  Of course he liked it at once, and so did I.  What was odd was that we would both get a craving for it at the same moment, out of nowhere.

Later after we split up I went exploring Beyond Phở and learned my way around the cuisine and over the next year, around 1995, I pretty much changed my whole diet to mostly Vietnamese, and I have lived on it for 18 years.  I felt better, my skin cleared up, I didn't get sleepy at 4:30 every afternoon anymore.  Sure, I ate salad and the occasional pizza but I probably ate more Vietnamese food than most ABVs.

I *jettisoned* my comfort zone.

I notice in any country it seems rather country vs urban. I see here and in most countries it's people that live in the boonies that wrinkle their nose at anything new. It's that "It's not a part of my culture, so not good enough for me." mentality. I remember moving to California and it being a foodie's paradise because there were so many people willing to try so many things. Not what I got back at the ethnocentric East Coast.

I remember the first time my 70 year old mother in law tried pizza. It was after we asked her to try it at dinner time and she kept saying that there was no way she could eat it. I caught her in the kitchen later that evening sneaking it out and eating it.
Now when we talk about what we want for dinner she always suggest pizza

Funny how it always comes back to pizza.  I bet we could have gotten those two kids to like it but OTOH they might have puked.  We've taken them to the buffet and they had a blast but still wouldn't even try the dim sum entries, only the recognizable Vietnamese.  And even at that age, 6 & 10, they were more interested in the seafood than the dessert.

Ever had an authentic Italian pizza?  It's unrecognizable.  Square, deep, mostly cheese, but delicious as hell.

Now I'm starving for pizza

Not what I got back at the ethnocentric East Coast.

Wonder where that was? when I lived on the east coast in the '50s we ate French-Canadien (greatest pea soup in the world!), New England Yankee (to include steamed clams with stomachs in them and lobster), Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Swedish, Irish, and Polish food. I even ate occasional Gujarati fare prepared by our neighbors upstairs, all in a New England mill town. I also spent a short while in a school there run by the sisters of Quebec (meat pies for holidays!) and walking out of my house could hear four or five languages before I got down-town. Presently, the local high school lists Khmer (but not Vietnamese) as a subject taught at the beginner, advanced, honors and heritage speaker levels.

Ate my first home-made Mexican food in Maine, my first Vietnamese food in North Carolina (1965), and some of the greatest African-American food in the South, not to mention the many Chinese dishes, to include Sechuan, and Latin-American cuisine in East Coast cities. (Can't count Cajun because Louisiana is on the Gulf coast)

Perhaps your upbringing was more insular.

I first had Chinese food in 1959 in New Hampshire.  Or so I thought.

I actually had my first Chinese food around 1991.  That stuff we called Chinese wasn't.

lirelou wrote:

Perhaps your upbringing was more insular.

I just consider East Coast to be more insular than West Coast in general, I don't project my childhood on an entire side of a country. Generalizations are just that, general.

My experience is very different, at least comparing anywhere on the east coast I've lived to Seattle.  Seattle is in the grip pf an extreme relativism and obsession with individualism.  You can actually get frosted for wishing someone good morning, reminded that whether or not it's a good morning is a matter of personal perspective.  This gets REAL old.

I've never lived in Seattle but I know a lot of San Franciscoers move there and love it for cheaper living with the same vibe. I have heard it's much harder to make friends there than Cali, but it's hard to make friends in Cali if you don't party or do business.

milkybunnyHCM wrote:

I've never lived in Seattle but I know a lot of San Franciscoers move there and love it for cheaper living with the same vibe. I have heard it's much harder to make friends there than Cali, but it's hard to make friends in Cali if you don't party or do business.

I first moved to Seattle in 1975.  Two years later I was still making phone calls to the place I had lived pretty much just for the summer to keep in contact with friends there, I still knew more people in a place I had only lived a few months than I knew in Seattle.  They're "shy."

I face similar things here .. I don't drink alcohol and I can't stand being around tobacco smoke, and that cuts out a lot.  People here both Vietnamese and expats, are much more alcohol centric than people I knew in the USA.  No biggie, I only need a few friends.  And I'd rather stay home and read than watch people getting stinko.  I'm pretty extroverted, not shy at all, but I need *something* to talk about.