Blog Post 7: Ina Friedman - How My Parents Learned To Eat

How My Parents Learned to Eat is a story of how a young girl's Japanese mother and American father met and fell in love, but also about the cultural exchange that took place in the process. It is a great book for multicultural and non-multicultural children alike. The book addresses ideas about food culture, cultural exchange, long distance relationships without focusing on the interracial dating or biracial daughter. Since it is not the main focus of the book, it becomes normalized and the reader hardly pays attention to the fact that there's anything different about the narrator or her parents in the first place. The book was published in 1987 but the story seems to take place during a war or occupation (possibly WWII).

I chose this book because it was one of my favorites during the first three or four years of elementary school. This book accompanied my elementary school's Japanese immersion class very well. I was no younger than five and no older than eight when I was introduce to this book. I loved it because even as a child I was a great food enthusiast, and my way of feeling a connection to the Japanese culture was through food and music (and cartoons of course). During the lesson plan for this book, we began learning what chopsticks were and how to use them. We learned about snacks that we'd never seen before like nori and mochi. We were also studying the language. Some of my fondest memories of that part of my childhood and academic career are of this book and that program. The book encourages children to engage in cultural exchange and the fact that my friends I have done it so extensively probably attests to the lessons we learned early on about its value in contexts like these. The best part is knowing we can still count to 100 and eat with chopsticks over a decade later.