George Kamide
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
George Kamide’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, wow. Yes. First, I am very excited to be here. I know we've been talking about it for a while. Favorite food. Oh, okay. I'm going to go with tacos first. There's so many I could pick, but tacos were the key ingredient into getting my kids to try new things.
If I could get it into a taco, they would eat it, and now they love tacos, and they are on the hunt for taco trucks, and they have a very discerning palate for their age, so I'm going to say tacos. Tacos. Favorite food memory. My family is from Brazil, and so there is a traditional Brazilian dish called feijoada, which is black beans that is stewed over very low heat for a very long time.
Like many cultural foods that are used to typify a country, let's say the pastas of Italy or the noodles of China, the paella of Spain, feijoada was poor people's food, more specifically slave food. It was basically whatever meat scraps were thrown to the slaves, they would put in this pot. And because they're working long hours, you know, somebody was watching it for a long period of time.
But I had it a lot growing up. It was delicious. And so my favorite food memory is the first time I went back to Brazil since we had immigrated to the States. Being able to locate this fish water that was being cooked out in this field in a gigantic, like the biggest pot I have ever seen in my life. And I located it by smell alone.
Like it was just sort of like a cartoon, like drifting on the vapor of the hot. So it was just felt like a very full circle moment from growing up with it as a kid and being told stories about Brazil. And then finally being able to go back to Brazil for the first time and turns out that food was the connector.
Yeah. When you think about paella, it's like the farmers were like, what do you have? I got these clams. What do you have? I just like throw it in a giant pot. It's a very collaborative food for sure.
Yeah, that is true. I mean, there's a lot. See, that was why it was going to be hard. It was either going to have to be Brazil, Latin America or Japan. So I went with the first thing that came to mind. I will say I was an anthropology major and the two cultural modes that are saturated, we say saturated with the most meaning, are food and sex.
It is how a people think of reproducing their lineage and all the rituals around that. And also how does it feed itself? How does it nurture itself? How does it continue to survive to the next generation? So you brought up the people who cooked. So, I mean, today we have history, you have culture, and you can layer in class, economics. We'll talk about security.
There's just so much that goes into food and it is something that can be a medium to convey all of that almost instantly. Like the moment you taste it for the first time, they're like all these cultural layers that you're unaware of, but some part of your human cultural radar is picking them up. And I think that's why it's so fun to share food memories.
Like, oh, I was traveling here and people might talk about the sites, but they almost always talk about the food also, the things that they ate.
Yeah, so they have always favored soft tacos. Mm-hmm, I do too. And we have, and sort of street style, in other words, much smaller tortilla. Yep. Lately, they've been favoring the flour tortilla, although there is an outfit here where we live where in the farmer's market, mom and grandma are personally pressing masa tortillas, like as you're ordering them, and that is incredible. Yeah.
And one day I will take them to Mexico and I have this insane taco story there, which was I was in southern Mexico and the family I was staying with was like, we're going out for tacos. Didn't really know what to expect. At that point in my life, I'm pretty sure my experience of tacos was whatever chain Tex-Mex restaurant we had on the East Coast, which is to say the nadir of Mexican food.
So we go out there and there's like three things you can put on the taco. So that's it. He's giving you choices. He's like, it's like cheese, chicken, or beans. I was like, oh, and these tortillas were very small, like the size of your palm. Yep. Oh, okay. I didn't really understand what was going on. Okay, great. So ordered whatever.
And then I turned around and there's this table with this array of like 90 salsas. And I was like, oh, I see. This is merely the vehicle to transport the salsa into my
face it's really the salsa that's the meal yes and and i i did my best i did my best to eat every single one i'm not sure i got there but the cost of the time was insane it must have been less than 90 cents per taco so i really tried to do as much damage as possible but that was like a peak experience for sure
The family we were staying with, you know, the day is hot. And so we would come back from the university and lunch is the biggest meal of the day. And I kid you not, the housekeeper who was in charge of preparing the meals, my friend Scott and I sit down and there is this like just cartoonishly large stack of tortillas.
He and I are like really uncertain as to like whether we are expected to get through this mountain of tortillas. Anyway, we got through as much as we could and it was incredible. But it was also like, this is why you have the siesta because I cannot move. Right. It was like just it's super hot and a full on food coma. And you're like, yes, I am not moving again until 3 p.m. when it gets cooler.
And I have at least digested some of this tortillas.
I want that. Yeah, China had more pictures. When I was in Japan, I was learning Japanese and I was living near Tokyo, so the lot was in English. But when we traveled out to the countryside, if you got into the place that didn't have it, you're like looking at them and you're like, I think that is the kanji for codfish or it's like umbrella.
And I guess we're going to figure that out when it comes to the table.
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