Describe Commonalities Among The Foods Of East Asia

East Asian Food
Your Name
Your Institution of Affiliation
April 11, 2017
Introduction
Throughout the history of the world, food is perhaps, one of the earliest and most important commodity that everyone have shared CITATION Gon11 \l 1033 (Gong, et al., 2011). This importance is not simply in terms of subsistence and survival, but also in terms of cohesion, unification, and creation. This aspect of creation happens when food is prepared collectively either by members of the family, community, or even the larger society. This, in turn, is what makes food a very important cultural concept because defines what a specific culture is and what makes it similar or different from the others. Following from this, it could be said that food could be used as an excellent analytical tool in order to determine one’s ancestry and origins (or differentiate one cultural origin), by looking at the similarities that exist between how food is (1) prepared and eaten, (2) what are the ingredients most dominantly used in it, and the (3) traditional reason for the creation of a cuisine? One good example where food could be used as an analytical tool to differentiate one culture to another is the case of East Asia. Although, East Asia is more of a political regional term arbitrarily used for the countries of China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan, these countries share a lot in terms of their history and tradition as compared to other countries. In most cases, this ‘vagueness’ and loose usage of the term “East Asian” makes it more difficult for most of us to conceptualized what East Asian is as a distinct regional cultural group, much less a distinct and specific cuisine that exist in between them. Nevertheless, the author believes that the usage of the concept of “East Asian Food” is correct, for the reason that the countries in the region – these cuisines have originated – exhibit similar and unique traditions in terms of preparation and consumption, despite the differences the ingredients used and the cultural note that exist in between each cuisine.
Preparation
Throughout Asia, some of the most common way of preparing food includes boiling, steaming, and baking. This is mainly because of the fact that the staple food in most Asian countries (Philippines, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, etc.) is rice and its varieties. However, aside from rice, East Asian countries also prepare millet by transforming it into noodles and its other derivatives, such as flour and alcoholic drinks. In Ancient China, this process of transforming millet into noodles was found to be existing as early as 1700 years BP, based on recent day analysis of “samples of P. miliaceum with husks from the Yingpan Tomb” CITATION Gon11 \l 1033 (Gong, et al., 2011). Aside from the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese are also well known for their art of preparing noodles for consumption. In the more present context, this characteristic of eating noodles (which is a characteristic of East Asian countries) with different ways of garnishing was made evident by the news that millions of dollars was used by South Korean researchers just in order to create Kimchi that would be suited for Korean space ...