The challenges of cross-cultural cuisine and feeding children

And in praise of food courts

We just got back to the US after a month in Australia, and a full breakdown of our Australian food spending is to follow. But for now, I have some thoughts about food during our time in Australia.

During our month back home, we stayed with my parents, in the house that I grew up in. My mum’s kitchen and style of cooking is a world apart from mine, which is well depicted in this video by The Chen Dynasty: Chinese cooking vs Western cooking. My mum’s kitchen is a typical Chinese kitchen, and I’m pretty sure all she needs are a cleaver, a wok, a chopping board, and chopsticks and she can conjure up all sorts of meals with those things. My mum never taught me how to cook, and all of my cooking influences are Western — I learnt how to cook from Google, books like Salt Fat Acid Heat, the Epicurious YouTube channel, and from various housemates and friends along the way. Our kitchen has things like measuring cups and spoons, multiple knives, and almost exclusively cast iron skillets as the pans we cook with. My mum and I cook very different types of food. When I’m in her house, she does the cooking. This is great for me because I get to eat the meals from my childhood that I miss (and haven’t yet learnt how to recreate), and that I also haven’t eaten in years, since our last trip to Australia in 2019. 

It was, however, a little less great for my kids, because Cantonese and Chinese cuisine is not something they have much familiarity with, and while they are willing to try new things, there weren’t many things they ate with great enthusiasm. They sadly did not like Chinese tomato egg stirfry (something I ate heaps as a child and still love), steamed fish, or beef chow fun. They typically like spring rolls and wontons here, but not the homemade ones that my mum made (which I also love). They apparently prefer the frozen wontons we buy from Costco and the spring rolls from our local Vietnamese restaurant. They did eat the pasta my mum made, shallot pancakes, stir fried lamb, and what seemed like endless amounts of xiaolongbao, red bean bao, and pineapple buns. I also made them jaffles a lot — not Cantonese or Chinese but distinctly Australian. 

A jaffle is like a toastie, but it’s closed on the edges from the shape/design of the jaffle iron. As much as I love toasties, there is something deeply satisfying about the pocket of deliciousness that a jaffle creates. The jaffle iron was invented by Dr Earnest Smithers from Bondi, Australia, back in 1949, and it is something I seriously considered bringing back with me. But something something different electricity wattage/voltage things in the US meant that I wouldn’t be able to just plug it in and use it. My husband said that if I really desperately needed it, there is a converter thing we could get that would be about the size of an airfryer and we would need to plug it into that for it to work. I decided against bringing a jaffle iron and just filled our suitcases with books and tea instead. I also resolved to just eat a lot of jaffles whenever we go back home. Luckily the kids also loved them so there was still plenty for them to eat in Australia, despite the cross-cultural cuisine challenges (pictured below is a dessert jaffle I made with peanut butter, banana, and chocolate speckles from Haigh’s. They were excellent).

In praise of food courts (and Australian shopping centres)

I’m not sure if this is common to all of the US, but at least in the part of San Diego where we live, there seems to be a difference between fashion malls, where you go for shopping as a retail experience, and strip malls, where you go for mundane and everyday life reasons. You would go to a fashion mall to buy clothes, shoes, and jewellery, go to a department store, have a meal at a nice restaurant, do some present shopping, maybe go to the movies or meet a friend to window shop and have a coffee. You would go to the strip mall for groceries, the bank, the post office, or to pick up the dry-cleaning. But there isn’t a shopping centre where you can do both. 

In Australia, there is a difference in retail geography — there are many large shopping centres that combine the roles of both the American fashion mall and the American strip mall. You can buy a nice outfit from an upscale fashion boutique, look at jewellery, try on shoes, and get your groceries, buy stamps, and go to the bank all in the same shopping centre. They are also often conveniently served by public transport or are right next to major public transport hubs. 

As a result, we spent a lot more time in shopping centres in Australia than we do in the US. Importantly, it is at these large shopping centres (and the large fashion shopping malls in the US) where you typically find food courts, and it was on this trip to Australia that I fully appreciated how great food courts are. When I was a teenager and an undergrad at uni, food courts were typically where my friends and I would eat because the food there was cheaper than going to an actual restaurant. Food courts typically serve a large variety of quick meals for reasonably low prices, and the variety and quality of food you can get has increased a fair bit since the 2000s (back when I was a frequent customer). 

These days, food courts have many food outlets with excellent food — but the best thing about them is an old feature: you can get food from multiple food outlets for different people and still all eat together. This was always a feature of food courts, but it wasn’t one I thought too much about or considered to be wonderful until I started spending my days wandering around a city with two small children, who would sometimes want to eat vastly different things for meals or snacks. When one kid wants a sushi roll and the other wants a peanut butter sandwich, it is the food court that can accommodate that. It’s like a retail geography parenting hack. 

When I think back to my geography days, and the research and lessons about shopping centres killing the high street, I do feel a twinge of guilt for liking shopping centres as much as I do. The supermarket that drove out the butcher, the grocer, and the fishmonger, and the cars and suburbs and massive shopping centres that caused the decline of the high street which resulted in a loss of small business and less vibrant economies (or so the story goes)... Shouldn’t I be against this? Especially given that I once wrote a thesis on independent bookshops in Sydney and how they fared when they were facing competition from large chains and online retailers? 

In many cases, I still want to support the small independent retailer (whenever I link to a book, I link it to Powell’s, a great independent bookshop in Portland, and never to Amazon), but I can’t deny that I also spent a decent amount of time in shopping centres on this trip to Australia. One nice thing is that these shopping centres still have butchers, fishmongers, and grocers, unlike in San Diego — the supermarket hasn’t completely driven them out of business, and I hope they never do. The shopping centres were where I bought groceries, snacks for the kids en route to the train or storytime at the library, where I got stamps and postcards, where we bought lunches at the food court, where I went shopping (with a friend, and without the kids), and where we spent time if we had to wait for a bus or train. Just another small thing I miss that I didn’t realise I missed until they were gone. Though I guess at five storeys and hundreds of retailers and restaurants, Parramatta Westfield isn’t exactly a ‘small’ thing.