Food, Family, and Friends

As she munches on an Asian Tofu Wrap from 1.5.0., a food vendor selling fresh, local, organic meals, and drinks water from a reusable CamelBak, Cara Coppola talks about the food that has had a tremendous influence on her relationships with her family and friends.  She discusses how traditions have shaped her and how some of her best memories center around meals.  It is obvious that in both familial and friendly settings food has played a pivotal role in helping Cara establish not only relationships, but an identity as well. 

            Family is the most notable example of how food, in both preparation and consumption have influenced Cara.  She comes from a large family, with fifteen family members on her mother’s side and over thirty on her father’s.  While the two families prepare and serve different types of food and have different traditions surrounding the food, both extended families use food as a means of connecting with one another, sharing stories, and maintaining relationships.  Her maternal extended family is Irish and will commonly prepare traditional Irish foods such as mashed, baked, or scalloped potatoes; corn beef and cabbage; and Irish stew.  Meals are often followed by family members breaking into Irish dancing.  On her father’s side, the family is Italian, another culture which highly values food.  This family will prepare foods such as lasagna, fettuccine, octopus, salmon, or something as simple as bowls of olives.  While the two families have different traditions and dishes, both use food and meals as a time to gather and connect.

            After growing up in families which placed such an emphasis on food, Cara continued to use food as a way of connecting with people.  During her freshman year of college at the University of Delaware, Cara lived on a floor that had weekly gatherings they called “Sunday Cooking”.  At these gatherings, the girls from the hall would cook meals with one another and invite people from outside the community to join them.  This experience was a great way to bond with people, and for Cara it created strong friendships and bonds amongst hallmates.  These weekly gatherings were especially important since the hall where Cara lived was composed entirely of single rooms, so the food was an important factor in creating bonds.

The dining hall was another great way for Cara to meet and socialize with people.   Often, she and her friends would remain in the dining hall for an hour after the meal was finished, talking, joking, and discussing various topics.  A fond memory of her freshman year was one evening when Cara and her friend Katie went to the dining hall together and ended up eating three meals: soup, salad, and cereal.  Each mini-meal was eaten with a different group of people as the dining hall patrons came and went throughout the evening. 

At the conclusion of her freshman year of college, something about the University of Delaware was not right for Cara.  She felt that her classes were not challenging enough to provide her with the education she needs.  At Thanksgiving break, when she saw her friends from high school, they were all excited about their college experience, yet Cara did not have anything good to say about her college when talking to them.  Despite friends and a good major, Cara decided to transfer to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Although she is having to start over and endure the confusion of an disoriented freshman once more, she is very happy with the decision she has made to transfer schools.

At Chapel Hill, food has not facilitated meeting new people and keeping in touch with old friends in exactly the same way it did in Delaware.  This year Cara does not have a meal plan, so going to the dining hall is a rarity for her.  She will go to the dining hall occasionally, approximately once every two weeks.  When she does go, she goes with a group of people for the purpose of socializing.  Food still does play a role in creating and maintaining friendships in Cara’s life, but there are not as many opportunities for food to impact her life at Chapel Hill as there were in Delaware. 

Moving from Connecticut and Delaware to North Carolina has introduced major changes in the foods that surround Cara. This change in latitude has produced foods that she loves such as sweet tea, BBQ, and biscuits, even though she recognizes that these foods are not healthy and tries to eat them only occasionally.  Compared to the people from the North, Cara has found that Southerners are more amiable, she says “I can definitely notice the warmth in people as they open doors for you, strike up a conversation on the way to the bus stop, or just smile and wave”.  She has noticed that this warmth also applies to the food; she describes southern food as “very comforting and warm”.  She has noticed that Southerners have a great deal of pride in their food, that it serves as an identity and source of self-worth for them. 

For twelve years, Cara has attempted to confront the dilemma of eating meat.  She first became conscious of the issue at the age of seven.  Her favorite character from a television show was Lambchop and she clearly remembers crying at dinner one night when served lamb chops.  However, the discomfort was short lived, her family’s comfort and persistence soon reconciled her to eating meat.  Yet, the discomfort never completely died.  In high school, Cara took an environmental class which reignited her past discomfort with meat consumption.  Through an environmental perspective, Cara had facts to back up her emotional troubles with eating meat.  At Chapel Hill, Cara is working towards a  sustainability minor and this coursework has also influenced her feelings about meat.  It has forced her to be more conscious about the foods she chooses to eat.

When Cara told her family about her desire to become vegetarian, neither of her parents were happy with her decision, yet they had differing degrees of disapproval.  Her mother’s reaction was one of offense; she told Cara that she could not understand why her daughter would choose a vegetarian lifestyle when good food was prepared for her.  Her father was slightly more sympathetic, yet not supportive.  Cara and her father had once watched Food Inc. together, so he understood some of Cara’s discomfort. 

Cara is who she is today due to the combined influence of family and her friends, and a majority of that influence was possible only through the way Cara and the people near to her interacted through food.  Now that she is at college, food, family, and friends will continue to shape Cara as she completes her undergraduate education.