If You Eat, Then What Am I? By Geeta Kothari

Dealing with multiple cultures as part of your family is a battle that many people, especially Americans, in this day in age fight. In Geeta Kothari's If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?, Kothari describes some of the struggles she has faced as an Indian in America and with marrying an American man, in the context of the differences in the food that the two cultures eat. She starts with her childhood, when she was not allowed to eat the food that the other American children ate at school, here is what she writes; "I want to eat what the kids at school eat: bologna, hot dogs, salami - foods my parents find repugnant because they contain pork and meat byproducts, crushed bone and hair glued together by chemicals and fat"(947). Kothari wanted to eat the same things as the American children, and her mother tried …show more content…
As a child, Kothari did not fit in with the American children, she felt because she was not allowed to eat the food they ate. But it was not much better on the Indian side of things. As an adult, after marrying an American man and moving away from her parents, Kothari attempts to prepare food that her mother and grandmother had made. Even after many phone calls and visits from her parents, Kothari is still unable to prepare the traditional Indian dishes as her mother does. She is frustrated that not only can she not prepare Indian food, but she is not very fond of it either. Also, she can not prepare American food because she can not handle raw meats. Kothari describes her feelings on the subject by writing, "Now I worry that this antipathy toward dal [an Indian dish] signals something deeper, that somehow I am not my parents' daughter, not Indian, and because I cannot bear the touch and smell of raw meat, though I can eat it cooked (charred, dry, and overdone), I am not American