#midthesis

Growing up, I was never interested in food or cooking. When it was time to make dinner, my mother would call all of my siblings and I into the kitchen to go help, and I often was the only one sitting in the living room watching TV when everyone else was helping out in some way. Even when I made it into the kitchen, I did not stay long. When relatives would ask me what I was going to do when I got married, I would say, "My husband will cook for me." For some reason I was never asked what I was going to do when I would be living alone and have to feed myself.

Ironically, my sophomore year in college I anticipated living in an apartment and not in the dorms anymore, so I developed a strong interest in cooking. I started collecting recipes online and asking my mother how to make all the Cameroonian dishes that I would have known how to cook if I helped out in the kitchen more when I was younger. My mother would have never dreamed of seeing the day when I would get excited about cooking. With that I started to also become curious about the make up of my food. I started counting calories and learning more about the nutrients that were in different foods. This habit started to become a little obsessive.

When I finally moved into my apartment and was cooking for myself, I could have fooled anyone into thinking that I was one of those children who watched their parents very closely when they cooked. But with food it was more than just enjoying to cook, I also started to buy into all the talks from the dieting industry about good and bad foods, so I began to classify my food choices as good or bad. Food became my gift and my thorn; I became a really good cook who didn't need to follow recipes but I also began to go on a roller coaster of depriving myself from foods I loved then over indulging later.

Throughout the years, my gift for cooking grew but so did my struggles with food, and I have learned so much about not only cooking but also human behavior around those areas. There is so much more to be learned and to be understood. For this reason, my thesis direction this year is all around food. I am looking into three areas of interest and I will eventually pick one or taylor them in order to come up with one main direction. First off, I am very interested in unhealthy relationships with food and eating disorders. I feel like apart from people who struggle with eating disorders, many people in general have bizarre behavior around food. I would like to explore what some of these behaviors are, where they stem from and ways in which people can regain a normal and healthy relationship with food.

Secondly, another direction I am interested in is in using cuisine as a way to learn about different cultures. I have received my share of ignorant questions about Africa in my days, and I have my own share of ignorance about other places in the world. I figured that since everyone loves food or at least has to eat, what better way of getting people to learn? I do not know what this might even begin to look like, but I believe getting people to learn about different places in the world through their cuisine will be an interesting project to take on.

Finally, my third area of interest is in learning about real food; "evolving from the de-evolotion of food" is what I am calling it for now. Through out time, our food has changed because of several reasons. As a result, there have been a lot of odd methods developed to process and conserve food and people have become more detached from the source of their food. I remember my sister telling me how one of her friends walked into her apartment while she was frying potatoes and after tasting some he said, "this tastes very similar to french fries." It might have been common knowledge to her that french fries are fried potatoes, but it may not be common to everyone. I begin to wonder when people started to become so detached from their food. If I was to choose this thesis direction, my goal would be to help people better understand what they eat and teach them how to go back to eating whole and recognizable foods in a way that is not burdensome.