Food has carried my culture in a way that has shaped a weekly tradition I’ve lived by for as long as I can remember. Every Sunday, my family comes together for dinner and my mom makes pasta and tomato sauce with meatballs for us. She uses store-bought pasta and tomatoes, but she has her own recipe for the sauce.
It’s at the point where if we have a different cuisine for Sunday dinner, it feels like something is off. Being an Italian, food, specifically pasta dishes, have always been a central part of my life. When my mom doesn’t know what else to cook for dinner during the week, it usually goes back to some form of pasta dish.
It hadn’t occurred to me the role of men in the cooking process until Dr. Alvarez brought it up today. In all my years, whether it’s been me, my brother, or my father, men haven’t traditionally been involved in it. Unless we include the cleaning up part, then it’s always been either my mother or my grandmother cooking.
Earlier I said, ‘it feels off’ if we don’t eat Italian on Sunday. I don’t mean to say eating other cuisines on a Sunday is wrong and we have done it on occasion. This is merely a custom we try to obey that my great grandmother carried down to my grandmother to my mother, and so forth. Sunday has just always been our ‘family day’, so to speak, but we’ll eat other types of food like American, Mexican, or Chinese during the week.
Taco Literacy 
No doubt food carries culture, memory, tradition, and for sure, care. The dynamics of cooking, in this case, of the gendered aspects, are important to consider. That is, if food carries all of that stuff just mentioned, and women to the food work, that means women are the ones who carry culture, tradition and care. Yes, men do too, perhaps in different ways, but we can see how food because of its associations of being a woman, a mother, a daughter, has different significance and importance. But really, the idea is about family, and how important a role the women in our lives play. In Mexico, it’s the same. But Pilcher also makes the claim that the great societies of Mesoamerica were built on the backs of the women grinding corn. I suspect the same may apply for the great ancient societies of Italy too.
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