This is the first episode of a special holiday series exploring tensions that arise when food and families mix, featuring the team behind LWC Studios and some of our friends. In this episode, Virginia, the show's producer, is concerned about her Peruvian father’s eating habits, and thinks everyone in her family should eat more vegetables! Registered dietitian Dalina Soto busts some myths about Latin American foods and offers advice on how to think critically about nutrition and what is truly healthy for our families.
Featured Expert:
Dalina Soto, MA, LD, RDN is a bilingual registered dietitian and positive health advocate committed to helping clients reclaim the joy and pleasure of diet-free living. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Nutritional Sciences from PennState University, then went on to Immaculata University to complete her Dietetic Internship and Masters Degree in Nutrition Education. She loves nutrition because she loves food and was inspired to be on the “preventative” side of health. Dalina founded Your Latina Nutritionist because she’s passionate about building nourishing new narratives that don't include depriving ourselves of the foods we grew up eating. Learn more about her work on her website and follow her @your.latina.nutritionist. Dalina also recommends following the work and resources of these two Black dietitians she loves.
If you loved this episode, listen to When Relatives Always Comment on Your Body and When Mom Body Shames you.
We’d love to hear your stories of triumph and frustration so send us a detailed voice memo to hello@talktomamipapi.com. You might be on a future episode! Let’s connect on Twitter and Instagram at @TalkToMamiPapi and email us at hello@talktomamipapi.com. And follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody. For some of us at LWC Studios, the holiday season means lots of family and lots of food. It also means plenty of opportunities for intercultural and intergenerational friction, the stuff we talk about every week. It means all of that because in our families, food is so much more than what we eat. So our team decided to do something really cool this year to help you and help us navigate through the festivities. It's our first ever food series.
To make it extra fun, we asked our own team, who usually live and hide behind the mic, to come forward and get in front of the mic to share some of the tensions that they've experienced around the holidays when it comes to food and family. Today we start with our producer, Virginia. Virginia's Peruvian father is an enthusiastic, self-made cook who loves eating and feeding his family, but as he gets older, Virginia has become concerned. He's not eating as healthily as she thinks he should. Let's get into it.
Virginia: My name is Virginia Lora and I am the producer of How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] about Anything. Growing up, I called my parents Mami e Papi. When I was a little kid, eating always felt like a chore. And my parents, they were very much about, you have to finish everything on your plate before you get up. So I was the kid who was there when the table had been cleared. Whatever plant we had as a centerpiece had been put back on the table. I do remember being a very picky eater and my parents always telling me why it was important to eat well and be healthy and care for your body and the kind of things that were healthy to eat. I was 13 when I moved to the US. My family is from Peru. I grew up in Peru and I came to the US with my dad and my younger brother, once my mom had passed away and my dad had to learn to cook so he could feed his children.
Whereas, in Peru we were lived very close to family. And so I had a lot of aunts and even some uncles who like cooking. But in the US I actually have really lovely memories of him trying things out. But also, I do remember him throwing things away because things got burnt or they just were terrible and him getting really sad and frustrated and stuff. He would do all this research and would read books and talk to people. And then there was YouTube. And so he's actually a really great cook now.
I live in a multi-generational household. I live with my dad and my brother. I get to eat his food a lot and I cook alongside with him. So my dad and I cook together. It's a lot of meat and potatoes and rice and starch, not necessarily vegetables. He'll say he doesn't know how to do something. He’s like, "Oh, brussels sprouts, how do we make those again?" And in my head I'm like, "But really you taught yourself... Remember what you felt that way about chicken or anything else?" I don't know. I feel like sometimes a little annoyed. Are you pretending this is hard so that somebody else says, "Yes, I'll do it."? And by somebody else, I mean me.
So another big challenge that we have and by we, is because my dad and I sometimes take responsibility over, this is my aunt's eating habits. So my dad has a sister and she's like a mother to me, and she doesn't eat well at all and she doesn't like cooking. And so she, we've had all so many conversations where she says, "Okay, now we're going to start eating….We're going to start an eating routine, then I'm going to create a weekly menu." And then she just doesn't do it.
Lazy is the word that she used, “flojera. Me da flojera.” And so with my dad, we've decided, okay, the three of us are going to do this, and so we're all going to cook and we're going, even though she doesn't live with us, we're going to incorporate her into our meal plan somehow, right? But it's never sustainable. My aunt is not the most open minded person in terms of eating, getting her to eat different things that she's not used to eating, is very hard. And maybe that's what my parents went through with me as a kid.
Unfortunately, I think because it's almost like every vegetable, even if it's not a super obscure vegetable, is different. But they have both said, "We should be eating better. What can we do?" The holidays are coming up. And so I have a big family and we all get together and we've started to talk about the menu. I have always had this idea that the holidays are a beautiful opportunity, where those of us who like to cook, can be creative and bring something to the table that people can try. And nobody in my family likes that idea. There's this resistance to experimenting, rather than sticking to the tried and true dishes.
The few times where I've executed that plan, this is why maybe I am the problem. I have done it with desserts. One day I discovered this recipe for pavlova with all these berries on it, and I made it and it was wonderful. And now it's become a tradition in my family. I mean, again, there was fruit in it, so maybe that counts, but it was dessert. Since the pandemic, I've become more aware of how both my dad and my aunt are aging. That has made me more conscious about how they should be caring for themselves and how I should be caring for them. I feel like there is more that I should be doing.
Lantigua: Listening to Virginia's story made me think about the bad rep some of the delicious Dominican food I love has gotten. I'm a grown woman, but I sometimes still judge myself when I make fried plantains too often. Virginia story made me think about this guilt and self-judgment, where the hell does it come from? Her story also made me think about how, for many of us first gens the, impulse to "improve" the way we and our families eat often means moving away from the foods we grew up eating and loving. What's up with that? To help us figure it out. I called it an expert.
Dalina Soto: My name is Dalina Soto and I am a registered dietician. I am bilingual, so I speak in Spanish and in English. So it's super important for me to say that because I think that language barrier is a huge issue with the medical system.
Lantigua: A 100%. So first question, what did you hear when you listened to Virginia's story?
Soto: So I heard a lot of assumptions about food. A lot of food should be this, health should be that. And I think that that's really what a lot of people feel when they think about health and food. Because what we see on the internet, on social media, on the news, even public health campaigns, is very fear-based. There's a lot of fear mongering, scaring you into being healthier. I just heard a lot of shame and guilt and there should be no shame and guilt.
Lantigua: All right, you know we need to unpack that. So let's talk about first the fear.
Soto: Yes.
Lantigua: Talk to me about how that shows up in your work and how you help us folks deal with it?
Soto: So our credentials are registered dietician nutritionists, and we go through a medical schooling. I tell people I know what happens to food the minute it touches your tongue to the minute you poop it out. I can tell you every enzyme, how it's broken down. I could tell you a lot of things that I never thought I was going to remember, but here we are. And then we have to sit for our board exam, which is our registration, and then that makes us a registered dietician. And then we have to keep up with our credentials and education, just like a nurse, a doctor, a therapist, everybody in the medical field.
So I wanted to say that first because I think that a lot of people are getting information from people that do not have a medical background and that causes more fear.
Lantigua: Agreed.
Soto: And I often say it takes someone to really be able to critically think, to really take apart the science that I learned, the science of science. But the textbooks, how they were written 50, 60 years ago, did not take people like us into consideration, did not take our lifestyles, social determinants of health, which is a huge factor in our health, did not take into any of that. It's just very much they eat fried foods, rice is bad, veggies are fried, and there's not enough of them in there. And it's just a lot of that stereotypical stuff that we hear and that a lot of people believe because it's perpetuated, sometimes by our own people in the medical field.
So I had to take a step back and be like, hold on a minute. I grew up eating Dominican food every single day. Nobody in my family is really sick. We don't have diabetes, we don't have any of that stuff. So why are we sitting here and blaming our foods? When you look at the rates of diabetes or heart disease or all those things, in our countries, they're not getting sick at the rates that we are. They're lower over there, but yet they're eating the same foods. So what's the difference here?
And I think that there's a lot of systemic issues in this country that really impact our health. And so when people come into this country or grow up into this country and they hear that our foods are bad, it's almost like an assimilation of a form. You want to be American, you want to live the American dream, you want to eat an American almost. But then we don't know how to do it because our foods don't fit that mold.
Lantigua: How do we perpetuate these fears amongst ourselves and with our relatives? Because that's one of the things you said, that we also contribute to the fear mongering.
Soto: I actually heard this very much from Virginia, it's the, well, you have to eat better. You have to be healthy, you have to do this. And the way that we perpetuate that when we're here in the United States, is that we assume that we need to start eating the broccoli, the kale. We need to change the veggies that we're eating. We need to healthify our dishes. We need to stop doing this and do that instead. And we're completely changing our traditions and completely changing our dishes because we have an assumption that the foods that we grew up eating weren't good.
Lantigua: So what should we actually do?
Soto: The way that I try to educate is that I try to educate about the nutrition in our foods. Our foods have all the nutrition that we're supposed to be eating. So why do we have to change the recipe? Why do we have to add kale? I have a post that went viral that's like, kale doesn't belong in my [inaudible 00:11:09]. It doesn't. Why are people doing this? You want to add veggies? Add onions and peppers.
Lantigua: Let's break down two things that I think are really embedded in stories like Virginia's and her family's, which is that the more Americanized, typically younger, part of the family learns all of these things outside of the house, they start to put these things into practice, they feel better about themselves. And then lovingly, they want to create a way for their relatives to also feel like, oh, I'm healthier. I'm doing something better. So how do we achieve that without alienating our relatives and then also without putting down traditions and culture that are who we are?
Soto: Yeah, I think the first question that I ask people is, is it really healthy? Because again, a lot of what I heard was, oh, my dad bought the books, taught himself on YouTube, consumed all this information. But was that information coming from people that looked like us? And if it was, was it embracing our culture or was it erasing our culture? I often think to myself, is it healthy? And I ask myself, or I ask you all, is it healthy because... Is this something that's sustainable?
If you're going to cut out sugar or you're going to be trying to eat 25 grams of protein, or if you're going to be running three miles a day, which your knees were not meant to do, is that healthy? If you have to wake up every single day and take a shot of apple cider vinegar or down a cup of nasty celery juice, is that healthy? Right? Because these are all the things that people assume.
Lantigua: The celery lobby is going to come after you.
Soto: No, I love celery, and celery belongs in other places. It does not belong in a juice. What people assume is healthy is usually a fad, and it's something that's not sustainable. We have been conditioned, almost brainwashed, to believe that if you're not doing these things, that you're not trying to better yourself, and so therefore you're inherently unhealthy.
Lantigua: Whoa. Okay, I need a second, because I feel very much like I am one of those people. If I make too many fried things in a single week, I'm like, oh God, this is the fourth thing I've made fried this week, but my God, sweet plantain. So I am definitely judging myself. So I want to go to the question of, if the outcome that we want is for our families to be healthier, to eat well, to eat fresh, so that they have longer lives, better stamina, they can deal with their stresses better, how do we help them do that in a way that is sustainable for them?
Soto: That is a loaded question, because that's the question that we should be asking the government.
Lantigua: Okay. Way to pass the buck, Dalina.
Soto: I mean, honestly it is because, I mean, I went to the White House conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health a few weeks ago, and that's the main question we were all asking. Is how can we really talk about health when not everybody has access to fresh fruits and vegetables and equitable healthcare? And unfortunately, it does affect our communities because when we come into the United States, not everybody is going into the suburbs where there's five supermarkets in a five mile radius. People are going to where black and brown communities immigrate to. And those are what we're calling food apartheids.
Lantigua: Wait, we moved from food deserts to food apartheids?
Soto: Yeah, because deserts-
Lantigua: I like this
Soto: Because, or when we think of the word desert, that means that's a naturally occurring thing. But food apartheids are manmade or system made. We have these very blatant systems that then cause our communities not to have access to supermarkets or fresh fruits and vegetables.
Lantigua: I need to push back because the underlying assumption here is that there are not now very distinct strata economically and socially to the Latino experience in the US. So I grew up in the South Bronx. I absolutely grew up in food apartheid communities a 100%. And we took advantage of the summer lunch programs.
Soto: Yes.
Lantigua: We absolutely sat in the government cheese line. That was my experience. That is not at all my kids' middle class experience in North Bethesda.
Soto: No, it's not.
Lantigua: Right. And so I want to make sure that we don't sort of try to say that this is the universal experience because I also believe though, that some of the same assumptions that were made about how we ate when I was poor and in the South Bronx in the '80s and 90s, are still some of the working assumptions I make when I choose food for my children.
Soto: Yeah. I think it all goes back to that generational trauma. And so you and I were able to move up the ladder of hierarchy of needs. We were able to get out of those systems. And again, this is something I talk about a lot, is that if we were to disperse the information from the CDC or any public health campaign and looked at socioeconomic status and access to food, when it comes to the Latino population, we will notice that the rates of diabetes, the rates of heart disease, all the disease rates would be a lot less if we're talking about people that have access. But we don't see that information because they lump us all together. So the information that's coming at us is very fear based. Even if you're not in that situation because we're being told, "Oh, you're Latino. That's why you have a 50% chance of becoming diabetic if you're living in the United States."
But we need to first understand why that statistic is like that and understand when we do make it out, when we do live in Bethesda, in the suburbs with your kids, we still carry a lot of that stress. And that stress can also impact our health because stress causes our blood sugars to be out of whack. It causes cholesterol to be all over the place and it's still another cycle. It's not a poverty cycle, but it's a stress cycle. We have to name all of those things to then be able to reduce the shame and guilt around our food and be able to learn how it nourishes us. To be able to learn that that plátano maduro is going to give your children more nutrition than a piece of whole grain bread.
Lantigua: Thank you for that. I needed that.
Soto: All right. So that's what I'm talking about is that we make assumptions about food based on what we've been taught, which was not meant for us.
Lantigua: Can you share a couple of sources where people who want to read more. Who want to basically decolonize their understanding to food and the food hierarchies and the propaganda essentially, that we base some of our behavior on? Where can people learn a little bit more?
Soto: Okay. So Food Heaven is an account that I really love. There are two black dieticians. Wendy is Dominican. So they do talk a lot about this information. And then, okay, so you could follow me on all social videos. It's Your Latina Nutritionist.
Lantigua: Thank you, Dalina. Thank you for coming. What an absolute pleasure to learn from you.
Soto: Aww. Thank you for having me.
Lantigua: All right. Here's what we learned from Dalina. Stop the fear mongering. Do not make assumptions about the food your family enjoys. Instead, get informed about the science of nutrition and the cultural bias that impacts how we measure health outcomes in the US. Hold the kale. Do not mess with the recipe. Look for ways to eat more of the nutritious foods you and your family already enjoy instead of changing a recipe to fit a food fad.
And remember, focus on consistency. To strengthen your health or eating habits, think about what you and your family can easily incorporate into your lifestyle and taste. If you force a change, it probably won't last and then that defeats the point.
Thank you for listening and for sharing us. How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] about Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Trent Lightburn mixed this episode. I'm the creator, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram, we're @TalktoMamiPapi. Bye everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Questioning Papí’s Food Choices”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything,
LWC Studios., November 28, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.