My main questions right now are how does cuisine evolve and change in America from its country of origin, does authentic food mean authentic and traditional recipes or ingredients? I think I need a series of questions as well because I think if I condense it into one question the project would either become too specific or too broad. I think I can even narrow the questions down I’ve developed so far. I wanted to create questions that would allow people based research, learn about cross cultural menus, make my final project be about real food, and get the oppurtunity to do more own research and come up with an answer on my own. I plan to answer these questions through an extensive research process in which I hope to interview at least 5 total chefs, restauranteurs, food critics, diners, or food historians. Speaking with them will allow me to absorb information about authenticity from poeople who actually work with food. I will also need help getting in contact with these types of  people in the community since I only know a few on my own. 

These questions matter to me because I am very interested in learning more about cuisine. I am interested in finding some kind of answer to these questions throughout my project. Also in cuisine the “best” cuisine is often considered western cuisine and I feel like my project could focus on types of authentic food and cuisine from other parts of the world. These questions also matter to me because I am answering questions I have thought about since I was younger when I would eat authentic Dim Sum in ChinaTown and then fried rice at a Chinese restaurant that was definitely not authentic. I always wondered why both were considered Chinese food when the style and tastes were vastly different. I also watch a lot of shows on netflix about cuisine from different parts of the world and many of them touch on the idea about authenticity and its importance so asking these questions would allow me to explore that idea more.

I originally imagined my project more like an internship where I could possibly “shadow” a chef in a restaurant. I wanted to see how they curate their menu and try to come to some conclusions based on seeing cuisine and food in real life. Now that an in person Senior Project is seeming less likely, I have come up with an alternative way to try and answer my questions. Firstly, I would like to come up with a list of questions and speak to people who are in the restaurant business or know anything about cuisine or food. I think talking to them would give me real life “answers” to some of the questions I have. They would also be giving me information about cuisine from the point of view of someone who does it for a living which would be helpful in answering my questions. I think I should focus on 1 or 2 cuisines for me to try cooking perosnally and I think it should be Asian because Asian cuisine is so expansive and larger than most people think. I also already eat a lot of Asian food at home. But when speaking to the people in the “food buisness” I would want to keep the questions more general and not just about Asian cuisine in order to get better answers.  In addition to talking to adults in the larger LREI community I think I could conduct some of my own research by sampling food from authentic restaurants and then sampling from inauthentic restaurants. This part would be added to me cooking some of the foods. Cooking in my house would be interesting because I am Asian but we don’t alwaus have access to traditional Asian ingredients needed to make the food “authentically”. I am also very multicultral and so are my parents so I think that would also impact the “authenticity” of the food I cook no matter what I make. I think by learning information from the adults in the “cuisine world” and doing my own research I could reach a personal definition to what authentic food means to me. I think 60% of this project would be me researching and talking to adults who have information on the questions I’m asking about authenticity and than the other 40% would consist of me cooking Asian food in my own home aswell as sampling food from “authetic” and “inauthentic” places.