Food: International Students’ Cultural and Religious Identity

Haochen Long

With 14.4% of its student body being international students, UCSB has dedicated a good amount of resources and efforts to make the campus an inclusive and comfortable environment for its diverse student body. We see this effort taking effect in academic advising, psychological counseling, and also student governments. Such inclusion and diversity initiatives have truly made a positive impact on international students’ social and academic life. However, while recognizing the amazing progress the campus has achieved, there is one aspect of an international education that often gets overlooked, and that is food. 

While at first glance, this topic may seem fairly trivial and irrelevant even for some people, it actually plays a big part in the international students’ educational experience throughout their time at UCSB. Food and dining options are a widely discussed topic among the international student community. Domestic students and faculty would be surprised at just how different dining and eating could be across cultures, whether we are talking about food and dishes themselves or dining habits and cultural norms around food. 

In fact, food is often used as a means of retaining one’s cultural identity and connection with their home for most international students studying abroad. Especially when they first arrive in a country with completely different languages and cultures and are now expected to excel in a drastically different academic system. Interestingly, if you ask any international students what they miss the most about home, their answer would be food. This relationship between food and heritage is a strong connection for international students because people from different cultural backgrounds identify with unique foods and often use them as a bridge between their everyday life in a foreign country and their home and origin. In a sense, the dietary habits and preferences of exchange scholars also represent the areas in which their families live and where their ancestors originated. 

These food preferences could even foster bonds and could a lot of the time be a therapeutic experience for international students as they come together and enjoy or talk about the taste of their cultural or regional identities. Therefore, one diversity and inclusion effort that UCSB could focus on is incorporating more culturally diverse and representative food options in the dining commons. Given that most of the 1st year students rely more heavily on the on-campus cafeteria for dining, it could potentially be an effective means to ease international students’ home-sickness while raising cultural awareness and providing a different experience for domestic students at the same time. 

Changes start with small details, and I think we might be surprised by just how big of a difference diversifying a few dishes could make!