The last ingredient in chili is perhaps the most important: the spices. Spices make the chili less bland, much like how the different cultures inside and outside of my family tree add new and interesting flavors to our own culture as we assimilate bits of each culture we encounter into our own. For example, my father enjoys cooking a variety of meals. He makes lentils or tofu ground beef with rice and cabbage rolls, dishes passed down from my Lebanese great-grandmother, but he also makes Mexican sopes and Chinese lettuce wraps, foods from countries where we have no ancestors. We pick up traditional dances from our foreign friends and learn other languages in classes, clubs, and just through listening to others speak. The assimilation of different …show more content…
Personally, I enjoy and enormous mound of Mexican four-cheese on my chili cheese fries, a heaping mound of dairy that melts through the chili and leaves strings when you pull off a fry. My cheese, the gooey mound that brings my cultural identity together is the culture I most identify with: the nerd. That’s right, I personally identify as an intelligent, unconcerned with popularity, cheesy nerd. Like the stereotypical nerd, my dancing and singing skills are utterly horrible. I don’t give any thought to how I look or what I wear. I make good grades, I’m obsessed with robotics, I go psycho-crazy for a good book, and everything about my personality is… cheesy… This cheesy nerdiness exists in a heaping mound that runs through and envelops all other aspects of my cultural identity, you can see it as soon as you look at me, and you never stop seeing it, it’s always there. Like all the pieces of my cultural identity, it shows up in the way I talk and the way I look and move and dance and interact with others, but unlike the other ingredients that make up me, my nerdiness is something you can clearly see and immediately understand through everything I