“It feels like cheating,” Larissa Pham says in a Gawker essay titled “In My Shopping Cart,” “to write about culture by writing about food.”
But it reads like anything but cheating. Pham wheels us through the grocery aisles of her memory, pointing out the Vietnamese food her family made with American ingredients, childhood treats with forgotten names, and the unexpected privilege of growing up with first-generation American cuisine.
Proust had madeleines; I have lychee gummy candy and yogurt drinks and rice crackers with tiny specks of white sugar crystallized on their puffed tops.
