The Intersection of Technology and Tradition

One of my uncles loves using shopping apps to buy cheap but cool items. There’s something new in their house almost every time we come over for dinner. He loves to talk about the items too, how functional they are and what a steal they were, only a couple dollars. 

A couple months ago, my uncle bought a two-in-one dumpling dough flattener and stuffer to make a Vietnamese tapioca dumpling called bánh lọc. The gadget was a really simple plastic gadget that had a lever that you moved up and pressed down on to flatten the dough into a disk. Then a bowl that was cut in half and clamped shut was attached below it. So you put the disk in, put the stuffing in the middle, and then closed it up to make the perfect dumpling shape. 

Traditionally bánh lọc is wrapped in a banana leaf and formed into a rectangle and steamed, but banana leafs are harder to get in the US. Instead my mom will make them into dumplings and boil them. I remember waking up early in the morning to make bánh lọc with my mom. I would make the dough while she made the stuffing, and then I would flatten them with my hands while she stuffed and closed them up. We do this only a couple times a year though, so we weren’t the best. Every couple of dumplings would burst open while boiling, but honestly those are my favorite despite my mom calling them fails. 

The whole bánh lọc making process would take 3-4 hours by hand to make a couple bowls, and my hands would be tired after all that flattening. After seeing the dumpling making gadget at my uncle’s house, my mom went home and made my sister buy one online immediately. Now when we use it, the process is cut down to 2-3 hours and we have fewer dumplings that break. Some will say that using it is not traditional, that using a dumpling maker doesn’t have the same effect. To them I will say that they taste exactly the same, they’re just way more uniform with a dumpling maker. 

Technology does not always have to be the bad guy that breaks traditional values, instead it can help us keep them. I swear my mom has never made bánh lọc as often as she does now. Every time I go home she’ll ask if we want to make them. Honestly she doesn’t even need me to make them anymore, she’ll do it all by herself with the time saved. Instead of breaking this tradition, technology enhanced it in a way. That was the good side of technology though, now I’ll show you the other side. 

How much would you expect to pay for a bottle of soy sauce? $2? $4? Try $35. For a bottle of traditionally made and fermented soy sauce, you can expect to pay 10 times the price of a generic bottle. With the invention of new machines and chemicals that replace the fermentation process and speed up the process, soy sauce has become cheaper to produce, but it also lost its flavor. You no longer get the same flavor profile, and instead you get a one note sauce. Technology has helped to make the soy sauce making industry bigger and expand to meet the demands of a global market, but you have lost the traditional taste of authentic soy sauce. 

It’s important to look at how we are implementing technology into our lives. We should be using it to enhance our lives without taking it over. Being efficient is important, but we can’t lose sight of what makes values and traditions meaningful to us.