Weber State University’s Multicultural Student Center hosted a food-sampling event called Tasty Thursday, Asia on Feb. 19 in the Student Services building, just in time for Chinese New Year celebrations.
Although the theme for this event was Tasty Asia, the Multicultural Student Center seized the opportunity to acknowledge and embrace other countries by incorporating their mainland cuisines.
According to the event coordinator Maria Huerta, the center hosts these Tasty Thursday food-sampling events to provide the WSU campus community with an opportunity to experience a variety of multicultural cuisines from around the world.
On the last Thursday of every month from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the center provides cuisines from different regions of the world. According to Huerta, this month Tasty Thursday is different since it was not held on the last Thursday, as the intention was to have it coincide with Chinese New Year.
The cuisines available to patrons were Saudi Arabian Orange-Vanilla water, Russian beef and vegetable Borscht soup, ham fried Chinese rice and a Polynesian dessert made from lychee with bananas in coconut milk.
There were also native games from different countries to sample.
It was Mikayla Nolden’s first time attending a Tasty Thursday event, so she tried everything except the vegetarian borscht.
“I like the rice. I thought the rice was good and the dessert was also good,” Nolden said.
Patron Shauntel Thackeray also tried everything and said, “Both the vegetable borscht and the beef were really good.”
The event has not only served as a way to expose Thackeray’s taste buds to foreign cuisines, but also to broaden her scope of the world.
“I never thought Russia had specific foods,” Thackeray said.
According to Thackeray, as a result of her attending the event, she also learned where the Multicultural Student Center was located.
“I think it’s great when the college does things like this because this is part of the reason why people come to college: to diversify, learn to understand different people and broaden their experience around the world,” Thackeray said.
According to Susan Fredrick, her favorite was the ham-fried rice.
“I had the veggie borscht, which was good, and the beef borscht,” Fredrick said. “The orange vanilla water is awesome-I like that. It’s all really excellent.”
Fredrick said she was looking forward to future tasting events.
Huerta was encouraged by the turnout.
“I believe it was great,” she said. “At the first hour we were swamped-that’s when we had a lot of people. I think we received a greater amount of students between classes.”
