On something, perhaps food souvenirs.
There was an article in the Times about food souvenirs. I know all about food souvenirs because ever since I can remember my family has always underpacked for vacations in lieu of either the ambiguous ‘spices’ and ‘ingredients’ my mother would pick up on vacation OR the boxes of Lucky Charms, double stuffed oreos, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Pop Tarts, brownie mix, CostCo size bags of chocolate chip and Kraft macaroni and cheese. My father still illegally brings back pounds of frozen Omaha steaks and burgers back. Suitcases are filled with American hamburger buns; the Russian ‘American’ brand falls apart too quickly, notwithstanding the heftiness and deliciousness found in an oozing patty. I am still some kind of Americana ‘mule’ for my family, schlepping Drugstore.com boxes of toothpaste and [REDACTED] hair dye boxes to random locales in which I meet my family in.
After graduation and being thrown into a world in which I can concentrate all my thinking time to what I like, I think a lot about food and why I like food. Often I dwell on the identity-building that was high school, and trying to pin-point that specific ta-da moment, sometimes theorizing that maybe it began with that Indian lunch with my dad, but really I just think of my friends. I was very lucky in the fact that all of my gal pals / Scooby Girl Gang (this is an inherent Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference and I only refer to them as this, they do not refer to us as this) had relatively positive or better than standard relationships with food, and it was really amazing to grow up in this ‘body-positive/food-positive’ atmosphere where there were no crash diets for Spring Break Cabo or anything. I am pretty sure if we had Food Network in Moscow we would have been watching it all the time. I am lucky that food for me has always been associated with building relationships, and not with an impending sense of guilt. My one observation from four+ years of immersion within the American food landscape is that in the US, food and eating = guilt. We just can’t manage the balance between wanting to be thin and saying no to SuperSized meals and ridiculous individual portions, so instead we guilt ourselves silly with low-carb diets and brown rice that takes longer to cook. I think the weirdest part is how much Americans LOVE the Food Network
Our attitude was more: bring on the pie. Many of favorite memories from high school were in Kalie’s kitchen, because her pantry was super stocked with the best of American semi-homemade goods, and Kalie’s mom loved to fatten us up with Velveeta-filled grilled cheese sandwiches and always had all the ingredients to make a pecan pie on command. All of my classic longing high school moments longing for my best friend’s year-older male cousin were soundtracked by the flipping of grilled cheese sandwiches. For my fifteenth birthday, Kalie and her mom surprised me at school with a perfect pecan pie – actually it wasn’t perfect, it was a little gooey and maybe burnt but like any pecan pie in Moscow is perfect if it’s in front of you, ready to be eaten – and what proceeded with that pie, my friends and our 20 minute mid-morning break was something that my Scooby Gang still affectionately reminisce over. We ate the pie in twenty minutes, the whole thing. Seven girls, seven forks, one table, on your mark, get set, GO.
As I’ve probably said before, when I look back at my friends from high school, it really was food that brought us together – we were ‘the lunch table,’ our social life consisted of big group dinners in restaurants, the one time a year we see each other post-high school is on the overfeeding holiday that is Thanksgiving. When I think of Amanda’s house I remember O’Boy chocolate milk which I still think is Swedish, and her mother’s homemade bread, while Francesca I think of homemade pizza and that Dutch snack of toasted buttered bread with chocolate sprinkles, Nicole I think of the Pop-Tarts her mom always packed her and big Saturday morning scrambled egg breakfasts, Ally I think of pancakes and delivered Thai food and dinner parties, Ana Donoso it the eight boxes of macaroni and cheese we made after her parties, Jenny I just think of like amazing Southern food and her mom’s keen sense of detail, Olga’s house is remembered by the dill pancakes, and of Callie, I think of only brownies. And chicken and rice. Last Thanksgiving we started our big turkey dinner with a large group discussion on how awful it would be if one was a) allergic to gluten b) allergic to nuts/chocolate/whatever. The terror in our voices reflected our need for mass amounts of gluten in our diets. We ate the turkey then, and of course after we ate the frozen mozzarella sticks, and the next day we richly buttered our English Muffins. And rolled ourselves home.
