Food

I’ve written a lot about food since I’ve been here – what we eat, and how we prepare it. I haven’t said much about how we think about food here. I should step back a few years and explain something first … In the last ten years I’ve worked in schools with significant immigrant populations, and where a huge percentage of the students live in poverty (as it is defined in the United States.) I have often been really uncomfortable with the way I see these kids interact with food. Whenever there was a pot luck dinner, I would get so irritated when I would see kids race to the table and fill their plates with no consideration for saving food for anyone else. When there’s ever free food, I would be genuinely embarrassed to have to make kids empty their pockets of the stash they had had taken. I have often said to kids, “come on, you act like you’ve never seen food before and will never see it again. Relax …”

In our first few weeks here we struggled to work out the proportions of how to prepare food for 30 people every day. There were a few days when the last people in line didn’t get much to eat at all, and no one ever got seconds. Given that we didn’t have much control over what we ate, and didn’t have the ability to go out and get our own food if we didn’t like whatever was served, it was hard for us to manage our food intake. We found ourselves getting mad when others took too much food. If someone unexpected showed up to a meal, we’d jealously eye the food on their plate. We would eat really quickly hoping for seconds, and then go get them even if we weren’t totally hungry. When visitors bring a bag of M&M’s, we devour it in about 11 seconds. Now, I need to emphasize that we have enough food here and no one’s wasting away. We don’t often have extra, but we generally have enough. We get three meals a day, and they’re usually good meals. But just that little fear that we might not get as much as we want, or that the next meal might be one that we didn’t love, turned us into some pretty greedy, food hoarders. I finally understand why people who have grown up without an abundance of food around them act kind of crazy at a pot luck buffet because all of us volunteers have watched ourselves demonstrate some of those same unflattering behaviors in the past few months. When you can’t have as much of whatever you want, whenever you want it, things get complicated. I really never understood that before.