Food Narratives in Another Land: International Students reflecting about adaptation
In my second week living in the United States, I took the campus bus to the grocery store. I remember it being very cold and the sky was very gray, a dramatic change from the summertime I was experiencing days before in Brazil. On the bus trip, I met an Indian woman in her 40s and as we started chatting, I asked her about her adaptation process in the US. Being in the country for 3 years now pursuing her PhD, she expressed that the experience of being in contact with many cultures was one of the greatest opportunities she had here. Homesickness was also present in our talk as she told me a sip of her experience on a 20 minute’ bus ride. She described how she would cook similar dishes from her home country and find ingredients in the international markets in Bloomington, Indiana. Eventually, she reflected about how even though we all come from different places, we connect through feeling. We all feel pain, happiness, anxiety, homesickness.
And food, for her, was a way to go back home.
Thinking of this setting and conversation, I had the intention to understand food through the lens of adaptation for international graduate students, a community I am part of. I caught myself thinking of food a lot and wondering how I could get ingredients familiar to me. I was certain, and still am, that food would help comfort myself and have a sense of control in an overwhelming environment. So, I reached out to my friends and we constituted a diverse group, divided between Latin American and Asian countries: from Brazil (me), Honduras, Chile, Thailand, Indonesia, and Tibet. I gathered individually with each of them, sharing food and discussing some topics I had previously shown them. To conclude this project, we all gathered together for lunch, and I had previously asked them to reflect and write a few bullet points to share with the group.
The reflections in this blog post were drawn from these talks and shared discussions about how food was related to adaptation, and in which ways we can comprehend possible shared feelings, practices, and reflections on food.
All of us were between 24 and 33 years old, and if not single, not married. Most of us are in PhD programs, but two were pursing their master’s. When reading literature to write this blog post, most had more “hard data”, based on surveys, and not focused on narrative or storytelling. One article that incorporates narrative elements, by Brown & Holloway (2008), showcases some excerpts of interviews throughout the text, providing more “voice” from interlocutors. The authors aimed to construct a model of adjustment for international students and came up with results that showed the dynamic and inconstant flow of feelings that depend highly on social, cultural, and external factors.
Cultural shock was another idea used to think about adjustment, along a large emotional range between students.
However, contact with fellow international students was also highlighted as a positive aspect by Brown & Holloway, bringing expansion of world views and more openness to difference. Millinckrodt & Loeng (1992) similarly point to the importance of social support when international students are coping with stress. The difficulties of moving include changes in one’s “sense of self-concept and self-esteem” (1992: 71), and social support would then help with adjustment and dealing with those stressors. Brown & Holloway similarly introduce the concept of acculturative stress which makes students feel “confused” and “lost” in their new environment while adjusting to western habits. “Acculturative stress” is then enhanced or diminished depending on relations with other students, nationals, and internationals.
The concept of “acculturation” bothered me. Why think in terms of acculturation, of losing bits of one’s culture?
In addition to a different methodology than my own, both of these papers were of limited use to me because they did not speak of food. The paper by Brown et.al. (2010), however, addressed the reaction of international students to British food in the UK. While they are different countries, the US and the UK share a common language, common western roots of thought, and have related culinary histories. They show that many international students found British food bland and unhealthy, and students retain an attachment to dishes from their home country. Those descriptions reminded me of some conversations I had with my friends, and the disregard for the blended seasoning, only based on salt, and pepper. Food “from home”, the authors argue, would be associated with healthiness, and offered emotional sustenance.
Again, eating together appeared as an important aspect of socialization, and the contact with international students from different places proportionated an expansion of their taste to food from other sources. The act of potluck, community bonding would play an important role in adaptation. Food, as they put it, “was of great importance both emotionally and physically and was one aspect of student life that was least open to change” (2010: 203).
Home food would relate to a positive association “between familiar taste and nostalgic thoughts of home and belonging” (2010: 202). More than that, food would assert a strong link with cultural identity. However, like the paper by Brown & Holloway (2008), Brown et al. speak of acculturation as an intrinsic factor of adaptation to food. This would consist in adding new ingredients to food habits, such as more butter and margarine, as well as eating more fats, salty and sweet snacks. Change in meal patterns would also be a supposed sign of “acculturation”. Acculturation is understood as something almost inevitable, international students will eventually suffer some “level” of detachment from their culture. As already put here, I had a difficult time buying this interpretation, although the articles were useful to navigate through the many variables on this subject.
Instead, I would like to look at these adaptations, and individual changes through the words of Care, my friend from Thailand with whom I held one of the interviews: “we are constantly doing bricolage”.
He referred to the experience of cooking and eating in the US as of mixing and adapting ingredients which -kind of- matched the one’s he found at home. The familiar taste is there, but not quite. This was a powerful description, as for me summarized a lot of what food had represented for me in those 4 months living in Indiana. Hence, like Care, I also found myself adding different stuff to my pot, pursuing almost an alchemist job.
Bricolage will be then, one of the main lines I will use to connect my and my friends’ experiences to food, a choice also discussed in group. As present in the papers mentioned, my friends highlighted the importance of social bonds as one main aspect to adaptation and to the experience of food eating. Therefore, the second aspect that could glue together the different people and perspectives of food experience, is the fact that eating relates to and forms community. It not only alleviates homesickness and creates a bond with home, but also constructs an opportunity to form a new community between individuals that all share the experience of being the other in the US.
“….eating relates to and forms community. It not only alleviates homesickness and creates a bond with home, but also constructs an opportunity to form new community…”
Narratives of food
Care (Thailand)
I made potato salad, with some homemade mayo. Care brought Pad Kapao, one of his favorite dishes, composed of ground beef and green beans. It had a sour-sweet taste, very flavorful and with unique seasoning. We had rice.
Care initially said he did not feel homesick at all. He paused and thought a little more. Then added that what he misses most is food:
“I think food helped me 90% emotionally related to homesickness. In the first few days, I went to an Indian store and I cried inside, it was my treasure. They had many ingredients I knew. But there are things that do not exist here, and I need to bricolage. I find things similar to substitute. When I go to the store is also so funny because my ancestry is there like the Chinese section, Thai section, Vietnamese section. I think Thai is like familiar to Chinese cuisine, so I can also navigate”.
Quince* (Chile)
We had a cup of coffee (a little more than a cup for me). There were some sweets, light pastries with jelly. They melted in my mouth. Later on, I thought: oh, that was tea-time!
Quince loves to cook, and I had already eaten some of his delicious pizzas. When I asked him about food, the response was immediate:
“Food was a main refuge. I’m going to stop and now I will cook the things that I used to cook in my country. In Chile, you are cooking in general with family. You socialize in the kitchen. Here, people don’t socialize as much when eating. In Chile I eat 5 times a day, in tea-time you sit, you have tea, you eat something, you talk with friends or family”.
“I started cooking more here. In Chile, you can find homemade food in the streets, with 5 dollars you buy a whole meal. I have been variating and learning now to complement new ingredients. I am discovering here, in order to prepare my food, like trying to keep my roots in terms of flavor, quantity. Sometimes when I am cooking or I am eating, I remember my family.”
Tio (Indonesia)
We had cups of coffee. That week I had cooked a Brazilian sweet, brigadeiro, and beans salad. I gave him a taste.
Tio said food itself was not a major factor in his adaptation, but he indeed saw a change in his habits in relation to home. In Indonesia, he would eat out every day, buying street homemade food, very cheap and sold through handcars, or in Indonesian, Padagang Kaki Lima. Eating, though, was for him a major moment of socialization with friends and family:
“I didn’t cook back home. I would eat outside, it is very cheap. I cook more here, it is much more expensive. But not this semester because it is my last one and I am busier than before, then I buy more stuff. I can find some Indonesian Spices here and when I cook, I usually do fresh foods, vegetables, and meat. Back home, eating is part of socialization, and important to bond. Here sometimes it is not the case, maybe it is more common for them to have a beer”.
Baleada* (Honduras)
I cooked cheese bread, a Brazilian snack, made of yucca flower. I wanted to recreate the delicious Honduran dishes my friend cooked for me more than once.
Since the first time we talked, Mariela told me she hated to cook, but here she had to anyways:
“I cook similar stuff to what I ate in Honduras, but here I don’t have as much variety of course, because of the ingredients. So, I feel my diet is limited. I also do not know what they do with the food here, I am eating similar things from back home and my body changed”.
“The opportunity to know new ingredients is also something I feel is very important, to expand the things I know. I do not feel healthy right now, but I am hoping to find an equilibrium”.
Momo* (Tibet)
It was finals week when we met. We decided to grab a coffee and walk through campus. It was a sunny, fresh day, and I was hungry.
Before she moved, Momo did not cook the many Tibetan and Indian dishes from the places she had lived. When she arrived, she learned how to cook through phone calls with her mom or watching videos on YouTube:
“I was so stressed, I gained weight, I would not cook in the beginning. I adapted myself to the American work style and had snacks during the day. Now on my second year, I feel that I found a balance, I do things to connect with my own culture and have a Tibetan community here”.
“It is never the same, but when I cook Tibetan food, or even try new things, I feel closer to home. But building a community with people of different places also helped me to see how I can share with other people the help I also received when I got here. We should do a potluck!”.
Closure meet-up
As we gathered for a last exercise, I cooked some risotto for all of us. We started talking and they shared some of the reflections they had previously written down. The main things they all wanted me to highlight were both how the possibility of experiencing new things was important to them and how there was a sense of community in the act of eating. Even though we all miss home and miss all the things that remind us of it, “being here” is enhanced by the experience of trying, and of sharing.
One of the main positives, argued Quince, was the exercise of trying something you never tasted before, you become “more open to food”. Baleada also highlighted how her main goal now was to try even more things, to find the balance Momo referred to on one point of the conversation.
Momo also highlighted human connection as “very important to adjust to a new environment and when talking to you guys I feel I am not alone”. Care also recalled the getting-togethers he frequently has with his Thai friends: “when we meet, we eat, It’s so Thai!”. Tio then argued that, for him, it is also about what we want to preserve; in his case, dinner. And dinner with friends mattered a lot: “I value the contact with other people”.
In this sense, bricolage not only refers to cooking, and adaptations on diet, but also to the transformative change when immersed in a new environment. Being here and there at the same time, in your home country and your new home in the US, allows a unique learning process. Very different from that, acculturation emphasizes missing something, the “a” prefix means absence.
I cannot see loss of culture based on the interaction I had with my fellow international students. What I see is changing happening in front of my eyes, resilience of individuals sharing their own narratives and reflecting upon experience together.
The attempt to try new ingredients, new flavors, and senses becomes part of an experimental process of rethinking identity. Rather than leading to losing a supposed essential self; being between two worlds made me, and I believe some of my friends, face our roots, reflect upon our position in this world and on what is of most value to us.
Through the possibility to learn and taste other foods and spices, I believe we are doing an active engagement of finding “balance”, of understanding ourselves in movement of experimentation. An experimentation of one’s self, constantly bricolaging. Through that, we also look at other ways of community construction beyond national borders.
- The names with * indicate where individuals who asked for anonymity. They are named instead after food.
Bibliography
Brown, L. & Holloway, I. 2008. The adjustment journey of international postgraduate students at an English university: An ethnographic study. In: Journal of Research in International Education. Sage Publications, 7(2), pp. 232–249.
Brown, L. et. al. 2010. A taste of the unfamiliar. Understanding the meanings attached to food by international postgraduate students in England. In: Appetite 54, pp. 202–207.
Mallinckrodt, B. & Leong, F. T. L. 1992. International Graduate Students, Stress, and Social Support. In: Journal of College Student Development, Vol. 33, pp. 71- 78.
