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I Hate Gnocchi
Digesting a legacy of poverty
I hate gnocchi. I never eat it. I don’t understand why people choose to eat it, especially those friends and family who have enough money to make a simple pasta without ruining it by adding potatoes.
If you don’t know what gnocchi is, it’s a small-bite-sized dumpling-like pasta typically made from potatoes, wheat, and eggs. It’s an Italian word meaning nocchio, meaning a knot in wood, or nocca, meaning knuckle, which is what gnocchi actually looks like.
My mother was convinced that gnocchi was a poor man’s food. As a child, I wasn’t sure what this meant. If we ate it, did it mean we were poor? If we ate it, would we become poor? Was there an ingredient in it that would make us poorer than we already were?
I didn’t understand how simple food could be a marker of financial struggles, but even today, I avoid it, afraid that I might fall under its tragic spell.
Eat it and turn poor
I ate it once in Sarria, Spain. It was the only non-fish dish on the menu; I was hungry. I had no choice. While eating it, I prayed that I wouldn’t become a poor pilgrim. I know. It’s ridiculous to have such a gnocchi phobia. I guess it’s not the gnocchi itself but the fear of poverty ingrained in me since childhood.
It didn’t last long in my system. I went back to my room and threw up the chunks of poverty and memories of my family’s struggles. It was as if eating it made all those buried fears resurface, and my body physically rejected the symbolic weight of the dish.
To make matters worse, my Apple stocks dropped, and even though I know it probably wasn’t (or was it?) because of that one time I ate gnocchi, I can’t help but feel a twinge of irrational guilt-ridden fear.
It’s a real fear, by the way, called peniaphobia — the irrational fear of poverty or becoming poor. I’m a peniaphobiac with a major preoccupation about going broke. Gnocchi triggers this eat-and-turn-poor fear.
My friends and some Italian-American family members who are not familiar with the history of gnocchi laugh at me when I refuse to eat gnocchi. It’s just pasta, they say.
