A Moving Feast

Our feast consisted of crepes, hot and spicy tomato soup, steamed shrimp dumplings, a lo-mein-like stir fry dish, macaroni and cheese, and rice pudding. Ying also brought some dubious looking eggs that were black as night. She and Regina, our new student from Korea, discussed how both their countries hold these traditional pickled eggs in high esteem for special occasions. I sampled one because I am a big fan of most pickled things. 

It was unlike anything I had ever tasted. And not really in a good way.

"Is it the texture that is odd?" Regina asked, seeing my complicated expression as I tried to swallow.

The texture was, indeed, odd. The yolk of the essentially hard-boiled egg becomes liquefied during the long pickling process, while the white of the egg—now a strangely translucent dark gray‒remains fairly firm. The combination of tart flavor and slimy mouth feel hit me pretty hard. Try as I might, I was unable to eat the second half of my portion. I had to work hard just to keep the first half down.

I've eaten—with relish, mind you‒sunny-side-up eggs, liver and onions, egg foo young, beets, pickled cauliflower, and Hurka, a Hungarian sausage made of pork liver and spicy rice in an intestinal casing. I love trying new foods and being surprised by them. In France, I sampled donkey jerky and escargots, which were both delectable. In high school, I drank wine a boyfriend's father had made from tomatoes. The vomiting that ensued was more from excessive volume than any intrinsic quality of the wine itself, which was surprisingly sweet.

But those "century" eggs (the Chinese name for them is pidan,and they are a cherished delicacy) were my Waterloo. The flavor wasn't so bad, but the murky color and bizarrely smooth texture through my palate for a loop. I could not make sense of this new experience, so my brain and mouth rejected it.

Luckily, I had some of Luz Alba's delicately sweetened rice pudding to wash it away.

As we digested, we discussed our individual plans for Thanksgiving. Jana, Van, and Luz Alba have family here in Akron with whom they will cook and eat elaborate, mostly traditional turkey dinners. Ying, Yuwei, and Regina, however, have no relatives in town and look at the long holiday weekend as simply a recess from the workweek.

Jana told us how, in the Czech Republic, it is traditional to cook fish for a winter holiday meal. When her American husband first met Jana's family in her homeland, he was seriously disappointed to be served a plate of fish, rather than meat or fowl.  When I asked Jana why fish was the tradition, she said, "it is just a habit Czech people have."

I guess that's similar to why we Americans eat turkey and stuffing at Thanksgiving, instead of the fish, maze, and squash our earliest settlers likely dined on for their first harvest meal. It has become our habit.

As we cleaned up our plates and leftovers, I shared another American Thanksgiving tradition with my class, perhaps the most important tradition of this holiday.

"Thanksgiving is all about being grateful for what we have," I said. "And I am particularly thankful that all of you came today and brought food for all of us to share. I love this class and am thankful that all of you come here."

All six of my students echoed the sentiment. Ying, in particular, who has expressed her enjoyment of this weekly meeting in the past, reiterated how important our class is to her.

"I love coming here," she said. "And I always try to come, even if I am busy. I will always try to come here when I can. I love this class."

I am thankful for many things this year: my health, my new job, my husband, my friends, my newly adopted cat, the lack of petty fights within my family. 

But one of the things I am most grateful for is the opportunity I have for volunteering. Not everyone has the time, resources, or energy to volunteer, and not everyone has a skill to offer as a volunteer. I am in a unique position where something as natural to me as speaking my native tongue is a valuable skill that I can share with newcomers to my native land. In the balance, I get the unique gift of sampling the cultures and languages they brought with them. And whether that involves an old Czech axiom about not stepping on a snake in bare feet, insight into the impact of the American economy on Columbian farmers, or a gag-inducing taste of an ancient Chinese egg delicacy, I treasure each of these experiences.

The two hours I spend with my ESOL class on Thursdays always expand my world a bit. For that short time, I am not just another dead-eyed American buying plastic stuff made in Southeast Asia or surfing the web on an expensive computer manufactured in a Chinese sweat shop or waiting in line for a coffee imported from struggling plantations in South America. For that brief period every week, I am an ambassador. I am an example of the best America has to offer, of American hospitality and generosity, of American knowledge and ingenuity. I am a counterweight to the politics and posturing of the government, to the sex tapes and violent videos of the Internet, to the xenophobia and bureaucracy of a broken immigration system. For two hours a week, a tiny forum of international outreach convenes in our classroom, and some small amount of cross-cultural understanding begins to emerge.

It is a tiny, tiny revolution. And I am immeasurably grateful to be a part of it. 

Feed Your Soul

"What's your relationship with food?" I asked my ESOL students last night. Yuwei's brows knitted together in his usual intense look of consternation. "Do you eat to live, or live to eat?"

We were preparing to discuss an article from The New Yorker that I had sent out earlier in the week, a seasoned food critic's reminiscence of his mother's detailed recipes against the backdrop of revolving food fads.

Each student, in turn, talked briefly about how being so busy during the week made it difficult to enjoy food, made a "grab-and-go" mentality a necessity. We all agreed, however, that going to a restaurant on the weekend or sitting down with family on a special occasion for a long, leisurely meal was a treat.

Jana brought up some research she had done in college about the change in family ritual from dining together to eating separately, and alone.

"This is why there is so much problem now," she said. "Dinner was where you all talked about your days and shared your problems. Now they don't have that."

I shared my own memories of compulsory family dinners with the TV turned off, as well as my experiences in France with a close-knit family who not only lingered over two- or three-hour dinners at the dining room table, but also sat down to breakfast and lunch together most days.

"Food is not just about nourishing our bodied," I said, waxing bit philosophic. "It's also about nurturing our relationships, about caring for others and sharing time. Have any of you gone to a restaurant and noticed a couple or a family who are all sitting silently, each absorbed in his own electronic device?"

A collective groan of recognition went up from the group.

"Yes, it is so sad," Luz Alba said. "I will see people who are not talking to each other at all, but just…" Here she gazed down at her thumbs and mimicked tapping on a smart phone. Then she looked up at us and spoke sternly, her index finger punctuating her point. "When I meet my friends for lunch, I have a rule: all the cell phones go away. They are not on the table. We are here to enjoy each other, to talk to each other, not to look at these things and tap messages. It is so disrespectful!"

"Who was that guy who made the Apple computers?" Jana asked. "Yeah, Steve Jobs. Even he said his own children did not have smart phones and tablets and things. He said, 'I played outside; they are going to play outside!' Is good, I think, to be away from these things sometimes. I love my phone," here she patted her own smart phone, face down on the table in front of her. "But there is a time for it, when you are alone."

Our conversation wended through electronic etiquette and back to food, then on to the article. We discussed odd vocabulary ('foolscap' is a kind of legal-sized notebook popular in Britain and Europe) and various semi-famous chefs and food critics (they'd never heard of Julia Child. This made me sad, so I required them to find a copy of Julie&Julia and watch it, asap).  

Eventually, Yuwei asked about the idiom 'what's at stake.' I love it when they ask about idiomatic phrases, rather than just vocabulary. The Internet has made it ridiculously easy to find the definition of a word, but idioms are sometimes more elusive. When the meaning of a phrase is not embedded in the meaning of the words in that phrase, as is the case with idioms, culture and history come into play, making the discussion so much more interesting and fruitful.

I used a poker metaphor to explain this phrase, but I think it only confused Yuwei further. Then we discussed how this phrase is different from 'burned at the stake.' I didn't want one being confused with the other, as their meanings are so different. Our discussion seemed to bring the two around, however, in a kind of full circle of meaning.

"Those women had a lot to lose when they were tied to stakes, didn't they?" Van asked, facetiously.

Yes, I thought; there is a connection.

After discussing various kinds of foods made from animal organ meat ('offal' is quite similar to its homonym, 'awful') and the 'pre-Vatican II' era, we decided to bring in food to share next week. I suggested we each bring a dish form our native country. Van, who has lived in the US for more than twenty years, said she knows nothing about cooking Vietnamese food.

"Green bean casserole is the easiest thing to make." she said with her usual enigmatic smile. "Maybe I just bring that."

As Thanksgiving and cold weather approach, my thoughts automatically turn to food and how we define ourselves by the food choices we make. The author of the article we read (John Lanchester, "Shut Up and Eat," November 3, 2014) hypothesized standing at the pearly gates in front of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr., and pleading your case for having lived a good life by saying, "I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal." His point was that perhaps these choices are not political enough, that food choices alone cannot take the place of real activism, of deep involvement with the world around us. That perhaps our focus has shrunk so much that we think buying organic or free-range turkeys, then ignoring our family to check-in on Facebook while that expensive bird roasts, is sufficient to label ourselves political.

I put thought into my choices at the grocery store, but I also put thought and care into the way I interact with the people in my life. I never want electronics to take precedence over human beings in my life, so I consciously separate the two. Sure, my husband and I eat dinner in front of the TV, but we often talk right over it, as if it were just another loud table in a restaurant.

Sometimes food is sustenance for the body, and sometimes it is sustenance for the soul. When a student of mine was upset about an argument with her husband, who is in Africa, and couldn't focus on her schoolwork, I listened to her and comforted her the best I could. There was not much I could say, so I mostly just listened. When her pretty face seemed permanently stuck in the clouds of sadness and worry, I broke off a piece of a chocolate bar and gave it to her. That morsel of sweet cocoa and sugar finally elicited a smile.

I eat to live, yes, but I also live to eat, to enjoy the abundance around me, and to feed others the joy of nourishment. Share a meal face-to-face with someone today, and put your phone away out of sight. Your soul will end up even more full than your belly.