Finding Food Culture

I moved around a lot as a kid. By the time I was 10, I had lived in four different states, moving from the suburbs of Chicago to Amish country in Pennsylvania to the balmy heat of South Florida and finally, to Atlanta, which I still consider home even after moving to Boston for grad school.

Relocating so much as a child fostered in me a resilience, an independence, that I’m grateful for. But despite the closeness of my immediate family, I was in some ways severed from the food culture that I had been born into. My mom made what I would call “Midwestern” food at home (which, of course, is not a monolith), but in my mind, that was just how my family ate. I didn’t realize her recipes, that style of cooking, was actually reflective of where I’d been born.

Growing up in Georgia, I was exposed to plenty of Southern food, which seemed different, distinct from the food we regularly ate at home. It was its own cuisine. The food my family ate, on the other hand, was just “normal” in my mind. That is, of course, a deeply privileged perspective—immigrants are acutely aware that their food often others them, and I’ve never had to deal with the discomfort of being ridiculed for the foods that taste like home to me. It’s also deeply problematic: The idea that I and other white people in the U.S. don’t have a food culture erases the way that white people have marginalized the foods of non-white people and non-U.S. Americans in this country. Admittedly, since we stayed in the eastern half of the U.S., my family’s food was not radically different from what others around us ate. Those subtle differences between regional cuisines were noticeable but not pronounced. As a child, it was easy to ascribe those differences between mine and my other U.S. American families’ foods to personal choice.

Most Popular

I didn’t know many people from the Midwest when I lived in Atlanta, but once I moved to Boston, I met many others who had once called the Midwest home. They invited me into their kitchens, cooked for me and told me about the foods their families made when they were growing up. Casseroles, canned vegetables and tortilla roll-ups filled with cream-cheese laced concoctions were not unique to my family—my Midwestern friends had grown up eating the same foods and now find a similar nostalgia in revisiting the recipes despite being far from home.

It may seem silly to make this distinction between cuisines. The foods in Chicago and Atlanta and Boston are not so drastically different from each other that they would alienate people who came from another part of the U.S. Last year, Jenny G. Zhang wrote about how the years after World War II homogenized “white” foods in the U.S., giving rise to the idea of American “white food” itself. She claims that the “white food” meme has also in some ways homogenized “non-white” foods, which are clearly varied, different and distinct from one another, in a way that lacks the nuance that shapes the world’s various, multifaceted food cultures.

The rise of mass-produced, processed foods and the relatively newfound ability for us to eat seasonal produce very much out of season has indeed homogenized the types of food you can expect to eat in the U.S. But I don’t think we should lean into this homogenization. It’s not helpful for white Americans to claim we don’t have a culture—just because our cultures have been forcefully made the norm (to the detriment of all the people of color around us) doesn’t mean that they are or that there aren’t differences between what white people eat in California and what they eat in Minnesota.

Not only was the erasure of my food culture problematic, but it also obscured my food identity, a small facet of who I am, who my family is, where we came from. Rediscovering Midwestern cuisine after years of moving around the country, after living in a place far from where I was born and where I grew up, has in some ways given me a sense of home I never really understood before.

Nobody’s food culture is just one thing from just one place. Other Midwestern families without my Jewish ancestry, for example, don’t serve kugel at Thanksgiving dinner like my family does. My taste now has been shaped by friends and family who have learned to cook—and eat—on different sides of the globe. This is bound to happen in a globalized world. But having some context for how I eat now, understanding that my family’s food wasn’t normal but that it was specific, particular to the place we came from (at least in recent generations) has allowed me to savor every bite, “Midwestern” or not, a little bit more.

Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.

Finding My Food Culture Far From Home