This fall, millions of students packed their belongings into boxes and left home for the first time. While some drove short distances to local universities, others flew long hours to an entirely foreign landscape filled with expectations and hope for new adventure. However, with such a radical change comes inevitable challenges: learning to do laundry, understanding the complex bus routes, and making friends amongst a sea of intimidating faces. In these moments, the concept of home can seem comforting — whatever that concept may mean to you.
To Aetant Prakash, a freshman from Orlando, Florida, home is “the people you’re with. It doesn’t really matter where that ends up being.” Often times, it is not the specific place that harbors a feeling of safety, but rather the memories we associate with that place. The warm lights of your childhood home, or the familiar taste of your mother’s cooking, the word home carries a sense of love that can be difficult to remember when we are displaced.
Nonetheless, there are some key aspects of home that tend to sustain themselves across time and space. Particularly, the memories associated with taste are often the strongest in reminding us of the people and experiences we hold at the core of our being. Jenny, a sophomore from Tampa, cherishes memories with her mom and the food they cooked together.
“My mom made lotus root and pork rib soup for the first time after we saw it in a TV show. It is not exactly a family tradition, but in my opinion that doesn’t make it any less special. I think of my mom and I bonding over C-dramas and her letting me taste-test the first time she made it, and us picking out the ingredients together.”
For Jenny, working to hold on to her culture brings back childhood memories. She believes it is important to communicate with her family, not just through language, but through food and cultural differences too. In this way, Jenny shares how a dish like lotus pork rib soup grounds her to her Chinese culture and allows her to connect with an intrinsic part of her identity.
The strong tie between home and identity plays another role in the quest of college students cooking and eating their cultural food. For most, being able to enjoy recipes such as Colombian Tamales or Dal Makhani means being a part of a specialized group who enjoy the same foods. Around campus, finding a friend who eats the same dishes you do means finding someone who understands your values, customs, and history.
Even for those like freshman Arturo Zárrate, who was born in the US to Colombian parents, but grew up in the Netherlands, food becomes a unifying factor that provides the opportunity to feel comfortable wherever he is. He says, “everywhere and nowhere is simultaneously my home, in other words, I am my own home." For Arturo, food is a way to bring a little piece of home wherever he is.
As students this year contemplated what to take with them to college, and what to leave behind, it is clear that recipes of all types were valued as souvenirs of a place regarded as home. Traditions, like meals cooked on Christmas or a special birthday cake hold not only a special place in our fridge, but also in our hearts. Meghan Kakiel, a freshman from Coral Springs, says she would love to keep her grandmother’s tradition of making sausage wontons on Christmas for her own kids. While Meghan claims she is not good at cooking, she thinks certain dishes, which remind her of family traditions, will push her outside her comfort zone in order to get a little taste of home.
Aetant Prakash thinks it is important to hold on to his Indian culture because… it is simply who he is. Similarly, Arturo Zárrate says he believes in the importance of using “all conduits possible, including food, to honor the culture that raised me, the culture that raised my parents, and the culture that allows me to exist.” Every person out there looks to celebrate the place that connects them to both themselves and a larger community around them. Food is not simply ingredients on a plate consumed for sustenance. It is comfort and love, and when all else fails, it is a place to call home.