A Hell of My Own Making (The Gratuitously Illustrated Food Post)

I have been bothering my mother intermittently on Skype all afternoon and evening, basically rewriting her shopping lists for the next few weeks. Now, this was not unexpected, since, like many of my peers, I am homesick and am especially hungry for food I can only get in the US.

All of my friends on our study abroad program who are going to be home for Christmas have dictated their first few meals at home. However, most of my friends’ lists are slightly more normal than mine. Taco Bell at the airport, foods that we can’t afford on our stipend, a proper hot dog or slice of pizza, and American peanut butter are all the sort of requests they anticipated making, and the sort of foods that it’s normal to miss with a passion.

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I, however, found myself insisting that my mother buy Diet Mountain Dew, Chocolate Brownie, White Chocolate Macadamia Nut, and Iced Gingerbread Clif Bars, pancake mix, Wheat Thins, cinnamon roll and red velvet cake flavored yogurt, pink lady apples, Ritz crackers, Wasa bread, and Three Musketeers bars. And I’m absolutely sure the list will grow – tomorrow I’m emailing to ask that she add Klondike bars and pretzel sticks to the list. This is in addition to the slightly less strange meals I have already requested be part of the menu while I am home: pot roast, spaghetti, steak when I have recovered from jet lag enough to enjoy it, a bowl of her mashed potatoes to myself at Christmas dinner (that’s only half a joke – these mashed potatoes are so perfect that I will probably end up dedicating an entire post to them in the future).

Why, I have begun to wonder, am I so excited about such weird food? I tried to pick this list apart to find some rhyme or reason, and came to the conclusion that there are three main reasons:

First, cultural or sub-cultural nostalgia. This one is the driving force behind the Ritz crackers, the Wheat Thins, and the pretzel sticks on the first list and the pot roast on the second. While I identify as an American and can’t wait for a slice of pizza from my favorite place, it is not the food of my country but the food of my subculture (the food that made my time in England such familiar territory, gastronomically speaking) that I long for most. Yes, I am talking about WASP food, and no, I make no apologies for missing Wheat Thins and pot roast as much as I do.

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Secondly, weird food preferences and obsessions. These are the things that I like but that are not popular or iconic enough to have made their way across the pond yet. Clif Bars and dessert flavored nonfat yogurt, I’m looking at you. Things from this group are usually the hardest to find a suitable substitute for. Crunchy Granola Bars and vanilla flavored yogurt may be nice, but they just aren’t doing it for me any more. Furthermore, since I have no particular reason to be emotionally attached to these foods, when I start wailing to someone they just think I’m weird, because really, who actually misses red velvet flavored yogurt that much?

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Third, food with real reason to reduce me to an emotional mess. These are the foods and drinks that quite literally haunt my dreams, and for good reason. Diet Mountain Dew, in addition to making me a sleepless nut, takes me back to my high school, now in the process of being demolished. Pancakes, which I have avoided looking for a mix for, remind me of my childhood, when my father would spell out names and initials in the batter, often for a crowd of my impressed friends who had spent the night. (A warning to him, if he is reading this: My first breakfast is going to have to be a stack of SLF initial pancakes.) Klondikes bring my late grandfather to mind.

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With all these foods back in my life, one might assume that I will be perfectly content at home. I thought I might, until I concluded my list, when I realized that I needed to warn my mother about the baking we would need to do when I returned. I informed her that I would be making shortbread, scones, bread and butter pudding, and sticky toffee pudding over the course of our Christmas celebration, and that if we were going to be able to enjoy proper cream teas, we should probably start looking into where to buy or how to make clotted cream. Patient woman that she is, she said she would start investigating. (This does not exactly make her a martyr; she's getting a cream tea out of this if all goes well.)

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Then the panic set in. If I’m this miserable about not having Wheat Thins for a semester, how bleak will the rest of my life be with inferior fish and chips, expensive imported Digestive biscuits, and really awful cheap chocolate? I thought more about this prospect, and it only became gloomier. Indian food in the States is apparently almost inedible, and I’m halfway through a year in a country that is famed for the quality of its take on food from the subcontinent. When one asks for tea in the vast majority of American restaurants, even quite good ones, the result is usually a mug of lukewarm Lipton rather than the pot of steaming Darjeeling, English Breakfast, or Assam to which I have become accustomed here. And I still can’t figure out how to get my greedy little paws on clotted cream.

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I realized, at this moment, that while studying abroad has been one of the best experiences of my life, it also probably means that, with my love of food and tendency to long for what I can’t have, I have condemned myself to a life of gastronomic hell. No matter where I am, I will always long for food I can’t get. While I may have been miserable without Wheat Thins, going for most of the rest of my life without Cadbury Flakes, good chicken tikka masala, and fish and chips seems even bleaker. The only appropriate reaction to this is a good sulk and a Crunchie bar.