I’ve inherited a passion for food from my dad. I think that an important part of belonging and feeling at home is food. Atleast for me. When traveling in Sweden or Finland, nothing ever really feels totally strange or exotic, because the food is mostly familiar. If nothing else, I can always go to the store and buy the foods that make me feel safe.
While traveling in other countries, though, the feeling of security through food is a lot tricker to accomplish. For me, the first inkling if homesickness that I get is a longing for specific foods. I’m not especially prone to homesickness, while traveling I’m usually too busy taking in everything new to think about home. It’s not that I don’t miss the people at home, it’s just that I choose not to think about it. But food I can actually actively miss.
For example, in Bolivia I could get these urges for proper, whole grain, rye bread. The Finnish kind. With really strong cheese on. The only thing served in most hostels for breakfast in both Bolivia and Peru was white French toast with strawberry marmelade. Not what you’d call a proper morning meal. That’s why being woken up on my birthday by Natalia and the others with breakfast in bed consisting of dark bread with real cheese, hot chocolate, fresh strawberries and ABBA songs strongly added to that being the best birthday I’ve had so far. The bread was amazing, bought from a luxury supermarket in a La Pazean suburb. And I had never had fresh strawberries on my birthday before, it being in February and all. It’s strange, really, how I could miss the bread so much. At home, I don’t eat bread that often. Only, like, once a week or so. But there, it was all I could think about some mornings.
Or the totally irrational situation with yoghurt in Namibia. In the Namibian supermarkets, the food is imported from South Africa and is quite European, really. Not very exotic for a Swede, excepting from the biltong meat and the occational strange fruit. It became standard for us to buy yoghurt for breakfast, because it was so easy to transport and prepare. They had dozens of different flavours, but for some reason, all of them were fat free. And when I say all, I really mean ALL. Fat free, but so sweet that most of the yoghurts could easily pass as desserts. If making the yoghurts fat free was to make them more healthy, then the reasoning behind adding all that sugar is beyond my understanding – but during my month in Namibia I came to shudder at anything sugary for breakfast and really miss the proper, sugar free but fat yoghurt at home. Fat is what makes the yoghurt taste! Fat is what makes you feel full. Sugar, on the other hand, is like a drug. They are strange, Namibians / South Africans.
What I’ll miss when in Canada remains to be seen, but I’m prepairing myself by eating extra everything of those foods that I suspect are missing from the supermarket shelves in North America. Like sourcream, rice cakes and really strong cheese from northern Sweden.
Katja Malmborg 