By Liliana Valderrama
My first memory of school in the United States was the overwhelming smell and taste of plastic wrap in everything that came out of the school cafeteria. There, my choices were limited to a styrofoam cup filled with a powdered chicken noodle soup or a ham and cheese sandwich. I could not swallow either, because of that omnipresent flavor of plastic wrap. Lunches in my home county of Peru had consisted of rice, a protein, potatoes and plantains, or a variation thereof. They were all homemade by my family’s cook and placed on an actual porcelain plate. Newly arrived in the States and without a hired cook, my mother and her fine-dining ambitions had to provide lunches for my three sisters and I. My mother had never been one for thinking too much about budgets or practicalities to say the least.
One her favorite preparations led my third grade teacher, Mrs. Vopel, a nice white American lady from somewhere in the Midwest, to encourage me, a Peruvian immigrant still mastering English, not to eat my lunch. It happened one day when she was doing the rounds, making sure that everyone had a lunch. Usually, she insisted they eat most if not all of it. When she took a look at my lunch that day she said, “you don’t have to eat it if you don't want to” and walked away. As I looked at my lunch I wondered what was so wrong with it? Why had my teacher spooned through the Thermos full of home pickled kidney beans and haricot vert and pried open the white bread and pâté sandwich, a lunch my mother had prepared for me many times? Was it my mother’s obvious Francophilia that disturbed this otherwise open-minded teacher? Maybe it was the pork and boiled egg aspic in another of my lunches, which had first raised concerns. The appearance of yet more pâté ended her silence. She thought she was defending me; yet it made me feel more estranged from my American counterparts than ever before. English had already isolated me from my classmates; now my diet was found to be too exotic as well. As I looked around the table, I saw examples of the ‘appropriate’ lunches.
Next to me sat a peanut butter sandwich that looked like it had been punched a couple of times. It was oozing a velvety grape jelly, and the heady sweet smell of peanut butter filled my nostrils. Another companion had a slice of pizza stuffed in ill-fitting foil. She even ate it cold, which really puzzled me. The white cheese looked congealed and it had an orange tint because of the pepperoni that had been picked off first. And then the most exotic of lunches, a sandwich composed of a slice of American cheese, mustard and bologna, with its cloying and enduring smell. You always knew a person had a bologna sandwich for lunch five hours later. I had never seen any of these foods until I arrived in Miami.
The most torturous of all was that the other kids got something sweet or crunchy, two things I never got, but I would eat like a recently released political prisoner when at a friend’s house. I was even enthralled by the packaging, that thin plastic film that would create a little scented puff when finally pried open. Little Debbie’s Star Crunch was one of my Achilles heels. I even enjoyed the thin pellicle of grease that coats your hard palate. The other ungrateful kids did not appreciate what they had.
But the item that I fetishized the most were comma-like cheese puffs, and of course that was a forbidden fruit that I could never enjoy. I would walk through the snack aisle in the supermarket, memorizing the different packages of the different brands of cheese puff goodness. They came in balls, twists and puffs. I wanted them all. I even conducted my own form of espionage, seeing which kids would bring which brand of cheese puffs. With this information I would try enter the cheese puff economy.
Lunch time in an elementary school is a lesson in brisk trade and cooperation, lots of bartering. But no one in their right mind would ever barter their large and crunchy cheese puffs. The sharing of cheese puffs was all but mythical. As my English was still developing, I did not have friends that got those cheese puffs in their lunch boxes. Being immigrants we all got offal and pigs feet. We knew we were never going to make a good trade, or any trade at all for that matter. Our lunches were smelly and messy and oh so different. The market would not bear a thousand pounds of offal even for a single bag of cheese puffs.
Now, in hindsight I am grateful for these smelly lunches. Had I not eaten all matters of liver pates and aspics as a child, now I would not be able to enjoy global cuisine with such abandon. I will try anything once. I have downed raw oysters, feasted on duck foie gras, torn through cow heart kabobs and have no qualms about indulging in sashimi. This kind of gustatory adventurousness has taken time. That being said, I still love cheese puffs and all their faux-cheese perfection.
As a child, cheese puffs for me seemed to be a kind of fetish. For American kids they were just a delicious, salty snack. For me they were something larger; they were a crunchy gateway to being accepted by my American peers. They imbued life with a kind of simplicity. I saw these Cheetos-eating American-born children completely unaware that other concepts of lunches existed. They did not bear the burden of having the teacher point out their “different” lunches, have a different accent or having to translate for their parents in the grocery store. Adapting to this country pulled the rug out from under my childhood and changed my life forever. At night I would pray for the day when my lunches would not contain tripe stew but a ham and cheese sandwich and not boiled potatoes with a walnut cheese sauce, but a Lunchable. Most of all, I dreamed of an unending supply of small bags of cheese puff. I hoped that one day my mother would understand that I wanted an American lunch. I would proudly display this lunch for teachers and classmates alike, the proof of my sameness, my American-ness.
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