Food Challenges: Eating with Local Housemates

Sitting down for break­fast this morn­ing in north­ern Kaza­khstan, it’s quiet and over­cast as shop­pers hurry along the walk­ways to the nearby Eura­sia shop­ping com­plex, pass­ing spindly trees and rut­ted dirt yards torn up from con­struc­tion. My house­mate Bena* looks out the win­dow, remarks on how karangi it is, the shy faded and grey.

“In my vil­lage we eat this all the time,” she says in Kazakh, point­ing to the but­ter and bread on the table. “We spread but­ter on bread, every day. There’s noth­ing else, just bread and butter.”

“But in the city, I never eat it. Just Sat­ur­days, Sun­days, like today.” She slathers but­ter on another chunk of round store­bought nan, and eats it while look­ing through the white and green gauze cur­tains at the nearby apart­ment buildings.

Bena moved to the cap­i­tal from her vil­lage four or five years ago, after hop­ping around the major cities of Kaza­khstan for work, but she still calls home every evening to talk to friends and relatives.

“I try not to eat bread… pasta, rice,” I frown passive-aggressively, nib­bling on an almond. “Car­bo­hy­drates, we call it. It’s…”

“You don’t like it?” Bena asks, going to the stove to turn off the kettle.

“I like it,” I call over to her. “it’s just… den­saulikka jaman. Bad for your health. All Amer­i­cans think so.” I pick up a cashew and eat it from our tray: cashews, almonds, raisins, sweet rolls, sweet bis­cuits, can­dies, sugar wafers. There’s a per­verse joy in offer­ing up new stereo­types of Amer­i­cans for her con­sump­tion, par­tially true and par­tially overstated.

“So you don’t eat breads?” Bena says, return­ing to the plastic-lace-covered table with a mug of pale tea in her hands.

Maybe she doesn’t real­ize that I’ve scarfed down most of her sugar wafers this morn­ing, three pieces of nan with gar­lic but­ter, and a hand­ful of cheap marsh­mal­lowy choco­lates that I dis­tinctly dis­en­joyed even while eat­ing them. “Oh… some­times I eat bread,” I say. “But I shouldn’t.”

“I like sweets,” Bena says. “Lots of sweets, can­dies, vafli.” She picks up a waf­fled suger-wafer and del­i­cately bites into it.

“It’s bet­ter to eat fruit and nuts,” I say, think­ing how surely slim Bena has noth­ing to fear from carbs.

“But nuts are mayliy,” she says, eyes wide. “They’re full of oil!”

“But they’re good oils!,” I protest, sure in my knowl­edge of good-foods/bad-foods from Shape and Newsweek and Reader’s Digest.

 

“Any­how, you eat dif­fer­ent.” Bena shrugs. “We Kaza­khs don’t eat salat or veg­eta­bles. My mother won’t eat any greens,” she says, stir­ring her tea. “She wasn’t used to those foods when she was a child.” Bena doesn’t eat veg­eta­bles either.

“So what did she eat?” I say, sip­ping my french vanilla cap­pu­cino mixed from a powder.

“Meat, just meat. And some­times broth and noo­dles,” Bena says. She tells me that her mother won’t con­sume any chicken, or fish, or any sort of herbs and spices.

“But most Kaza­khs will eat lots of bread,” she returns to my ear­lier thought. “Bread with pasta, or bread with besh­bar­mak noo­dles, bread with rice..”

Bena purses her lips. “I don’t eat this way, but bread with pota­toes is ok… or bread with soup, just a lit­tle bit.”

 

Keep­ing house with a new room­mate is always a chal­lenge, but even more when there are dif­fer­ent cul­tural per­cep­tions at work. In Amer­ica, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if some­one was vegan or raw-foods, if they were Atkins or gluten-free. Or even if they were a bacon-eating veg­e­tar­ian, or — like me — knew the basic fact that processed carbs=evil but enjoyed french toast and muffins for break­fast anyway.

So it’s not the choices here that star­tle me, as much as the assump­tions about which foods are right and which are wrong. Nuts are oily but slather­ing store­bought but­ter on bread is tra­di­tional? I’m think­ing. Fresh bread is bad but sweet­ened cof­fee pow­der from a Sin­ga­pore fac­tory is good? she’s prob­a­bly thinking.

And when I sug­gest curry spices, red pep­per, and some local greens to add fla­vor, Bena shakes her head. She gen­er­ously con­tin­ues to serve up pasta fried in oil, some­times float­ing with dill and salt.

So right now I’m full of sugar-wafers and feel­ing a bit cross and culture-shocked. But I’ve got pleas­ant dreams of caliente TexMex enchi­ladas, my mother’s rich spinachy Oyako-Domburi and light-heavy Huevos con Arroz, or of bright tangy broc­coli salad with a yogurt and bacon sauce.

It’s also made eas­ier when I remem­ber that I’m just a vis­i­tor here. This bread­ful way of liv­ing is tem­po­rary. But eat­ing like this with Bena reminds me of all the peo­ple adjust­ing to a cross-cultural mar­riage. I can’t imag­ine being in a life­time rela­tion­ship with a house full of unfla­vored pasta & bread eaters!