Migration, Poverty, and Food

I arrived in Buffalo, NY, in August 2001, to go to graduate school. The first three days I spent at one of my professors’ apartment, a penthouse overlooking the impoverished Buffalo downtown. It struck me as a town of sharp contrasts and sharp winters. Nothing seemed to be in the middle, everything white or black, old, very rich and decaying or young and extremely poor. Where did I belong? I found out soon enough after learning about the many deductions from my $8,000 a year teaching assistant’s stipend.

            That first week, from my professor’s penthouse, I walked to a train station, six or seven blocks away. Used to living in Europe and walking downtown and pretty much everywhere—I didn't need a car in Europe and I couldn’t afford a car in the US—it didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the presence of extreme poverty just a block away from the fashionable area with interwar buildings inhabited by middle-class professionals.

            At a street corner, already in the “bad” area that as I learned later my colleagues who had cars avoided, there was a neighborhood food store owned by a Middle Eastern family. That was my first experience buying food in the United States. Everything was canned and dusty, the sloping floors were covered with ancient linoleum, the smell of some disinfectant detergent made me sneeze. In the end I picked up some cheese, wanting to reward my professor’s hospitality. I wanted to make an omelet. The cheese turned out to be Monterey Jack and, for my tastes at that time, uneatable. My professor, shocked yet amused, explained to me “what horrible things they were doing to cheese”—that’s how she put it—and then two days later took me shopping to a nice smelling shop with bright windows, a young good looking sales person, and carefully wrapped cheeses and jars of olives that cost as much as some of the books I needed to buy—another expense I had failed to calculate out of my meager TA paycheck.

            Then I found a room in a house and I started cooking at home. I dreaded the foreignness of it all. Everything tasted different, even the milk: whether Vitamin D enhanced or the simple 2%, it tasted as if it had been made out of powdered milk, not as if it came from a cow. Bread was different too—either the prohibitively expensive baguettes or the prepackaged stuff, which I once tried to eat untoasted and regretted it. Why did bread have to be sweet? Where were the regular bakeries that poor people could afford, so that they could eat bread, real bread with crust and middle, and not… and not… this? And why were tomatoes so expensive—that was poor people’s food back in Romania, everyone had tomatoes, with everything, they were cheap, you could grow them in your backyard—and why, and why please someone tell me, even when these tomatoes were so expensive, why is it that they didn’t have any taste, just a pale color and a slippery yet hard texture that made me think of seafood?

            And why did it bother me so much?

            “But of course,” an anthropology professor said to me, “it’s normal, it’s food, the ground of your identity.” I thought about this for a long time.