When you’re all grown up and on your own and have lived a bit, it’s easier to find peace with your weirdness. All those little and large things that set you apart as a child are what make you the person you are today.
Back then, though, kids may not have been so kind.
Enter the elementary school lunchroom, where PB&J or bologna sandwiches are the brown bag standard, and anything other than that is regarded as freaky.
Kids from immigrant families are up against a lot, and the pressure to assimilate to their new culture outside the confines of home can be overwhelming. For many it’s a matter of retraining speech patterns or learning all new pop culture icons. But they can’t control what goes into their lunchbox — and other kids take notice.
Stella Fayman already felt like a visitor from another planet when she came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1989, and lunchtime was a whole new universe of discomfort. She says, “I would bring Russian food, and the kids would make fun of me and call my delicious homemade meal an ‘alien sandwich.'”
It was the smell that gave away Hungarian immigrant Wanda Miarecki. In the 1950s, her grandmother would send her to school with a lunch of Limburger cheese sandwiches and a hard-boiled egg and possibly sardines or a lard sandwich sprinkled with sugar. Sister Agnes would send Miarecki to sit at the back table in her Catholic school cafeteria and as she notes, “Needless to say, I didn’t make any friends.”
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But perhaps the kids of today can learn from the lessons buried in these school lunch memories.
Pablo Solomon, an artist and designer, grew up in a multicultural home in Houston, and was bullied as a child. Lunch, however, provided comfort.
“I would have such Mediterranean delicacies as kibbe, dolmas, feta cheese, stuffed squash and cabbage — even baklava and huge date cookies,” Solomon says. “Throw in the occasional tamales, epanadas, sausages, containers of various soups, beans and stews, a variety of homemade breads — and I ate well.”
Sandro Gerbini grew up in upstate New York to a father born in Lebanon. From first through third grades, lunch — for her, pita wraps filled with hummus, baba ghanoushor yogurt with olive oil, olives, tomatoes and mint — was a harrowing experience. “I remember multiple occasions where I came home to my parents in tears, begging them to pack normal kid lunches for me so that I might be spared the embarrassment of being scrutinized by my typically cruel first- and second-grade peers,” she says.
But an astute teacher intervened, turning it into a cultural lesson by inviting students to bring in a dish representative of their heritage. Gerbini says, “Most students ended up trying a bit of everything, sampling cuisine from nearly two dozen cultures. The event was such a hit that by the next week my formerly oddball lunch was suddenly in demand by former skeptics. Never again was my Lebanese lunch a source of distress for me.”