Recently, I was asked “what was something you wish you had known before coming to Swarthmore?” I pondered on it and said, “I wish someone told me I shouldn’t have the dining hall desserts every single day.” I gained some weight in my freshman year, which I assume is not quite uncommon, partially because of the plethora of dining hall desserts I had. When I first came to Swarthmore, I truly lived out the spirit of the pass/fail first semester, embracing the full range of college experience and trying out everything I felt enthusiastic about, including classes, club events, friends, and every dessert I had never had before in the dining hall.
Aside from the desserts, I am very satisfied with the food at Swarthmore in general. Our dining hall offers a wide variety of options, and the restaurants in the Ville, or downtown Swarthmore, add more flavors to my plate. Hobbs Coffee is my go-to spot for Sunday breakfasts; Co-op sushi is exquisite and delicious; Renato Pizza has fantastic tuna salad; and recently my friends and I have loved going to Luna’s Mexican Grill for tacos.
But occasionally, I do miss the taste of home.
Thankfully, I am not the only person missing the taste of home away from home. While Swatties could and do venture outside of the campus to search for homelike tastes, another way to address this is to cook by ourselves.
My favorite campus cooking event every year is the Fall Feast held by i20 (Swarthmore’s international student club). At Fall Feast, i20 invites student chefs, both international and domestic, to cook and share their tastes of home to the entire campus community. I can’t remember exactly if it was our friend from Malaysia or my RA (resident assistant) from Nepal who made the best curry chicken I had ever had, and I was definitely chatting with Yurika, our exchange student from Japan, when we indulged ourselves with Taiwanese ice cream rolls. Last year, my roommate made a Vietnamese-style pork rib soup to accompany vermicelli, which my Chinese friend exclaimed in surprise was just like her mom’s soup back home!
At last year’s Thanksgiving, when most students had left to reunite with families, I recreated a home dish for the “Friendsgiving” dinner I had with my friends staying on campus. I made fried rice cake, a simple nutritious dish representative of Shanghai cuisine. It has the most basic ingredients: bok choy, pork and rice cake. My grandparents make the best fried rice cake for our family’s reunion dinner on Lunar New Year; I also liked the one at my school’s cafeteria when I was little. Fried rice cake is an easy comforting food and you can’t go wrong making it – but just to make sure I did it all right, I did consult with my grandparents before I cooked. My fried rice cake was part of a potluck feast with how many dishes I couldn’t recall. I do vividly remember having amazing bruschetta, spring rolls, curry, red braised pork belly, miso soup, brownies, and flan – we put together a feast with really everything!
I came to Swarthmore as an anthropology major, and the first anthropology class I took was called Food and Culture. It was, to me, an amazing introduction to anthropology because it showcased how universal human experience can take countless shapes and forms and how ordinary mundane things in life are soaked with cultural meanings. Ultimately, food is more than its taste and filling our stomach. What we eat, how we cook, with whom we eat and where we eat are like the air we breathe yet shape us in ways more numerous than we are aware of. Recreating home dishes at Swarthmore goes beyond fulfilling our craving for particular tastes. We cook food loaded with fond memories and stories to tell. It is an act of sharing, expressing love, and exchanging little bits of who we are.
