Our Kids Are What WE Eat

Posted by: Lauren Young on October 03

Savita Iyer is a freelance financial journalist now living in The Netherlands who frequently guest blogs for Working Parents.

As its website rightly states, you either love Marmite, or you hate it. Fortunately for Solomon Teague, a magazine editor in London for whom I write, his one year-old son, Noah—like a true Brit—loves the stuff, something that makes Sol extremely proud.

I asked Sol if (a) he had wanted Noah to like Marmite, because he’s a Brit and (b) whether he would have been disappointed if Noah didn’t like it, because he’s a Brit.

“I wanted him to like it at the end, but I didn’t expect him to like it yet,” Sol says. “Yes, I would have been disappointed if [Noah] didn’t like Marmite. But I would have got over it and moved on…. In fact, I will be more disappointed if he doesn’t like curry, as [my wife] and I both love that, and neither of us are Indian!”

That’s what I love about the UK: Marmite, Bovril and now, curry, Britain’s national dish. This last makes us Indians pretty proud, and it’s great to know that there’s a kid out there who’s even devoured Vindaloo (the spiciest curry option on restaurant menus), at age one (“Apparently, he didn’t flinch, he loved spicy food from the first time he tried it,” says Sol, who knows the child in question).

But what happens when Indian children, those born and raised overseas, don’t like Indian food? For my husband—a proud Indian-it’s a sore point and every now and then, his disappointment that his kids are not curry fans flares up.

His friend, Sundar Srinivasan, a researcher in cellular physiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, feels the same way: His first-born cannot stand anything remotely Indian.

“I find it quite difficult to believe that a type of food that so many, including all of our White/black/Chinese/Korean friends LOVE, is something that she can’t stand and will barely sample when forced,” he says. “The other issue is a feeling that our identity (Indian) is the object of her rejection, a view bolstered by her need to conform to the larger society around her.”

It’s not written in stone that a child who’s ethnically Indian should love Indian food. But there is no greater source of pride for an Indian parent raising a child overseas than to tell the folks back “home” that said child LOVES Indian food. Conversely, there’s no greater shame than taking your kids to India and meekly confessing that they actually prefer spaghetti and tomato sauce to rice and lentils.

Food, then, plays an important role for diasporic parents trying to inculcate a sense of cultural identity in their kids. We really want our kids to eat our ethnic food because then we know that there’s a link between where they are and where they came from (had he been an expat Brit rather than one living in England, Sol says that he would have been a lot more bothered if Noah didn’t take to Marmite).

It’s also easier to travel “back home” if children are accustomed to home cuisine. Only recently in India are foods like chicken nuggets and pasta available on a widespread basis. But more than that, many diasporic parents fear the condescension of people, those “see, I told you so” kind of looks that suggest that one might be a sellout as a parent for living abroad and not fostering an appreciation for ethnic food.

I recently met a Mexican woman whose children (raised in the US and now in Europe) will not even look at anything Mexican. It’s an object of despair and shame for her vis-à-vis her family, she says.
Another common feeling among diasporic parents is that they didn’t try hard enough.

“I don't believe we were particularly adventurous with the foods that we offered our daughter as a baby and toddler,” says Sundar.

Making good Indian food takes the kind of time that I don’t really have, but I still feel that I don’t try hard as hard as my mother did, even though she didn’t work. When I was a child in Switzerland, Indian food was virtually unheard of and you couldn’t get any ingredients. To boot, we were also vegetarian, but my mother still persevered.

From the one and only health food store in town – a tiny, hole-in-the-wall that anyone could miss – she managed to ferret out the grains and lentils that would were a staple part of our diet. She ordered turmeric, cumin seeds and red chili powder from Indian grocery stores in London. She took simple cauliflower and frozen carrots, and spiced then up so that when we visited our grandparents, we had no trouble eating whatever was served.

Should we force our children to eat Chicken Tikka Masala or Mole Poblano or Ceviche or whatever if they visibly despise it, in the belief that this will make them love it and develop some kind of national feeling? I’m not sure. I hated okra and aubergine curries when I was a child but I was forced to eat them. It wasn’t until later in life that I developed a taste for them, and by the same token, came to terms with my Indianness.

“I always got the impression that my dad was disappointed that I was not more into his fish stews when I was eight or nine,” says Sol, who’s father is part Ghanaian. “I found them too hot, but I think he hoped if he kept giving them to me I would eventually get used to [the spice].”

Again, it wasn’t until he became an adult that Sol began to enjoy spicy Ghanaian stews.

Maybe because I was not raised in India, I do not have such a strong sense of Indian identity as my husband, with respect to food or anything else. I think it’s okay for children to like what they like, so long as they are eating a relatively varied and healthy diet, and I don’t think parents need to think that they’re cultural sellouts if their children don’t like their national food. Maybe my children will eventually like curry. If not, I’m sure that there are enough Vindaloo-loving Brit kids out there to keep it going.

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