Food helps us make a cultural connection.

Byline: Ellen Dolan 

COLUMN: LIBRARY LETTERS

Sometimes life presents the most interesting connections.

At a recent meeting of the volunteer coordinating committee for the Big Read community reading project, a conversation occurred that revealed just such a connection. One of the committee members was describing a possible activity for the upcoming cultural festival, where common words could be given in English and a range of foreign languages, with short, accompanying stories.

To explain her idea of how language and words are closely tied to ones cultural experience she told the story of a Thai woman's experience in coming to America. She explained how the woman had married a Peace Corps volunteer and moved to the United States in the 1980s. Years later, while making a Thai recipe for Khao Pad Kra Prao Gai (Thai basil chicken fried rice), the woman told her daughter how she had packed several suitcases with fish sauce, since she was not sure she would be able to find it in the United States.

Obviously, the woman felt the sauce was an essential ingredient as she adjusted to life in America.

We all enjoyed that story because it reminded us how much food is a major aspect of cultural tradition. Food brings back memories of events, people and passages in life.

The reference to food and this woman's journey to America provided a wonderful connection to the novel "My Antonia" by Willa Cather, the book which serves as the centerpiece of the Big Read project.

Besides reflecting the immigrant's experience in coming to America, the book offers another poignant connection to the Thai woman's story.

In Cather's novel, one of the main characters, Mrs. Shimerdas, mother of an immigrant Bohemian family, carried a precious package along the interminable voyage across the ocean and train trip to the western Nebraska plains. In an early section of the novel, after receiving gifts of much needed food from their new neighbors, Mrs. Shimerdas pressed a small package of dusty brown flakes upon her guests.

With limited English words to explain, Mrs. Shimerdas proclaims, "Very good. You no have in this country."

The American guests were mystified by the strange brown flakes "that were as light as feathers, and the most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odor."

Jim Burden, another character in the book, who was a young boy during this visit to the new immigrant family, noted years later: "I never forgot the strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so jealously were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some deep Bohemian forest -"

Both of the preceding stories show the deep connection food provides to one's past. Culture consists of so many basic parts of life: Language, literature, dance, music, craft, dress, religion and numerous other traditions.

The Big Read Coordinating Committee is planning a cultural festival on Saturday April 5, at the Shrewsbury Senior Center to celebrate the varied aspects of the people who make up our community. The festival will include music, dance, song and, we hope, lots of good food.

If you have cultural traditions to share with others that day, we hope you'll get involved. Maybe you have an old family recipe that is a precious part of your family's history, or a craft, or music, or a story.

There will be a place for all of this at the cultural festival. If you would like to help out or be involved in some way, please contact me at the library at [phone]. We hope to the festival will be as diverse and embracing as our community.

Ellen Dolan is the director of the Shrewsbury Public Library.