American Foods to Be Thankful For: A British Girl’s Sugar-Fuelled Awakening
Originally published in the NEW YORKER
Oh, America: blue breakfast cereals and string made of fruit are not perfectly normal childhood foodstuffs. Your young are corrupted by pleasure. Unfortunately, I was too.
I had an American childhood. Sadly, most of it was in England. I was only four when the first blow came; my father, a presumably well-meaning Oxford academic, accepted a temporary teaching post in a small Massachusetts town named, oddly, Cambridge. Children at that age can be easily transplanted, can’t they, and then brought home unchanged?
Not the greedy ones.
In Britain, in the mid-1970s, breakfast was toast, or cornflakes. A snack meant a banana or a digestive biscuit. Our packed lunches, in well-scrubbed plastic vanilla ice-cream tubs, contained a ham or cheese sandwich, an apple and a bag of crisps. We ate like small bored adults, in a brown and beige and wholesome world.
Then America blew my mind.
We moved to Albion Street, in Newton; opposite lived Rhonda, born on exactly the same day, and my conduit to a sugary world. In England, Hallowe’en involved ghost stories. Here, Rhonda and I were led up and down weird suburban streets, clutching paper sacks into which strangers poured a rainbow: hard orange corn-niblets like lost teeth; Tootsie rolls tasting of chocolate and Hershey’s chocolate tasting of wax; candy dots stuck to paper; pillowy chunks of bubble gum whose most astounding feature wasn’t bubble-blowing ease (‘Big bubbles, no troubles’) but the outlandish flavours. ‘Grape’, you say? Nothing like any grape I’d ever tried. ‘Watermelon’? I had, I thought, tasted a watermelon but did it taste like this? It did not.
At home, I attended a nursery attached to an Oxford college, where we solemnly performed ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and learned to read the most boring books ever written: Peter and Jane. In Boston, our minds were formed by the witty Monster books while, for fun, my beloved Mrs Ritchie showed us how to grind peanuts into a strange delicious spread and to cook crabapples into something called ‘jelly’, which I brought back in a paper cup. It tasted of heaven. And then, for extra sensory overload, we’d go to a shop selling entirely ice-cream, where, just as with television, instead of the familiar three options there were dozens.
Jamoca Almond Fudge, nothing will ever replace you in my heart.
A few years of wholemeal bread and baked beans later, we were back, this time to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Were my parents extremely cool or simply reckless? Did they not realise that Smurf-Berry Crunch, Fruit Roll-ups and a staggeringly delicious treat called Kentucky Fried Chicken would ruin us? None of the flavours made any sense: wintergreen; Dr Pepper. On which fruits, pray, were they based? At home, yoghurt was vaguely sweet or plain; here it involved a pool of ultra-strawberry goo or, better still, was frozen. We were used to occasional squares of dark cooking chocolate, not sacks of Hershey’s Kisses; flapjacks, not colossal blueberry muffins; fishfingers, not lobster rolls. And worse still, our favourite relatives were close by.
When an Indian humorologist marries a Hungarian UN food adviser, gastronomy becomes gloriously complicated. Oxford had a single Indian restaurant; in Chapel Hill our beloved cousin Judit, smiling beatifically in her muumuu, would cook lamb Jalfrezi or Afghan kebabs, chicken paprikash or grits, on demand. The gluttony never stopped: weekend breakfasts meant unlimited onion bagels and smoked salmon; we drove into, or at least through, a Wendy’s and ate triple burgers; attended a chowder festival (Manhattan versus New England, apparently a serious matter); dug clams on Emerald Isle; and, at Disneyworld, ate a mysteriously delicious tiny waffle. It was the summer of disbelief. I remember almost nothing but the food.
It was only on the final sabbatical, when we found ourselves marooned in a Philadelphian suburb, that my torrid affair with American food began to cool. The neighbours were unfriendly, the house smelt appalling and I was fourteen, preoccupied with my own despair, Mad magazine, the preppy clothing at an unfamiliar shop called the Gap, and the excruciatingly silent daily Meetings at my Quaker school which, for a self-conscious English girl with a rumbling stomach, were forty minutes of dark hell. Someone asked if we had telephones in England; I touched a friend’s afro, watched The Golden Girls, had crushes on everyone and wisely counselled a school acquaintance on sexual ethics, despite my own profound virginity. Yet, although I must have endured dozens of high-school lunches, fast food, home cooking, another Hallowe’en and, presumably, a Thanksgiving, nothing remains.
Even Britain changes. Corner-shops sell fruit roll-ups and yoghurt with goo; bagels, muffins, Reece’s Peanutbutter Cups and Nerds. And I realise now that I was on the cusp of something we have lost: innocence, and excitement. Few Western children could nowadays experience that shocking rush of sugar and artifice, the blue-raspberry maple-marshmallow sprinkled world, of my first transatlantic feasts. America, you have given me so much: the poetry of Frank O’Hara, the fiction of Grace Paley, Michael Cunningham, Alison Bechdel and Henry James, and a lifetime’s magnificent television. But, most of all, I will always love you for the dazzled astonishment of a small corduroy-dressed girl, faced with a box of breakfast cereal and thinking: seriously, you’re allowed to eat this?