Food Memories

Rotherham, just on the outskirts of Sheffield holds some of my earliest memories. The things I remember is car boot sales on Sundays, my grandmother writing letters to Pakistan on those blue letter papers with red and blue trimming in the park, libraries and book stores in Sheffield city centre and playing with the kids of other ‘foreign’ healthcare staff employed by the NHS in our communal outdoor space. This was a community full of people from all over the world and we shared the experience of being new in a different culture to our own but we also shared the foods of our respective lands. We had the pastries from a Sudanese lady, powdered with sugar. I cannot to this day find these anywhere and they may have been unique to her cooking. I first ate Arab rice with vegetables and meat given to us by another neighbour, which thinking back was probably, Maqluba. It was also a time I discovered the fast pleasure of processed food. My fondest memory is of my Sri Lankan neighbour’s grandmother, who wore the most beautiful saris and the first real woman I knew who wore a red bindi on her forehead which till then belonged on the screen to women in Indian films. At the time my mother was studying at Sheffield University and this woman used to look after us along with the other kids whose parents were at work. It was an unofficial day care and one I’m sure would be illegal nowadays. She gave me my first Kit Kat. To this day every time the foil makes that noise as I’m tearing through it, I think of her. It was a comfort to my 3-year-old self. A lunchtime treat. My memory of what Kit Kat used to taste like is so vivid and it no longer tastes the same. It hasn’t done for decades. I still search for that particular aroma and the sweetness against my taste buds. This probably explains my attachment (border lining on an addiction) to the stuff. I reach for it when I’ve had a bad day or if I’m feeling like something sweet. I have always done so. Stressed before an exam in university, I’d always go for a Kit Kat. Heartbreak will always lead me to days of eating Kit Kats and so will days on end of deadlines. For a long period of time I always had some on me until a few years ago when I was studying a module on human behaviour. As part of an exercise I was to find a habit I wanted to get rid of. I, being an Asian with diabetes and heart disease running in my family, wanted to control my blood sugar levels better so I chose to working on quitting the lunchtime tea and Kit Kat habit. Having successful made it to the other end, I now reflect on what it means to me and how I do not remember any faces or names from that period of my life. Only the comforting sweetness of Kit Kat, I wonder if it actually did taste that good. Or was it in fact the carefree nature of childhood I’m searching for in my increasingly busy life. Come to think of it I was probably never addicted to sugar, only to the comfort, which came wrapped in a tin foil packaging when I was three and experienced being an outsider in a foreign land for most likely the first time ever.

 ~ Rotherham UK, Early 90s ~