What do you do when you don’t have access to the foods that bring you joy and connect you to the people and places that feel like the most authentic you? Language, customs, and food are integral parts of people’s daily lives, so when a new college student leaves this daily norm and enters an entirely different one, it can make adjusting more difficult. This difficulty is enhanced when there isn’t a way to get some of that norm back, including being unable to access culturally relevant foods. This can be harder in rural areas or small towns compared to larger cities. Regardless, students in colleges and people in college towns find daily ways of bringing back pieces of home, whether it be in restaurants, in town, or in dorm kitchens.
I grew up in a predominantly Latine household in Los Angeles, where I only spoke Spanish at home and dinner was almost always Mexican or Salvadorian food. This flipped after committing to Oberlin College. When I first arrived at Oberlin, I spoke Spanish on very rare occasions, I was most often around White people, and I ate a lot of traditionally White American foods. This caused a lot of homesickness and made it hard to feel comfortable or have a sense of belonging in this new place where I would live for most of the year. Sometimes, dining halls had familiar foods like tacos, empanadas, or Mexican-style street corn and I jumped at the opportunity to eat these foods, even if they didn’t taste exactly like the foods from home. I kept looking for authentic Salvadoran or Mexican food, in a desire to eat good food, but also to feel more grounded in my identity while away from home. I wasn’t satisfied by Lupitas in town or the next closest Mexican restaurant in Elyria, nor did I have the car to drive to Cleveland. So, I kept searching.
In the first semester of my second year, I joined the Third World Co-op (TWC), hoping that this would be a step towards finding community and my place at Oberlin. TWC is a dining cooperative that aims to make a safer and more welcoming dining community for students of color. Students in this co-op work together to cook lunch and dinner everyday and maintain a clean kitchen and dining space. It is founded on the ideas of the Third World Liberation Front and is invested in having conversations about topics such as colonialism and identity.
Although I am a picky eater, being in TWC for a semester changed a lot of my relationship with food at Oberlin, Oberlin College, and myself. Being able to eat meals with other people of color had the power of bringing my home to me. Meals felt lively and were well-seasoned. There was pride in cultural and ethnic identity and it shined in our conversations and in the kinds of foods that were being cooked. One night, I signed up to cook a taco special meal. My cook shift and I made esquite, seasoned tortillas, pico de gallo, chicken, and arroz con leche. We listened to cumbias while making the dishes and it felt like I was back at home, but with Oberlin undertones. It was moments like these when I realized that the food that I had eaten all my life played a role in the person I was from moment to moment. When the environment and emotions of home were present in my Oberlin life, I felt myself becoming more confident and more sure of myself, the way I often felt at home. Being in TWC was a crucial experience to making Oberlin feel more like a place where I belonged and could be more authentically myself. Looking back, TWC was able to do this so well because it had so many of the same characteristics that my life back home had, most notably the food and ways of eating.
Photo taken by Lea Crowley.
Previously there was a feeling of detachment from where I came from and who I was at Oberlin because I was existing in an entirely different way, until I brought back some of those pre-existing ways of living. Outside of cooking and eating with TWC, I also tried to embrace the taste palette I grew up with by purchasing or making knock-off versions of cultural snacks. Some of my favorites include Tapatio hot sauce on Lays chips or lemon with Hot Cheetos. Additionally, I sometimes make meals with friends. My friend Lilly is very dedicated to helping me make my cultural foodie dreams come true. They have cooked chicken tacos, sopes, and pupusas with me, and we are not the only people who embark on complex food missions in dorm kitchens. When I lived in Kahn, there was a friend group who would often make delicious food in the dorm kitchen. During my first year, I saw them cooking and eating many different things, such as mussels, noodles, and hot pot dishes. These are foods that they had each grown up eating, and were now able to share with each other at Oberlin, thousands of miles away from home. For me, as it possibly was for them, this practice of making and sharing food strengthens my friendships. By making food together, my friends and I were able to learn about where we came from and how that has shaped who we are. Teaching my friends where I come from, through food, has allowed me to be more authentic in who I am around them.
Adjusting to an entirely new environment, like college, can be a great challenge, but it can be made easier by finding the parts of your previous environment that really made home, home. For me and many college students, we have been able to find home in Oberlin through food. Making and eating cultural food with college friends, co-ops, and community members can be a great way to establish home in a place that may not immediately feel like it. I look forward to all the cultural foods that grace my dorm kitchens and make it feel more like my home’s kitchen.
The research of an experience like mine that I describe above is not new. The authors of The impact that cultural food security has on identity and well-being in the second-generation U.S. American minority college student touch on exactly what I experienced in my first few semesters at Oberlin College. Their research is focused on the ways that second-generation American college students’ relationship to their ethnic identity impacts their overall mental and physical well-being.
When memory and food go hand in hand, they have the power to connect people to their ethnic identities. The authors discuss that cultural and ethnic identity are in part composed of the rituals and memories that surround the preparation and consumption of meals. For many, including myself, cultural foods come with a sense of nostalgia, belonging, and comfort. Growing up, we eat these cultural foods around family and friends who look like us and come from similar backgrounds. These similarities can make it easier to connect and feel more accepting of ourselves. Therefore, the authors of this article share that many college students reconnect with these feelings and sense of belonging through foodways.
Cultural food insecurity, however, makes it difficult to reconnect, and therefore threatens the well-being of those who cannot access their cultural foods. The article defines cultural food insecurity as a lack of access, utilization, and consistency of cultural foods. It argues that when there is a lack of cultural food security, students may experience food shock. This shock can lead to feelings of isolation and a disconnect from one’s cultural identity. If one doesn’t have access to one of the main things that connects them to home and the good feelings of home, then well-being cannot be ensured. Problems continue to arise when this isolation and disconnect continue. The article shares snippets of interviews with people who did not have access to their cultural foods. Some people mentioned feeling guilt or shame that they were not as connected with their identity. This can lead to lack of confidence and ease in both social and academic settings. However, some interviewees also said that when they could share cultural meals with their friends, they felt like their friends could better get to know where they came from and therefore made their identity stronger.
The ability to share cultural and ethnic identity with other students proves to be crucial for many second-generation American college students. In The Lived Experiences of First-Generation College Students of Color Integrating into the Institutional Culture of a Predominantly White Institution, the authors discuss their research of how first-generation college students are able to better integrate at Predominantly White Institutions. One of the ways that was discussed was through a more supportive multicultural campus environment. People who were interviewed talked about wanting this support in their classrooms, on their campus as a whole, and in the larger institution. These are things that people who were interviewed want, in part, because there is a sense of culture shock and then alienation for people of color at these PWIs. People commented on feeling like they couldn’t make friends on campus and feeling overwhelmed by the complete change in worlds that they had entered, now one that was predominantly White. Some participants talked about how this change affected their mental health. A very similar experience was described in The Complexity of Cultural Mismatch in Higher Education: Norms Affecting First-Generation College Students’ Coping and Help-Seeking Behaviors. Their research found that many students of color were concerned about “the lack of diversity and issues with a sense of belongingness on campus”. This was paired with the finding that a lot of students of color felt like they had to be more self-resilient and were less likely to ask for help, including in situations concerning mental health, than their White counterparts. These two things together, continue to perpetuate the feeling of not belonging and being unable to feel a home where one is living most of the year.
Additionally, a specific point that stood out to me was the appreciation for race affinity groups and their power to transform these feelings. The Lived Experiences of First-Generation College Students of Color Integrating into the Institutional Culture of a Predominantly White Institution’s research states that “Participants described these designated spaces and groups on campus as providing a welcoming environment where they felt they could be themselves and feel a sense of belonging”. To me, this felt very reminiscent of TWC. After feeling the culture shock and alienation at Oberlin, similar to the one that many students described in this research, I found that TWC transformed the way that I existed on this campus. I found a more welcoming environment where I did feel more confident in being myself and it’s beautiful that this was able to happen over what seems to be just shared meals and meal preparation. However, it was more than that. My sense of belonging came from being around people who were more like me. It came from the memories and feelings that the rituals around meals elicited.
Photo taken by Lea Crowley.
Although it may sound impossible, cultural foods, like the pupusa for me, are able to give people confidence, but they give you more than just that. While in environments like PWIs, people with cultural backgrounds, beyond traditional American culture, can be faced with deep emotions of homesickness, a disconnect from one’s own cultural and ethnic identity, and isolation. A major way that this can be transformed is through food. By eating the cultural foods that we ate at home, we are able to reconnect with our homes and our identity, both on a physical and emotional level. Our foods can also be aids in connecting with those around us. This connection is powerful enough to heal and make us feel grounded in who we are and where we are.
Works Cited
Adams, Talisha, and Juliann McBrayer. “The Lived Experiences of First-Generation College Students of Color Integrating into the Institutional Culture of a Predominantly White Institution.” Qualitative Report, vol. 25, no. 3, 2020, pp. 733-756.
Chang J, Wang SW, Mancini C, McGrath-Mahrer B, Orama de Jesus S. The complexity of cultural mismatch in higher education: Norms affecting first-generation college students’ coping and help-seeking behaviors. Cultur Divers Ethnic Minor Psychol. 2020 Jul;26(3):280-294. doi: 10.1037/cdp0000311. Epub 2019 Oct 14. PMID: 31613122.
Wright, K.E., Lucero, J.E., Ferguson, J.K. et al. The impact that cultural food security has on identity and well-being in the second-generation U.S. American minority college students. Food Sec. 13, 701–715 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01140-w
Works Referenced
Edible Identities: Food As Cultural Heritage, edited by Ronda L. Brulotte, and Michael A. Di Giovine, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oberlin/detail.action?docID=1746960.
Stephanie Mata Granados OC ’26 is passionate about creamy soups, spicy chips, and a really good BLT sandwich. They enjoy sous-chefing and are ecstatic to cook more in their life!
