Food (and Different Ways to Say I Love You)

Before I heard of love languages, I intrinsically understood food to be the one my family spoke

I’ve been reading a lot of Cat Sarsfield’s Substack lately. Beautiful, delicious, sumptuous writing that makes you think about food and the what it means in our lives. This guest post from Tahmina Begum was especially poignant to me. It’s gotten me thinking about my parents, and their relationship to food, and how their background has bled into how they feed and love their family. Enjoy!

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When I was in university, my younger sister and I still living at home, my parents traveled to Australia, or possibly South Africa, or maybe France. They were traveling a lot in those days, giving workshops on parenting and family counseling to Muslim communities across the diaspora, and it seemed that every few months they were boarding another plane for 10 days or 3 weeks or a month. The memories of the various trips blend into one another now that I’m 40, now that these stories are easily two decades away, but a pattern can definitely be drawn. A pattern of what was left behind for us to eat, and what we actually ate.

On the trip in question, my parents called us from a payphone at the Ottawa airport as they waited at the gate before take off. The flight was on time, all was good, they’d send an email when they landed but don’t wait up, the trip would be long. Then my mom said, “I’ve left you dinner in the freezer, batches of stewed veggies with beef, packaged for 2, and enough brown rice in the fridge to last you maybe 3 dinners. After that, you’ll have to make your own. There’s also a tray of pasta with bechamel sauce” - that most delicious of Egyptian meals - “and fava beans for breakfast, dressed and ready. All you have to do is defrost them. Eat healthy.” And then she handed my father the phone and went to use the restroom.

Baba made small talk for the first few seconds, waiting until she was out of ear shot, and then he lowered his voice a notch and whispered, “go look in the deep freezer, under the frozen dinners Mama made. There are 3 tubs of ice cream there for you. And in the cupboard by the fridge, behind the tuna cans, I’ve stashed a few boxes of those Mr. Christie chocolate chip cookies you love so much.” And I knew that as he whispered, he was looking over his shoulder, keeping an eye out for when she would be back.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

Over the course of the next few weeks, my sister and I ate the cookies (all of them) and the ice cream (most of it) and two or three of the healthy dinners. And then we went to Loblaws and bought bucket after bucket of their ready-to-eat honey-garlic chicken wings, first as a side and then as a whole meal, sucking the sweet, tangy sauce off the meat and then the meat off the bone, licking our fingers after. We at so many wings that month that we developed an aversion and couldn’t eat them again for several years after that.

Before I had ever heard of the concept of love languages, I knew intrinsically that my parents loved people through food.

My father says I love you by grocery shopping constantly. By calling to say, “the elbow macaroni is 98 cents for a bag of 900 grams at Food Basics, the apple turnovers are on sale for $2.99 at Farm Boy”. By showing up with a box of mangoes one night and a box of prickly pears the next, and maybe a bag or two of everything bagels from the “enjoy it tonight” aisle. My father loves a sale.

My mother says I love you by cooking and freezing batches of ground beef, storing them in old yoghurt containers, sometimes alone, sometimes stewed with okra or green beans or black-eyed peas and onions. By squeezing 4 whole lemons to mix with dechlorinated water and pink salt and pouring them into multiple cups to give to you and your sister and your son and your nephew, because you seem tired and your nephew has a low grade temperature and your son has a stomach ache and your sister’s knee is hurting. By doing all of this before she’s had her breakfast, even though she’s been up since fajr prayer and won’t go in to nap until 2 or 3 in the afternoon.

In Egypt, where my parents were raised, hospitality is practically sacred. Food is pushed on to guests as a matter of honour, a matter or pride. Plates must be piled beyond the point of what anyone’s stomach can consume. “No thank you,” is an unacceptable response to “have some more.” As a child, when we would go to Egypt, we would often squeeze in multiple visits to different households into the same day. A shame, really, because the amount of deliciousness we were served went from being wanted and enjoyed to becoming a challenge to overcome. If only there was a way to spread all the fruit and dessert and delicacies, all the mango juice and mille-feuilles pastries and baklava and mahshy and kofta and stuffed roasted pigeons over the months we had when we came home. To save it for the days we’d have spaghetti or tuna sandwiches for dinner on busy weeknights back in Ottawa.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

My parents haven’t lived in Egypt for 50 years now, but the need to feed hasn’t left them. “Have you had dinner?” my mother always asks, no matter whether I am stopping by to drop something at the door, or staying for hours. “Let me take you for a Tim’s,” my dad always offers, whether it’s 9 am or 7 pm, whether we’re in the car or sitting at home, watching his beloved soccer. There are parts of us from our childhoods, from our home cultures, that never really fade.