Concluding Thoughts on Culinary Citizenship: Becoming Americans in the Cafeteria
In an article entitled “The Gourmetization of Hummus in Israel,” anthropolo- gist Dafna Hirsch discusses the meanings given to and political claims made of
Christine R. Yano (with Wanda Adams)
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hummus: “The meaning of hummus for Arab-Jewish relations is not given, but is a matter of the way in which it is used by social actors.”23 Here, too, debates may flare over the nutritional value of plate lunches past and present or the degree to which they were local (Pacific Asian based) versus American food or how they navigated the space between public and private. As in Hirsch’s discussion of hummus, so, too, our discussion of plate lunch in Hawai‘i is based most significantly on the way in which the school lunch—or the idea of it—is used by social actors, including the state, educators, cafeteria ladies, and the children past (now adults). School lunch for baby boomers and older in Hawai‘i represents their shared experience, the stuff of nostalgia for a time when people talked about assimilation as if it were a proud and necessary achievement.
For this older generation, school lunch was not laden with concerns about nutrition. Rather, the plastic tray and small carton of milk carried with them some of the best-remembered, everyday, not-home, comfort food of one’s childhood. This is the food that people would never expect their mothers to make. Rather, it was the food that they went to school to eat and, years later to talk about. Here lie the practices of talking with one’s mouth full. School lunch became its own genre of food: similar to but not replicating that found in many family-style restaurants in Hawai‘i.
But how did school lunch provide such a fulsome mouth in postwar Hawai‘i? I return to some of the features of Appadurai’s epigram with which I began this chapter: rank and rivalry, solidarity and community, identity or exclusion, and intimacy or distance. School lunch during the statehood era provided a means of inclusion, generating identities that changed through time—as members of a particular neighborhood school, as members of an island-based state, as fledgling Americans, as a generation of aging baby- boomers. These identities were not without rivalries, sometimes pitting school against school on the basis of their lunches, sometimes correlating with the socioeconomic class of the neighborhood. But the rivalries themselves became points of pride and affiliation.
The mouths filled with talk of school lunch in Hawai‘i are replete with emo- tion, intimacy, and overwhelming affection. They speak person to person; they speak, too, in the public forum of nostalgic newspaper articles and food col- umns. The objects of such affection are the Spanish rice or the shortbread and often the women who made them, the cafeteria ladies like those with which I began this chapter. Those mouths are still talking, as are the women them- selves. When they talk about the good old days, the subject inevitably turns to food. Good old days may never have been quite as good as people remember
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them, but this is where the nostalgized school lunch and the opportunity to taste this version of America now called “local” find their way to center stage. As an everyday, every-person shared experience, the Hawai‘i school lunch of the postwar era embeds mundane, assimilationist rhetoric in the intimacies of the heart and stomach.
This is where culinary citizenship comes alive—or at least did for a genera- tion that grew up with dreams of becoming American. Even before one could march with stars and stripes in hand, one could at least participate in acts of assimilation daily. The achievement of the postwar school lunch in Hawai‘i was that it created citizens through taste rather than through didacticism. Caf- eteria ladies knew all too well that in order for children to eat their peas, they had to savor them and return every day wanting more. School lunch lessons taught clearly that politics may be best swallowed when mixed with a hearty dose of pleasure.