In honor of Thanksgiving, I'd like to address the fundamental American value that is at the very core of this holiday: eating. I mean, who are we kidding? Once you get past the genocidal history of the thing, Turkey Day is a pretty one-track celebration. Sure, it's a little about family and a little about thankfulness, but it is a lot about eating. Like, almost entirely.
Eating is something that has been a serious hobby of mine for as long as I can remember; I pretty much came out of the womb doing it, and even as I watch my second decade of life pass me by, I am still eating at least three times a day.
I start getting pumped for Thanksgiving around the beginning of October. Now that I don't have a meal plan, there are no mass-feeding situations available to me until that fateful day in late November. You must be asking yourself: Doesn't this girl have a kitchen? Why yes, I do — I have an awesome kitchen, in fact, stocked with every appliance and apparatus one could ever imagine, thanks to my culinary-savvy roommates. Ironically, however, it is only by the grace of their cooking skills that I have managed to eat anything at all this semester outside of yogurt cups, Poptarts and Oreos.
Things used to be different. When I first moved off-campus, I was armed with a set of IKEA measuring cups and a stack of handwritten recipes, courtesy of my mother. I fed myself with a determined self-sufficiency, going to the grocery store weekly and doing grown-up things like actually touching raw meat and eating vegetables. Yuck! Then I went abroad and everything fell apart.
My kitchen in Australia consisted of a microwave with no number buttons, a shared mini-fridge and a sink. The apartment was "furnished" but did not include a garbage can or any pots or pans. And with restaurants like "Thai-riffic" and "Thai Space" on every corner and a 24-hour falafel place inside my building, my already-foundering cooking skills sank to the bottom, pulled by an anchor marked "Thai-tanic."
I returned to the States assuming that cooking was like riding a bike, but things were more than a little shaky. My first week back on campus, I realized I had no idea how to cook salmon.
"Just broil it," my dad instructed over the phone. Oh.
Two minutes later, I called back.
"Dad? Where's the broiler?"
My father helpfully explained that the broiler was that drawer under the oven where my Mom stored all the skillets. Relieved, I laid a few filets of raw salmon right on the bottom, turned the oven to "BROIL," and waited. Ten minutes later I went to check on my culinary masterpieces. They looked exactly the same. Kind of slimy. I touched them — cold.
My roommates came to the rescue, cutting me off in the middle of my story with shaking heads and pitying faces. Little did they know they would spend the rest of the semester watching me alternate between periods of sustaining myself on pizza bagels and orange juice and attempting to cook real food, which almost always ends up with me elbow deep in raw chicken breast, mangled vegetables and "Steak Magic" seasoning blend and them in the fetal position on our ample kitchen floor, crippled by hysterical laughter.
I don't know what happened to me "down under" that gave me complete cooking amnesia, but the bottom line is that I can no longer feed myself. My skills are slowly returning and I hope that some day they will return to their former glory. In the meantime, I have to depend heavily on the handholding of my roommates, over-the-phone guidance from my parents (though I now take my dad's advice with a grain of salt), and my favorite pre-made breakfast pastries. I will, however, always have Thanksgiving.
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Jessie Borkan is a senior majoring in psychology. She can be reached at Jessie.Borkan@tufts.edu.
