My partner doesn’t understand what it means to happily submit to the labour of love that is feeding your friends or family. The willingness to dirty your hands and kitchen, for the simple pleasure of seeing your loved ones enjoy a home cooked meal. “Just chuck some sausages on the barbie,” he says. Ten people coming equals a loaf of sliced white bread, two trays of bangers, and an onion if aforementioned guests are lucky.
When he says this, the contours of my forebears’ faces float before my eyes – the trays of sweets prepared by my grandmother, my parents’ table sagging beneath the platters of skilfully and lovingly prepared feasts, just in case someone else drops by. I shake my head no. He doesn’t understand.
You don’t think about a person’s eating habits when you first swipe right, accept a drink at a bar, or meet their eyes across the room for the first time. Your first thought isn’t, “I wonder what they eat for Christmas dinner, or what they’d cook for their friends, or whether they’re dessert people?” These questions might not come up for a long time – or maybe not until you’re on a date at a restaurant, trying to hide your utter surprise (or rather, judgement) at their aversion to butter. You might even think to yourself, “Perfect, all the more butter for me.” Until several years down the line, you get sick to death of cooking everything in olive oil.
Today, intercultural relationships are increasingly the norm. To find someone – “the one” – in the small preset of humans culturally, geographically, and in age close to you is nothing short of a miracle. More and more, you have to compromise not only on the everyday nuances that make up any relationship, but also what to serve on important dates, what foods are appropriate when you’re sick, or I don’t know, say, what to cook for dinner every. Single. Day.
My partner and I could not have been more different in our eating habits when we met. Him coming from a white Australian home and myself from a traditional Hungarian one means we’ve had to compromise on the majority of our eating habits.
Like every other Hungarian kid, I grew up on heavy, hearty dishes. On a two-to-three course hot meal for lunch, and cold cut meats and cheeses for dinner (and even breakfast). Of everything made lovingly by my mother or grandmothers from scratch, of taking hospitability as seriously as love. Luckily for me, I also grew up in a family of foodies – wild game, aged cheeses, you name it, I’ve loved it since before I turned double digits.
On the other hand, my partner grew up in a real salt and pepper type of spice household. He hadn’t had much to do with garlic before we met, and I could unfurl a list as long as my arm with the things I introduced him to.
When we first got together, this difference was exciting and fun – mostly for my mum who loved making him try his first liver, or his first beef tartare, watching with pure glee for a reaction each time. But it also presented subtle challenges both in our budding relationship, and again further down the line once we’d moved in together. I was painfully aware of every incremental eating habit I had to give up, whereas he had to adjust to expanding his palate from zero to a hundred real quick.
Over the years, of which there have been seven and counting, and the closer we get to having kids, I have thought a lot about a lifetime’s worth of habits I took for granted that form an integral part of who I am, and that aren’t or won’t be intrinsic to the nutritional makeup of our relationship, our life. From simple things such as going on a hike and eating berries or fruit off wild bushes, through the very specific three-course, all-day Sunday lunch spent with family, all the way to the customs seeped in traditions that defy logic and yet are so cellular to my existence I never could’ve imagined a life in which I’d do without them: sizzling speck roasted above open fire, drizzling fat on thick slices of white bread; being able to order homemade lemonade at every single restaurant through the summer months; the festive flavours of mandarins and peanuts brought by Santa Claus on the 6th of December; rolling pinched noodles for gulyás soup until your carpal tunnel objects in the summer sun.
Not to say that some of these customs would be impossible to replicate 13,000 kilometres from their origin. In fact, my family has brought over many of them. What is and would be lacking – what I struggle with – is the complete naturality of these occurrences within context, the unconditional understanding and acceptance of these and many more food practices by those like me who have also grown up with húsleves or pálinka being the answer to every hurt or ailment.
To me, eating is so much more than consuming calories. The act is cushioned by customs, idiosyncrasies, shared understandings – the ingredients that make a stew cooked in bogrács above open fire all the more delicious, for a lack of need to explain why it should be cooked outside, what’s a bogrács, how to make the pinched noodles, and so on.
Food plays an integral part in culture, and culture plays an integral part in our identity. Therefore, it’s only natural that our sense of self, our sense of happiness, and everything in-between is heavily influenced by our relationship with food. I know for a fact that when my partner leaves me for extended periods of time, or when I go back to Hungary, my eating habits shift back towards ground zero. I eat more cured, fatty foods. I enjoy vegetables that might not be part of our everyday normal as an intercultural couple. I also know for a fact that my partner is the same: when I’m not around, he puts a lot less effort into cooking, and is very happy with the bare basics. And yet we’re both better off having a common ground to come back to. Why?
Because being in an intercultural relationship has made us both more open-minded, has made us both try new things, and it helps us understand each other on a much deeper level. Like life, a relationship would be meaningless without its challenges, but when taken on with a responsibility to see both sides of a coin, interculturality has the potential to sweeten any deal.
Nothing is clearer evidence of this than the fact that when I conducted thorough research on this topic (research being, I posted a question sticker on my Instagram), the stories, thoughts, and passionate opinions kept flooding in. From attempting to reconcile hosting differences, time of dinner, to strong beliefs as to what one should give their baby when they’re sick, no one in an intercultural relationship seemed impartial to the topic of eating. Good or bad, they all came spilling out.
Differences came up in when it’s appropriate to start eating (do you wait until everyone is seated and ready, or do you just dive in?), in clear plates as a sign of fullness, or rather as a sign of a lack of satiety (something that requires fixing, like another helping of food), in the level of formality eating requires.
Sarah, who is American with an Austrian partner, initially struggled to feel comfortable with what she perceived as an overly rigid approach to having people over. To her, the fine china and the formality of the process of setting the table perfectly all translate to guardedness.
“To me intimacy, vulnerability, comfortability is being able to stand at a kitchen counter eating slices of pizzas straight from the box with someone.”
In other instances, these differences and the resulting tensions have nothing to do with sustenance at all; rather, they have to do with beliefs, with the seemingly minute but fundamental bases of our lives.
Kim, who is Malaysian and whose partner is from Nepal, says that the most difficult hurdles within their family unit arrived with the birth of their baby, and that even simple things such as sickness became a minefield between the two cultures – starting with what foods are appropriate or believed to be helpful when one is sick.
“I was very frustrated when my mother-in-law made comments about giving my daughter oranges when she had a cold. It just made me feel like she was judging me as a mother, giving my daughter what she shouldn’t be having.”
For every step we take towards a fair midway compromise, there are childhood favourites, meals sticky with comfort, fond food memories – pieces of ourselves – that we leave behind. This comes at a price, which is both good and bad, the positives moving life excitingly along, the negatives sometimes building towards resentment, even the breakdown of relationships.
As Nigerian essayist Yemisí Aríbisálà writes in her short story, ‘The Long and Short of the Love Affair that Imploded because of Eccles Cakes, Three-Quarters of a Quiche and Don’t-Cut-My-Leg African Chicken’, relationships steeped in two different food cultures can’t always be salvaged. Sometimes, the gap is too wide and any attempt at leaping across is in vain. Sometimes, love isn’t enough to sustain a relationship – you need food for fuel too. In Aríbisálà’s case, she simply couldn’t reconcile her Nigerian background – “the chemistry of sun and spices and meat” – with her tentative love for “a white man from Surrey,” who wouldn’t understand her people if his life depended on it.
My friend Simone, who is Malaysian, is an example closer to home. Her previous relationship with someone from Sri Lanka had ended due to, among other things, his unwillingness to try her culture’s cuisine, going as far as declining to eat dinner with her family.
“He often said things like ‘It looks weird’, ‘It doesn’t look good’, ‘Why should I try it? I don’t want to’. We lasted one year, and I had to end it. His strong resistance to trying my food was the final straw, for me and my family.
“So it was refreshing when I started dating my current partner, Taylor, who is often called an Asian-passing Aussie in my family, and to see a flip in circumstances. I’ve been so lucky that he has always been open to trying our food and always engages in the meals and parties that my family hosts. We have a rule that we must try something thrice before we can make a judgement on it, and he has always stuck to it.”
But Taylor isn’t the only one in the relationship who has to strain further from his baseline.
“In our daily life, it was an adjustment for me as the main cook to tone down the spice, incorporate more Western meals, and reduce the number of days that we consume rice. On the other hand, I’ve significantly increased the amount of veggies I eat, and moving in together also helped me get the independence I needed to get creative in the kitchen.”
In all of these instances, something is lost while something else is gained – the balance, of course, tipping towards a happy, sustainable relationship when what’s gained can be appreciated by both parties. Whether it’s the adaptation of different habits to everyday life – Sarah says her partner now prefers the intimacy of messy hosting; Simone admits that Taylor has made her love avocados – a deeper understanding of your partner through food; or a rare insight to another culture: life seems fuller, riper with room for new and exciting intercultural traditions.
Today, my partner and I have both adapted to each other’s habits. Our main hot meal is dinner for logistical reasons; breakfasts are a combination of healthy fats, protein and fibre – as opposed to cheese on bread; I have warmed to the idea of store-bought, pre-marinated foods being an acceptable meal; and he has taken on the habit of making Hungarian dishes for himself out of things he’d never tried before me. And while if hosting was up to him, the sausages would make a swift return, he is more than happy to help me put on more elaborate feasts.
I like to think that I have made him cooler, more adventurous in his eating habits. But in the same vein, he has made me healthier, more balanced in my relationship with food. Are we then perhaps better off having come from different food cultures? If I’d ended up with another Hungarian, I might not be writing this in the first place – sausage and pepper sandwiches would need no explanation, we’d always know what food will be on the table over Christmas, we’d follow unspoken rules blindly and happily. And my partner would live blissfully unaware of how delicious meat-stuffed crepes or deep fried plum dumplings are. These are the facts. But would we be happier, better people? I highly doubt it.
Like any relationships, those between two different cultures will have to overcome their own hurdles and mishaps – but if we have any hope for a more united, diverse future, then surely it begins by a desire to learn and appreciate more about each other, to expand what we know about food, and to invite others into our own culture the same way we want to be present for theirs: with respect and curiosity.
As Aríbisálà writes, her hopes were always for a reconciliation through food, a sort of truce between cultures and skin colours, between eating habits, despite all of these challenges.
“I had hoped what was between us was like a brilliant moin-moin hack in a cold, foreign country, where desperate cravings call for desperate measures, where half of the crucial ingredients are missing, and there is no pot for steaming the wrapped blend of beans, onions, pepper and oil, no thaumatococcus-daniellii ewe-eran leaves, but you make it anyway, just for two, and it is good.”
Unlike Aríbisálà, who fails to find this between her and her boyfriend, my partner and I did find a common ground between us to build on: a delicious if sometimes messy moin-moin of our own. Except, in our household, it’d likely be called chicken liver soup.