Snack Chat: Back to the Future
On Sour Patch Kids on a plane
My only flights this summer were for a brief but non-stop work trip to New York City. I was preoccupied on the way with what I would eat with my allergy, as is often the case when I’m traveling for work, meals are catered, and the schedule is jammed. I’d packed folded sheets of tin foil for wrapping sandwiches, and as soon as I got to the hotel, I bought groceries so I could make myself almond butter and jelly for lunches and breakfasts. I am over almond butter and jelly for a while.
I did make it to my beloved yoga studio, and I did manage to eat at Eel Bar (where the bartender was from LA, of course), Cervo’s (where I ate seared scallops on fat slices of cucumber with olive oil-pooled vinaigrette, delicious), F&F Pizzeria twice (my pick for best slices and best crusts in NYC), and good old Cocoron for some heatwave- and hurricane-season cold soba. But my visit to Scarr’s, a downtown slice standby, was thwarted by the news that they’d added peanut products to their kitchen since my last visit. I almost didn’t ask, but I am very glad I did. (Besides, it’s how I ended up at Cervo’s with those scallops.)
In other words, I survived without feeling too deprived. But an ache was there. When you have a severe food allergy, being a visitor makes sustenance the focus, rather than the city and the people. I long to explore and socialize and yes, work, without having to vet each meal and put trust in restaurant staff who are extremely busy, understandably distracted, and often inconsistently trained in allergen cross-contamination. Vigilance after a couple days starts to feel endless, exhausting, and above all, lonely, like literally looking through through glass at the crowd in the candy store.
New York, with its electric human connectivity, never made me feel lonely when I lived there, because my kitchen was in it. I knew the staff at the wine store, the butchers at Paisano’s, the guys who sold me fish, the cashier at my fruit and vegetable stand. I had a place in the city through food, not in spite of it. I fed myself, and I fed friends and family. It’s no coincidence that my favorite meal of this trip was on the last night in Brooklyn, when friends and I walked to the grocery store and we snack-dinnered, leaning around the kitchen counter and swooning over a perfect melon.
Still, I was relieved to be back on the plane, eager to just be home when a girl and her dad sat next to me, the dad at the window, the girl in the middle. I’d boarded early to wipe down my seat in case its previous occupant had been eating peanuts, and now her dad took out wipes too, doing the same, apologizing that his kid had severe anaphylactic allergies, including to peanuts, as well as to many other nuts. I told them I’d already wiped down our shared armrest, and told them about my allergy. It turned out she is doing experimental immunotherapy in LA, something that didn’t exist when I was a kid and which I am now too old to do. It is a slog, requiring patience with the process and serious discipline, but it means that the risk of her dying from trace exposure is now very low. Life-changing.
Learning all this overwhelmed me. But then her dad shared that she is also the child of a Japanese parent and a European white one, and she has an obaachan in Japan as well as family on the East Coast.
Something seemed to inflate inside us both when we realized the overlaps. I can only imagine what it would have meant for me to have learned that I wasn’t the only one back then. As it is, I can only know what it means to meet a child now, who is so like I was, and yet — thanks to evolving culture and medicine — who is so fantastically different.