Culture shock

The Food Chain

The episode explores how relocating to a new country fundamentally alters an individual's relationship with food and identity. Through perso

Key takeaways

• Juanita Rees discusses the difficulty of sourcing authentic Colombian staples like tamales and empanadas in British Columbia.
• Jen Ballantyne describes the sensory overwhelm of navigating Japanese supermarkets without knowing the local language or packaging styles.

Main topics

• Culture shock and food
• Reverse culture shock

Notable quotes

Food is kind of related to who you are.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that while moving abroad presents significant

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 6 (0:06) Is it okay for Gen Z job applicants to take iced coffee into an interview? That's the question burning up social media following a viral TikTok video from an American recruiter. I'm William Lee Adams. Join me on What in the World to hear all about this intergenerational conflict in the workplace. What in the World is an award-winning podcast from the BBC World Service. We explain what's going on in the world every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:39) Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:08) Imagine walking into a supermarket and recognising nothing on the shelves. Not being able to feed myself was incredibly overwhelming. Or being unable to make your favourite meal because there's no way you could get hold of the ingredients. Speaker 7 (1:24) You're unable to find even the most common of things. Speaker 3 (1:28) If you've ever moved country, this might sound familiar. Welcome to The Food Chain from the BBC World Service with me, Ruth Alexander. In this week's programme, we're talking about how going to live abroad can force you to change how you cook and have a profound and lasting effect on your relationship with food, even long after you've returned home. Speaker 5 (1:51) Food is kind Speaker 4 (1:52) of related to who you are. I think people will be familiar with culture shock. But reverse culture shock rarely gets talked about and I suffered from that really badly. This is Speaker 3 (2:03) all something that's been on the mind of listener Juanita Rees, a Colombian chef living and working in Revelstoke, a small ski town in British Columbia, Canada. Speaker 2 (2:13) I moved here from Bogota with my husband about four years ago. Revelstoke is a beautiful place, but being a small mountain town, also means that getting certain foods can be difficult. Some of the foods I really miss are actually the foods that don't travel very well. For example, tamales, empanadas. Tamales are made with dough, meat, and vegetables. And they are grabbed in a banana leaf and they are steamed. Empanadas are fried corn dough. Pastries usually fill with meat and potatoes. The thing with this type of food is that bringing them from Colombia isn't really practical. The trip can take two or three days, depending on the route. So it's not like you can buy fresh empanadas on the street in Bogota and put them in your suitcase. And making them here is a completely different story. They don't taste the same as the ones you can get in Colombia. Speaker 3 (3:29) Juanita in Canada. Well, I'm joined by three people who no doubt can relate to all of that. Kelvin Chung, a Chinese-Canadian chef who's lived in India, Belgium and now Dubai. Also Miwa Kishi, a cookery teacher from Japan who's now in the Netherlands. And Jen Ballantyne, a teacher in the UK who's lived in Japan, Tanzania, Brunei and Azerbaijan. Speaker 4 (3:52) Am I right, Jen? Could you relate? Definitely. I know when I lived in Japan, my Japanese friends would often... want to take me to foreign restaurants so I could have a taste of home. And we would sometimes drive many hours to visit these fabled restaurants only to turn up and the dishes that I was given and told were traditionally English were completely different to what I knew from home. And I quickly learned to embrace the local food because it's far, far better. Speaker 3 (4:29) Jen, it was you who suggested we make this programme in the first place, emailing us at thefoodchain at bbc.co.uk. Thinking back to when you first arrived in Japan, do you remember a moment when it kind of hit you that actually cooking and eating was going to be really quite different? how it was at home. Speaker 4 (4:50) Yes, definitely. Prior to that, I traveled, but I'd never lived overseas. And living in a very small village in Japan, where there was very, very little English spoken, I found myself in a supermarket. staring at things and having no idea what anything was. And it may sound strange to listeners that haven't been in that situation. But obviously, packets don't make sense because everything's in Japanese and packets look different. The branding is different. But even the vegetables and the fruit, they look different. There are things I'd never even seen before. I was very, very overwhelmed initially as I began to sort of think I'm going to have to find a system. My approach was to try and find the bits that I recognise and then pick one or two items that I didn't know what they were, go home and try them. And if I still didn't know, take them into the school that I was working in, show them to a colleague and say, what is this and how do I eat it? And I also found... talking to people in the supermarket. As I began to learn Japanese, I wrote things on my hands and I'd go up to people and ask people. And slowly but surely, I gained confidence of just trying things out. But that culture shock initially, I mean, I was an adult and not being able to feed myself was incredibly overwhelming. Speaker 3 (6:11) Miwa, you moved in the opposite direction from Japan to Europe, the Netherlands. Do you have your own version of... Jen's story, standing in the supermarket, feeling overwhelmed. Speaker 5 (6:24) Yes, like, oh, visually, I can recognize everything. But when it comes to, for example, flowers, I don't understand everything. Like, I want to get the flower for making a bread, but I end up getting different type of flower. So it never become proper, you know, baking. So it's a little details, but it's really affect to my... Calvin, Speaker 3 (6:50) how easy did you find it to feed yourself when you first moved abroad from Canada to India? Speaker 7 (6:56) Yeah, moving to India, you have Speaker 3 (6:58) to Speaker 7 (6:58) bear in mind, this was when I moved, it was in 2011. So international ingredients were still impossible to get. So we quickly realized that you're unable to find even the most... common of things that we're used to being able to readily buy at home. And I thought when Mia mentioned bread, especially at that time, Indians only had one type of flour, which they referred to as maida, which is an ultra refined processed flour because they don't make typical Western breads. So you really have to be able to adapt very quickly, especially when it comes to food. And you notice it even in the restaurant, right? We wanted to make fresh fries, just something that I love to do. Pretty much most of the world these days, I can call my supplier and call the local farm and ask the farmer for an 18-month low-sugar, high-starch potato. And they would be able to give me the exact potatoes that I would want for fries. Now, in India, you get potatoes. And it took us two years of going to all the local vegetable markets. In Bombay in particular, what we discovered was that in Washi Market, there was a gentleman by the name