AMERICAN CORN
Just had for breakfast what Praveen, the cook, calls American corn, sweet corn, cut off the cob and mushed up, with many spices added.
In the husk it certainly looked like American corn, but once spied didn’t taste like any corn I’ve ever eaten which means that all the breakfasts served at the Med or Waffle House in Asheville—hash browns, eggs, bacon, pancakes, biscuits and gravy—to a Gujurati taste very strange and even hard to swallow leading to the assumption that Americans eat very strange and almost inedible, at least on a regular basis, concoctions for breakfast. The same is true of lunch and dinner with no meat at all, ever, and everything including the tomato soup spiced with hot chilies, everything oily with ghee, clarified butter.
In fact, after three weeks my American stomach begins to rebel, and I am offered what other Westerners must have asked for, artificial tasting soft cheese slices, super sweet jelly and toast, which I would never eat at home but am grateful for here because they are neutral although fairly tasteless. And if they seem tasteless to me what must they taste like to a Gujarati who has the sharp bite of chili in everything. No wonder Indian families in the United States, at least until the second generation, stick to Indian food three times a day which they buy in Indian grocery stores, such as RADHA in East Asheville in a bland strip of nondescript shops. Everything in RADHA seems to be imported from India. I am reminded that in the Army PX in Aschaffenburg, Germany, in my two years of army life everything was imported from the United States and my fellow GI’s insisted German food not only tasted terrible but was unsafe to eat, while to me German bratwurst and hard rolls were delicious, with the Army food served in our canteen also tasting good.
The children eat breakfast indoors, leaving their flip-flops lined up outside.
When they are done eating they wash their own breakfast trays. And several times a week they wash their own clothes and hang them up to dry.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 