I spend a significant portion of my day thinking about food. I have the world’s tiniest room, which precludes having a refrigerator, which means that I eat almost all my meals out. Therefore, every day I spend a lot of time planning where I want to eat and thinking about food in general. And sometimes, that thinking turns deep and contemplative. The other day, for example, I was struck by the insight provided by onions.
Over Easter break, I was visiting my friend in England and stumbled upon a quiz show on TV called Cleverdicks. Basically three old, male, British intellectuals answering Jeopardy-type questions. In one round of the game, the host would say varieties of a certain type of food and the Cleverdicks would have to guess what the food was. Here the Cleverdicks fumbled. There were probably five or six varieties of this food that the host said, and none of them ever got the correct answer. The first clue: Vidalia. I knew immediately: onion! Vidalia onions are the champagne of Georgia, if you will. They are the state vegetable– a type of sweet onion that must be grown within a certain geographical area around the town of Vidalia.
Funnily enough, I felt a certain pride in Vidalia onions–those are from my state! Now, if someone told me that I could never live in Georgia again, I’m not sure I would be too broken-hearted. If someone told me I could never visit again, then it would be a different story. Point is, being far away from home has made me appreciate home that much more. When I see Polish people wearing Braves hats or hear “Georgia” by Cee Lo Green being played at my laundromat in Krakow, I want to tell everyone “That’s where I’m from!” When my Polish teacher asked me to do a presentation about Georgia, I was thrilled to teach my class, who come from all over the world, about the origins of Coca Cola, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hartsfield Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the world in terms of passenger volume. I had a hard time keeping a smile off my face when my professor characterized Georgia as “a small Southern state” (really it’s the ninth most populous state in the US and the largest geographically east of the Mississippi).
Of course, there are times during this study abroad experience that I’ve been homesick, but I don’t think that these surges in Georgia pride are due to homesickness. Two other reasons stand out in my mind. First, learning about the construction of Polish national identity has struck a cord with me, as someone from the South. In an article written by one of my professors here, Zdzislaw Mach, he characterizes Polish national identity as marked by defensiveness, the desire to show that the nation is not weak or inferior. I often feel like I have to be on the defensive about the South, to show that the South is more than the stereotypes that surround it. Second, I think being abroad and learning about the cultural heritage of Poland, and other countries that I’ve visited or read about, has made me realize where I come from is an important part of who I am, one that I’ll never be able to change or let go of. Georgia doesn’t have to be the most important state in the Union for it to be important to me.
In this ever more globalized world, I don’t get a surge of pride every time I see a McDonald’s or hear a Katy Perry song, however much I love McFlurry’s and however catchy her songs may be. Traveling has somehow activated a smaller identity, a regional identity–one tied to sweet Vidalia onions.
