As a Child of Immigrants, I’m Teaching My Kids Lunch Room Tolerance (Exclusive)

It’s 10p.m., Nigella Feasts hums softly from the tiny television in the corner, and every inch of our kitchen counter is dusted with flour. I’m 11, seated on a stool, mesmerized by the rhythm of my parents filling and folding and sealing pelmeni. Pelmeni are dumplings — and a tradition in our Ukrainian household.

They’re small and round, with a thin skin of dough encapsulating a blend of meat — ground pork, beef and veal, at our house — plus some finely minced onion, salt and pepper. By the time they finally head to bed, my parents will have crafted hundreds of these little pouches. And a week later, at my family’s annual Pelmeni Party, they’ll all be boiled (or pan-fried, or floated in soup) and consumed by a raucous houseful of our closest family and friends. 

Like so many dishes of my childhood, pelmeni are joy. They are family. They are play — there’s always one, the lucky dumpling, that my parents fill with black peppercorns to award a prize to its unfortunate recipient, like finding a Golden Ticket. They are comfort — the taste an instant tether to the kitchen, to pots of water boiling and the smell of bay leaves in the air. They are home. 

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And as a kid, they’re also something I keep, like a shameful secret, within the confines of our house. I won’t eat pelmeni — or varenyky (their sour cherry or potato-filled cousins), or borscht, or selodka (smoked herring), or holodets (for the uninitiated, meat Jell-o) — in front of any of my American friends. I won’t eat any of the foods that make me who I am in front of them. Because who I am, it turns out, isn’t who they are. My parents’ cooking is a blatant marker of our differences, at a time in my life when all I want is to belong. To fit in. To be the same. 

Ask anyone who grew up as an immigrant to tell you about their middle school cafeteria, and you’ll hear this story, or some variation of it. How the garlicky fermentation in their kimchi made the other kids feign vomiting. How they dreaded opening their Tupperware of curry, already anticipating the question — Ew, what’s that smell? How they begged for prepackaged foods, acceptable ones — Lunchables were made for us — to avoid feeling their faces burn as their goulash got side-eye.

The stinky lunchbox is so universal an experience that it’s almost a trope, but trust me, it doesn’t feel that way when it happens to you. There’s a particular kind of pain associated with the first time you discover that something you love can be a source of disgust and shame and humiliation. You never forget it. 

But then you grow up. And your relationship to food changes.

By the time I entered my 20s, I didn’t want to assimilate anymore — at least not on the plate. I craved culture. 

Maybe it’s because I moved to New York City, where the dining options were suddenly limitless, and to try a new cuisine was a source of discovery and excitement and pride. Maybe it’s because I fell in love with someone who had a completely different background from mine, and sharing the food of my childhood with him made it more delicious, because I was also sharing my history. Maybe it was just because my world expanded, and I realized how much more there was to the human condition than the sea of turkey sandwiches in my childhood cafeteria. 

Suddenly, the private food I ate with shame in public was something I was proud to share. Like when I took my very American college boyfriend to Veselka in the East Village for varenyky, and he was so enthusiastic that we tried every filling on the menu. (Reader, I married him.) Or when my older brother took me to eat borscht at his favorite college haunt near NYU, which was packed with cosmopolitan students all ordering the same thing. (Don’t tell our mother, but it rivaled hers.)

It’s hard to know exactly when that shift happens, and different becomes delicious, but by the time we move from adolescent to adult, our palates often expand. We’re bored of the same old thing; we become adventurous. Food is a gateway to exploring the world, to finding intimate connection over a shared meal. It’s a way to honor our cultures, and to remember our ancestors. It’s perhaps the easiest way to invite someone in — to literally break a silence or taboo or stereotype by breaking bread.

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we treated people with the same openness and excitement that so many of us bring to their cuisines? At our house, teaching our children to be enthusiastic and curious about something outside of their ordinary starts with dinner. 

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My kids are American — the first generation of my family to be born here. But the food that we expose them to isn’t limited by that categorization. They’re nourished by Eastern-European and Ukrainian foods, by Italian staples, by German meals. They’re fed by cultures we don’t have any familial connections to: Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Indonesian, Mexican, Indian. We encourage them to try unfamiliar foods, and even if they sometimes default to nuggets or mac and cheese (they’re kids, after all), we have prioritized teaching them to never yuck someone else’s yum, to try something outside of their comfort zone, to embrace the new instead of shrinking from it.

It feels especially personal to me, because they’re the kids with the power in the lunchroom now. At the cafeteria table, they can choose to be better. Kinder. More accepting and enthusiastic of how someone’s difference on the plate can make them cool instead of just other. Because that can translate to choosing kindness, and acceptance, and connection in life, too.

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