Road Trip Foods
My family had road trip foods.
These were the foods that sugared my brain between Saturday morning cartoons–a rainbow-colored parrot fluttering the screen, screeching, “Follow your nose, it always knows,” boys surfing delicious waves of sticky red juice, and giggling adolescents tumbling through forests of candy trees and eatable giraffes.
These were the foods I cried for in the grocery store. They were foods for only one occasion: a family road trip.
With my sister and I seat-belted in the back seat, ready for our trip to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm in South Dakota, Mom would stockpile the space around her feet in the front seat with grocery bags of road trip food.
Mom always got it right, a perfect combination of sweet and salty foods–Twizzlers Pull & Peel Licorice, A&W Root Beer Barrels, Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, Twinkies, Black Forest Gummy Worms, Rold Gold Pretzel Rods, Cheetos, Pringles Sour Cream & Onion Potato Chips, Wheat Thins for Mom, and our treasure chest, the red Igloo cooler, heavy with cans of soda: Squirt, RC Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew with a caffeine kick for Dad if we were driving through the night.
If we planned our snacks well, alternating between sweet and salty, we could munch all the way to Grandpa and Grandma’s.
Fifteen years later, not much has changed. Sure, conditions aren’t right for a road trip to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm. I don’t own a car. My parents live an ocean away. And my Grandpa and Grandma don’t live on a farm anymore. But a week ago when April and I bought train tickets to Castellón, a 5-hour trip from Madrid, we talked about road trip foods.
On the train to Castellón, we told ourselves we would wait until we were hungry (at least an hour or two) before snacking. We didn’t last long. Maybe 20 minutes into the trip, our backpack was empty on the floor like a discarded banana peel with the contents of the backpack cramming our pull-down trays like items on the checkout counter in a grocery store.
We toasted over a can of Mellow Yellow and a fruit juice box and began feasting. My first course, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. April’s, a baggy of pretzel sticks.
It wasn’t until about our third or fourth course that I noticed a few things about the other people on the train with us. Number one, there were a lot of them. The train had made a stop or two, and it was bursting with people. Number two, a surprisingly large number of these people had forgotten their road trip foods. No empty backpacks on the floor. In fact, we were the only ones eating anything.
That’s when I made my third observation, or rather I remembered a conversation I had had two weeks before with a Spanish friend. The conversation had been about road trip foods, although I hadn’t thought about the conversation that way until this moment.
My friend told me she had visited London, loved it, but thought the city was dirty. She said she refused to take the subway, the Tube, because she couldn’t stand the thought of all those people eating on the train, crumbling over the seats, smearing their greasy fingers everywhere, littering the floor with wrappers. She told me the trains in Spain are clean. People don’t eat on the trains.
These words stuck in my throat half way through a chocolate chip cookie. I was suddenly very aware that I was eating food on a Spanish train, a clean train.
It’s moments like these that I’m reminded that living in another country means I’m constantly making decisions about whether or not I want to fit or not fit in the culture I’m living in.
I’m American. I’m Spanish. I’m a cafe con leche, two ingredients–coffee and milk in one cup. I add a little milk, a little coffee, each decision changes the mix.
I was on the train, and I had a choice to make. To fit or not to fit.
I chose to finish my chocolate chip cookie.
I was embarrassed, for sure–I was being dirty–but I was choosing something. I was holding on to a family tradition I wasn’t willing to let go of.
And I’ll drink to that.
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