Never See Come See

In this episode Wendell discusses the pitfalls of suddenly being exposed to food culture in America when he emigrated to Maryland to study, and why his Trinidadian background made it harder for him to deal with it. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Never see come see is a Trinidadian phrase used to describe someone behaving in a naive, overly enthusiastic way. Typically because they are experiencing something for the first time. It is the antithesis of someone who in American parlance acts like they've been there before. So, for example, a person who suddenly comes into money and buys a Gordy McMansion and a Humvee, even though they live in the suburbs, is a never secumsey. Or a sheltered person who shows up at a party and loses their minds doing too many shots and wrecking the place in a manic, drunken state, would also be called a never secumsey. Or it could be a licorice 21-year-old coming from Trinidad and Tobago to the United States to live and not having the mental, emotional, or physiological maturity to deal with the sheer volume of food available to him in this country. So I was pretty slim. I had a little bit of a belly, a remnant of being an overweight kid. But in my mid-teens, I hit this gross and slim spit. And at the time of my arrival in the U.S., I wore size 32 jeans. I had earned a full academic scholarship to Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, which included a meal plan. So seven days a week, I would get two meals a day, meaning I only had to fend for myself for my third meal. And the main cafeteria or refectory, or as we lovingly call it, the Refact, shout out to McKelden Hall, was an all-you-can-eat extravaganza of culinary. Well, it was all you can eat. What it lacked in quality, it made up for in quantity. And students could walk in and have any or all of the offerings at multiple stations. There was a salad station, a soup station, a make-your-own sandwich station with multiple cheeses, meats, spreads, and breads, a hot food station serving, the traditional meat and two vegetable options that you would find in a typical restaurant or diner, a pizza station, a burger and fries station, desserts, a cereal bar, juices, regular milk, skim milk, chocolate milk, and so on. And since many of the international students were on limited funds outside of our scholarships, we supplemented our third meal by quote unquote shopping at the refact, meaning we smuggled food out in our backpacks and our coats, and depending on who was at the exit, full plates of food covered with napkins. We often left with wrapped sandwiches and bowls of cereal. And believe me when I tell you that many of today's CEOs, consultants, doctors, lawyers, and upstanding community leaders were brazen enough to lift whole bags of cereal and loaves of bread from the REFAC. Overall, the food wasn't great, but it did the job and it did it all too well. Now, I don't know if the term freshman 15 is still in circulation, but I am pretty sure that in my first semester I put on a freshman 60. And that was only the beginning. The Trinidadian term licorice is a slight modification of the word licorice, which is an adjective describing someone as greedy, desirous, or having a lustful, lecherous appetite. For the Trini version, we drop the E, and while I can easily say that I've had my fair share of impure thoughts about pizza or Trinidadian KFC, we use the term more for food and less for lust and lechery. I mean, we have other words for that, but that's not really what this episode is about. Now, for additional context, I want to take a step back and talk about what food was like when I was growing up in Trinidad. I was and still am a licorice boy. I love food, period. More than that, I love food from all over the world. I see food as easily accessible windows into other cultures. But lest you mistake me for some kind of sophisticated epicure, please know that I still drink Kool-Aid, shout out Tropical Punch, and I'd eat a$2 taco with the same excitement as I would a$100 steak. Me and my boys growing up, we all loved to eat, and we still do to this day. And in Trinidad, we had a plethora of options at our disposal at any given time. Since Trinidad is a truly cosmopolitan country, we have always had our pick of cuisines from all over the world, but the culinary landscape was and still is dominated by a malage of African, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, South American, European, and North American foods, all mixed up, marinated, and lovingly prepared in our own unique Trinidadian way. While most of us Trinees are learned enough to understand the heresy that is putting ketchup and mustard on pizza, you can still find bottles of each next to a bottle of pepper sauce in most pizza joints in Trinidad. We love fried chicken so much so that both Dairy Queen and McDonald's serve bone-in chicken in Trinidad in my lifetime. Our ketchup is sweeter. We put garlic sauce on anything we damn well please, and we season everything. I've been in this country for 30 years, and I still cringe when any American or European TV presenter on a cooking show proclaims that they are about to season something, and the only thing they have in their hand is a bottle of pepper and a bottle of salt. There are very specific reasons for the way that we season food. In a country like America, which has more established industrialization, leading to better storage and more efficient supply chains, it stands to reason that someone would be okay with having their steak barely kissed by heat and practically mowing on the plate. But please understand that for us, eating rare meat, at least back when I was growing up, was a quick way to end up in the hospital or dead. Also, like many cultures built on the backs of slaves and indentured laborers, we worked with stubborn root vegetables and really tough cuts of meat. So we learned to prepare food in a way that maximizes flavor and tenderness, coaxing goodness out of everything from chicken feet to oxtails. Now I see similarities in states like Louisiana to the way we prepare food. But overall in America, in my experience anyway, there's less emphasis on that kind of cooking, unless, of course, some hipster chef gets a hold of it and then all bets are off. Which is why oxtails are now one of the most expensive cuts of meat in any grocery store in America. But beyond these differences, there's a major economic driver in the way we ate back home versus the way people eat in America. I think most trainees would define themselves as meatmouths. We love meat. We love all kinds of meat. The ones you buy in a store and the ones that somebody who knows somebody that you know went in the bush to catch. But Americans have us beat hands down. A Trinidadian plate would consist predominantly of cheaper options such as rice with maybe a secondary carbohydrate such as potato salad or macaroni pie, along with some beans and maybe a small salad. And then in the corner of the plate, you would have your meat. Now, the meat, while still being the star, works cohesively with the ensemble, stretching itself to make sure all are represented and share the spotlight. Our meals were designed to stick to your ribs, as they say. But the starches and vegetables do a lot of the heavy lifting. If you go to an ethnic restaurant here in the United States, particularly a Caribbean restaurant, you will get a mountain of rice and vegetables and then a relatively smaller portion of meat. Because these were the ratios that we were accustomed to growing up. Cost effectiveness is a consideration in the construction of every meal. So we also cut up our meat into smaller pieces to stretch the pot. A whole chicken that might yield about eight pieces in America would yield at least double that in other cultures, where pieces that were typically discarded, like the neck and back pieces thrown into the pot for good measure as well, because somebody in that household will eat it. Not so in America. In America, the meat portion drives the entire affair. The sides playing back up and sometimes not even making it onto the plate. I mean, this even extends to fast food. At KFC in Trinidad, we split the breast of a chicken into three parts. You have the center breast, which is more of a tender loin, and then the two side breasts, which includes the ribs. I remember the first time I had a breast from KFC in New York, and I realized that instead of three parts, they split the breast into two halves, meaning the breast piece was much bigger than any breast piece you could get in Trinidad. And it seemed massive to me at the time, but trust me when I tell you, I ate that chicken with glee. And you see, this was my problem when I came to the US as a student. In the US, the more meat or cheese or butter or sugar that you can pile onto a plate, the happier everyone is. More is not a luxury. More is an expectation. Why would you put 10 chocolate chips into a baked item when you can cram in 25 chocolate chips? Why just plate a sandwich naked when you could batter it and deep fry it? You start with more and then you add more on top of that with the snap of your fingers. So small, medium, and large are simply not enough. There must be an extra large or a biggie size or even a super size. And this speaks directly to me as someone who is licorice. I grew up, always wanted more. More roti, more doubles, more meat, more fries, more drinks, more everything. So even though I had visited the US many times before and already had my favorites, it was always on someone else's dime and someone else's timetable. But now I was legally an adult and on my own with a little bit of money in my pocket and an appetite fueled by my newfound freedom. I was, to coin a brilliant literary phrase, in deep shit. Imagine my delight in my freshman year when I went to Ruby Tuesday, for example, and ordered the barbecue breast entree. I expected a tiny piece of breast meat, maybe a mingy wing on top of it, uh, to go with my mashed potatoes and broccoli. But instead, I got two whole breast tenderloins doused in barbecue sauce. I felt like I had stolen something and gotten away with it. And any part of my brain that was underwhelmed by the flavor profile was overridden by the gluttonous glee of having two meals worth of meat on the plate in front of me, plus mashed potatoes, plus broccoli. And it was the same at the Rifacon campus, where I could basically get anything I wanted in any quantity that I wanted. And coupled that with the social construct of liming, which for Trinidadians is this hanging out gene that we have in our DNA. Liming is just being in a place for an extended period of time with people that you like. If you put a grapple Trinidadians in an enjoyable environment, we can and will stay there. And if you throw food, drink, and music into the mix, we can literally fold space and time in pursuit of a good line. I remember doing a 12-hour stretch in the pool hall with my boys in Maribal once, leaving well past sunup. And I'm pretty sure we went back there later that night. And all we did was play pool. We had some bears, we ate food, but we literally played pool for 12 hours straight. So on campus, me and the other Trinidadian students, including Kevin, who you all met on a previous episode, we would go to the refact for brunch on a Saturday or Sunday and literally sit there for three hours straight. People would come in and leave, and we would just be sitting there and eating and talking and greeting the next wave of people and then eating some more and talking some more and rinse and repeat. I remember some of the Jamaican students being astonished when they left us at brunch one time and came back and found us in the very same seats at the beginning of dinner. So we basically sat there for the entire brunch service. The refact closed and then reopened and we were still sitting in the same spot. And they couldn't fathom how we had just sat there eating and linemen while they had to go do other stuff like laundry and groceries and, you know, studying and homework and mundane stuff like that. And then when we went up to the mall in Towson to shop, I discovered that the scientists at Panda Express had somehow figured out how to break the laws of physics and put a whole portion of fried rice, a whole portion of noodles, and two full portions of meat onto a small paper plate. And if you were feeling crazy, they would somehow be able to pile a third portion of meat on there, all for less than$7 at the time when you added an egg roll and a drink. It was magical. But it was also ridiculously dense in calories, fat, carbohydrates, and sodium. Now, that being said, Panda is still one of my guilty layover treats when I am flying through Houston, either on the way to Trinidad or back to the US. And there's another psychological element at play here. So in addition to the volume in food, many fast and comfort foods were just cheaper in the United States, compounded by the slippery mass of the exchange rate between our two currencies. So back then in the late 90s, I believe it was 4 to 1 or 5 to 1, meaning that for every five Trinidadian dollars, you would get one US dollar. And that meant that things always seemed cheaper here in the United States, even if they actually weren't when you did the conversion. The first time I walked into Dunkin' Donuts and I realized that I could get a dozen donuts of all varieties for less than$3, it blew my mind. And I bought it without hesitation. Took them back to my dorm room and ate donuts until I literally got sick of them. And now that was a temporary sickness, but you know, you could see the problem right there. And additionally, when I was in Trinidad, I lived an active lifestyle in a fairly homogeneous climate. None of my partners were very good at football or soccer, but we all loved playing and we played a lot of basketball as well. And then we also went to a lot of clubs and we danced and we did a lot of partying. So liming is about being around each other, and you can lime and still be active and still burn lots of calories. However, when I got to Morgan, our lime rate stayed the same and in some ways increased, but plunging temperatures in the fall and winter meant that we had to trade our football time for refact time. We also traded our beach limes for mall runs, and we basically stopped playing basketball altogether because back home we had almost exclusive use of the Fatima basketball court. And that meant that somebody like me who would be shooting 15% in the paint as my career average, we could play with, you know, without worrying about having to come off the court. Not so much on the courts in Baltimore City, Maryland. So what that ultimately led to was more food in and less energy out. And that often leads to similar things. Bad choices when it comes to diet, exercise, and scheduling. But for me, this was compounded by the cultural difference. So by the time I went back home after my first year, I'm pretty sure I was close to 300 pounds. And I went from wearing size 32 jeans to wearing size 42 jeans. I literally added another human to my body weight. And then when I went back to Trinidad, I ate and drank like I was on vacation because I was. So I ate large quantities of fast food, late nights filled with bears and rum, topped off by maybe like a 1 a.m. burger or a peanut punch that had honey and granola and powdered glucose sugar on top. Literal glucose sugar. So I got my fill of all the foods that I had missed in my time abroad, but now with an appetite that had outstripped my ability to burn these calories off, even when the lineman back home was more active than it was in Maryland. And this period of glorious insanity extended well into my time after graduation, where I had even more money in my pocket and I got to experience the culinary wonders of the American all-you-can-eat buffet and fast foods like the Burger King double cheeseburger, which was, I think, a dollar at the time. Me and my roommate Bill, who was from the US, we actually had a nickname for it. We'd just say, hey, let's go get a double charge. Or you could also get a triple chariz for quats or more. And I would get that, and maybe two of them, fries, onion rings, and all that stuff came off the dollar menu. And on Friday nights, when Bill stayed over at his girlfriend's Jill's place, that is not a joke or euphemism, his girlfriend's name was actually Jill. I would order a couple of pizzas and wings and fries and just sit at home and gorge myself while discovering movies like Donnie Darko and Session 9 on VHS. Now, describing these portions as a middle-aged man is terrifying. And it's something that I really hadn't thought deeply about until I sat down to write this episode. And I still somehow found time to be hungry and do it all over again a couple more times during my waking hours. When I went and I got my first big boy internship at the EPA in Crystal City, Virginia, I was, you know, making good money for a student and I was surrounded by some fantastic lunch options, including a Chinese buffet where I would just go and have lunch. And then when I got back to my desk, I would have to sit perfectly upright for the rest of the afternoon, lest the orange chicken bubble back up in my throat as my body tried to digest the onslaught. My aunt, who lived in DC, she traveled a lot for work, so she would let me stay at a brownstone while she was gone. And I would get home and rock up the giant and buy a box of frozen fried chicken because what you can Get frozen fried chicken in America, and then I would crush that with some craft mac and cheese and uh some frozen orange juice that came out of a tube because all of those things were such novelties to me. Then when I worked in Southwest Virginia after grad school, I would leave work and get a snack on the drive from Roanoke back to Blacksburg. So Salem sits between Roanoke and Blacksburg, and I would stop at the McDonald's on Main Street and get a double quarter pounder with cheese, fries, and a large sprite. And then I would go to the gym or maybe go for a run when I got home, and then I would still have dinner on top of that. All in all, the truth of it is this having come from a culture where food is a central part of who we are and how we relate to each other, I was no match for the onslaught of cheap, accessible, delicious, and calorie-dense foods that America offered and the billions of dollars put into marketing these foods through every possible medium. When you sit and you think about the sheer volume of fast food commercials that we are subjected to every day, it is no wonder that they've had to enact legislation through the years for all manner of food marketing practices, including the types of commercials food companies are allowed to show kids during Saturday morning cartoons, or where certain types of sugary cereal are allowed to be placed on shelves relative to the kids' eyelines, or why things like supersizes are no longer available at McDonald's. To be clear, this is not an indictment of American capitalism. Now I have my own thoughts and feelings about the many dimensions of capitalism, not only from the perspective of a consumer, but as someone who has studied and taught business and marketing at the college level. But that's not what this is about. This is just my story, the story of a young, naive foreigner who was not prepared for the jump from a structured environment where food was always accessible but generally within reasonable limitations, to one where anything could be bought at any hour of the day in any quantity that money could buy without the rhythms of my youth or the means to effectively process the food into its intended purpose, which was for daily energy. It was a paradigm shift for me, and one to be honest that I still battle to this day. If you order a large drink in Trinidad, you would get the equivalent of an American small or medium, sometimes with so much ice that you barely get any soda in it, or sweet drink as we call it. I remember the last time I visited Europe and I found myself ordering two cans of soda at a restaurant because the ones that they have over there are thimble-sized compared to the the ones that I had grown accustomed to here in the United States. And you know, in Trinidad, there are very few, if any, self-serve soda fountains. Well, there are very few self-served anything in Trinidad because we don't see that as a convenience. We see that as a challenge. And if you give something to a Trinidadian for free, we will accept that challenge. We will salute and we will get down to business. But in America, more often than not, you can serve yourself. And it really doesn't matter what size cup you buy because you could just get back up and refill your drink. And then before you know it, you ended up drinking three or four times the amount of soda that you actually need. And of course, I'm sure doctors and nutritionists will tell you that the number of ounces of sweet drink or soda that anybody needs in a day is probably closer to zero. And you see how quickly this thing gets out of control. When you sit down at a restaurant and you're having a meal, if your glass even goes below halfway, the silver will come and refill your drink or just bring you another one. I have to actively ask silvers not to refill my glass. In Trinidad, if you ask for a couple packets of ketchup, they might look at you with their face skin up like you asked them for their firstborn child. But in America, if I say, can I have two packets of ketchup, or sorry, may I have two packets of ketchup, and I'm not exaggerating here, these poor underpaid workers will indiscriminately just grab a fistful of them and hand them over. You know, a dedicated packet drawer isn't something typically touted as a feature in residential listings in America, but at this point it probably should. Because I know everybody has a packet drawer in their house. In America, bigger is better, and more is what everybody needs, and more is what everybody deserves. And this is where I ended up as a proper never-see comesie when it comes to food. Now I won't lie to you and tell you that my palate doesn't often lean on the sophisticated side. I love all food, including elevated fare. And I've hung around with enough world-class chefs to understand why, all things being equal, a rare cut of steak is always superior to a burnt-out rubbery slab of overcooked beef, which is the way I used to order it when I first got to the US. And I actually know how to make that bougie face, you know, that delight, that face of delight when you taste a delectable morsel, when you close your eyes and relief and ecstasy washes over your face, and you just rock your head back at the restaurant and look like a dumb jackass. Yeah, I make that face a lot. And as I've gotten older, it has become less about quantity and more about quality. But I will never be too stushed to forget my licorice roots. I am happiest to report now that at 50 years old, I hover around 235 pounds and I get compliments all the time for how good I look for my age. But I tell people that I can't take too much credit for it because I've had this dad bod since I was like 22 years old, and I'm just now finally aging into it. Now, all jokes aside, I have consistently worked out on an average of four times a week for the past three decades, and that has helped me stay relatively healthy. But the truth is, I work out not just as a way to hopefully live a long and healthy life, but it's also a way for me to keep eating more than I should on any given day. Also, even though I have way more muscle mass than I did when I was 22 years old, I'm still considered obese for my height, which illustrates the gulf between our nutritional guidelines and the way that we actually live. I often look at suggested serving sizes in America with cut eye or side eye, because I think of them as an absolute joke. We have this giant bag of croutons in our pantry, and the listed serving size is two tablespoons, which amounts to 35 calories. Now, my question every time I look at this is how the hell do I get two tablespoons of croutons? Since the average single crouton is about two-thirds the size of a tablespoon. Do I stack them and make a towel of croutons? Or do I pulverize them and shape it onto the spoon and make this like croutonian mound? Or is it that the recommended serving size is literally three croutons? And if so, should it even be offered as a topping for salads? Now I am sure that some nutritionist or company spokesperson will explain how these three croutons fit into a healthy diet. But I know Tom Foolery when I see it. And all it does is irritate me as I toss about 15 croutons onto salad. Salad, mind you, which is the thing that I'm going to enjoy way less than eating, say, a slice of pizza or a double cheeseburger with fries. I wish the nutritional guidelines here and in Trinidad matched the reality of how food is manufactured, packaged, and served. But that's wishful thinking at best and dumbassness at worst. I think suggested serving sizes are less about giving people healthy guidance and more about avoiding litigation. But that's just me. And I know that in every capitalistic society, not just in America, food is engineered to be irresistible. Even if you are selling the healthiest product, it would be dumb to make and sell something that isn't competitively palatable. No one ever says in a commercial, our food will make you look and feel amazing, but from a taste standpoint, it really, really sucks. But please buy it anyway. And when I say engineered, I mean exactly that. The potato chip is a perfect example of science working against us. The goal of a potato chip is twofold. When you put it in your mouth and chew it, it should deliver the maximum amount of flavor and salt that is pleasurable as quickly as possible. And then the secondary goal is for that flavor to dissipate almost immediately, making you crave the experience again and again and again until one serving, which is probably like four chips, becomes an entire bag. It's the same thing with soda. It's the same thing with food that we eat in sit-down restaurants where they put as much butter and cream as possible to make these things as delicious as possible. In capitalist societies, food has become an act of pleasure versus an act of survival. And I'm not sure that this is the best path forward for us as a species, but these are the cards that we've been dealt. These foods are created in labs and test kitchens and have the responsibility of competitiveness through delivering maximum flavor and comfort at the requisite price point. And we are, as consumers, no match for it because, like with many things, it's us versus science and the billions and billions of dollars of research and refinement over decades that go into product development and marketing. Food is marketed to make us feel a certain way. And that even bleeds over into popular culture where you have songs about steak nights at a certain chain restaurant being a perfect date, or whole TV series centered around meeting at diners and coffee shops to have conversations. The overused adage of living to eat versus eating to live still rings true. And I can say I will always favor the former, so controls are important, but those controls often crumble in the face of the culture around us. The true definition of a first-world problem is making enough money so that you can eat and drink at the level of perceived success commensurate to your station in life, or at least the station in life that you are aspiring to. And then having to spend more money on gym memberships and consumption management apps and medication to help you keep all those extra calories and saturated fats from making you obese and killing you. And again, I want to reiterate this is not a critique of America. This is a global issue for countries where consumerism has thrived. In Trinidad, today, we have more and more fast food options popping up, more and more foods from around the world, and larger portions available if you are willing to pay for it. I don't know what the answer is, but I know it is a constant battle. I count calories on my app, I've done Weight Watchers, I track my steps, and I've tried all different ways of eating. Now I'm finding some success with lower carbs and higher protein, which flies in the face of the way I grew up in Trinidad, where again, all plates were loaded up with cost-effective and delicious carbohydrates. Now, education has a lot to do with it, but I think it needs to be honest education that aligns with the reality of what we all face as consumers. We need fewer guidelines and more honest guidance. Psychologically, I was not prepared for coming to America when it came to food. And when I was hanging out with my boys back home a couple of months ago, we we all had the same conversations. Each of us took turns explaining what lifestyle changes we are currently using to lose weight, to gain muscle and sleep better. Our middle-aged conversations often come back to riveting topics like inflammation and colonoscopies and fasting and proper hydration and mental health. The kinds of topics that would have made us when we were 21 and 22 years old roll our eyes and cringe. You know, youth is indeed wasted on the young, unfortunately. But I think it's wasted even more so on licorice, pardon, never succumb to use.