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One of the most amazing and empowering experiences of my life to adate The opportunity to live in a foreign land and be completely immersed in that culture is one that expanded my horizons and opened my eyes to the world, its immense opportunities, and its wealth of cultures. While studying abroad, I achieved a new level of independence, while at the same time I gained friends from numerous countries." Sara Baumgartner studied abroad in the Summer Institute for Italian Language and Culture in Florence
- "My resume is often looked at with more care since I have an experience that employers often look for... reflects character, adversity, and flexibility in your personality since you have had such a different and eye-opening experience." Patrice Horowitz, BA French, studied abroad in Besançon, France
- "(Studying abroad was) an empowering experience in that it provided me with the skills needed for entry into a profession where experience with cross-cultural immersion is requisite." Andrew Holtman studied abroad in Ghana
- "It's pretty difficult to succinctly identify the enormous impact that this experience made in my life; it opened my eyes, made me a courageous and confident person, and offered me an entirely different perspective on the world." Rachel Bateman studied abroad in Amsterdam
"I decided to pursue Urban Planning after living in Copenhagen. I fell in love with the conveniences of mass transit and the wide array of transportation modes that are available in most of Europe." Karen Clawson, BFA Industrial Design
Eric Garrett, center, a KU study abroad alum who now teaches English and is an administrator at a foreign language school in China.
We Are What We Eat
A.
Andrea Broomfield, a KU alum, is an Associate Professor of English at Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas
Shared Broomfield, a KU alum, is an Associate Professor of English at Johnson County Community College and is currently writing a book for Praeger Press on the history of food and cooking in nineteenth-century England.
When I decided to spend my Junior Year Abroad at Exeter University in the UK, I left Kansas with predictable objectives for a twenty-year-old: experience a different culture, figure out who I was, gain independence, and enhance my academic record for when it came time to apply to graduate school. I did not, however, expect to learn anything about myself, let alone anything about the English, through what I ate! And yet, years later, I realized that my most lasting memories, impressions, and the conclusions that I drew during that time abroad came initially through my stomach. While studying abroad did help me get into graduate school and led to my becoming an English professor, my experience with English food also led to my becoming a culinary historian, one who attempts to understand a nation by examining how and what people eat.
My initiation into English culture, or my "baptism by fire" as I like to call it, certainly involved food. All who study abroad go through an initiation of some sort one that happens early in their stay and which, while often funny in retrospect, was embarrassing or even painful while it was occurring. At the beginning of my first term at Exeter, I went to lunch with a group of English students who like me were enrolled in a nineteenth-century literature course. We had just come from our first lecture and were talking animatedly about Romanticism as we stood in line at the university's refectory (cafeteria). As we moved our trays along, I spied some sausages that reminded me of American hotdogs, and a wave of homesickness washed over me. Passing up the salads, the ploughman's lunches of cheddar cheese and bread, the jacket potatoes, beef burgers, fish and chips, I ordered a sausage and then did what most Americans do: I slathered it with mustard. Grilled hotdogs with mustard: that's comfort food for me, and being with new people and having to speak intelligently about Byronic heroes and Grecian urns put me in much need of such a treat.
I sat down with my classmates and unthinkingly took a large bite out of that sausage, and immediately thereafter, I thought I had died and gone to hell. In the States, yellow mustard means French's. The English mustard that I had liberally applied to that sausage, however, was so hot that there was no taste; rather, I felt like I was standing in a smoking sulfur pit with its fumes penetrating not only my mouth, but crawling up through my nasal passages, into my ear drums, my tear ducts, and permeating my brain. During the ordeal, it hit me that maybe Americans shouldn't be such big eaters, so eager to inhale food, so confident about biting into things that they don't really know much about. So my first lesson about food and England taught me something about me, about what many Americans do when it comes to a plate of food.
Today, I remember my year in England because of its food and traditions, and in years since, its history, culture, and literature have made such an impression on me for reasons of cuisine. Any Dickens novel will make it clear very quickly that food and drink are as important to understanding the characters and their circumstances as are the clothes they wear or their home address. Toast with marmalade recalls the leisurely mornings I spent talking politics with a Welsh national who befriended me at Exeter. A sone recalls the lush Devonshire countryside with its agricultural history and traditions. And as for mustard... I keep a tin of Coleman's on my shelf as a reminder to take smaller bites and to be a bit more cautious about all foods I put in my mouth, no matter how enthusiastically I as an American might approach new flavors and experiences.
JAYHAWKS ABROAD
C
8
FALL 2005
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