#class issues
the ‘will people feed you’ discourse rn is very funny and hopefully a wake up call to some of the rude freaks scattered out there across europe, but I do want to note that the cultures we’re talking about are cultures of the affluent. literally everywhere I have visited, working class people share food as a matter of course. everywhere I have visited, working class people push drinks and snacks on you the moment you walk in the door. there’s a layer to this conversation that only exists among people who have the choice to be miserly and unaffected by their neighbours behaving the same way.
the first time I experienced being completely shut out of another family’s mealtime, it was when I was a teenager on an exchange trip to the netherlands. I was staying with this family, and literally reliant on them for food and housing. The day I arrived they explained to me what time mealtimes were, and that I would not be fed unless I arrived at the table on time. One morning I was running a little behind because I had trouble figuring out how the shower worked, and when I came downstairs my hosts were already eating. They hadn’t set a place for me, and they all ignored me and continued conversing in dutch. When I timidly tried to serve myself, they gave me look as if I had just walked in off the street and started raiding the refrigerator. They were an intimidatingly affluent family.
one morning the mother had to drop me off early at my work placement, before the building opened. I was sitting outside on a wall for like 50 minutes by myself with nothing to do, and an older lady running a food cart nearby started chatting to me (she wanted to know I was okay, because I was like 15 and not in school, and was very interested to hear that I was on exchange from scotland). she offered me a free breakfast, and when I said I’d already eaten she gave me a drink and a packet of crisps to keep for lunch, and kept trying to make me try fried things that were apparently dutch specialities but were way too much for me at 8am. she was very sweet and funny, and had infinitely more in common with the poorer dutch students who I would meet at a separate pan-european thing later than with any of the kids or parents around the upper middle class academy we were paired with that year. people are people everywhere, some are just more inclined to worry about appearances than others.
Sociology/Anthropology, Swarthmore College
Collecting Cultures and Imagining Class: The Experiences of First Generation College Students Studying Abroad
