Discovering Diversity in My Own Backyard

Not so far from my home in central Missouri, on the outskirts of a rural farming community dressed with fields of corn or wheat in varying shades of greens and gold depending on the season, lies a diversity of culture I couldn’t deduce twenty-five years ago as a high school student in the nearby town of Green Ridge whose population tally is consistently below the 500 mark.

Then, I found the confines of small town living stifling. My mother knew one way to cook meat – fried; and two methods of cooking potatoes – fried or mashed. She would then assure the death of the already slain beef or pork by suffocating its remains under a thick layer of pasty flour gravy. After spooning green veggies from a can to offset the gray pallor of the main dish we would sit down to what I assumed was the average household meal. I was desperate for a variety of edible colors, textures, and tastes. My taste buds yearned to be tantalized and teased.

Shortly after graduating high school, then marrying, I moved to a larger city, began traveling, and was shocked by the realization that food was meant to be enjoyed and esteemed, not just succumbed to. I have eaten, admittedly with a bit of trepidation, sheep’s head stew at a local’s home in Jamaica and tripe soup in Mazatlan. As my horizons widened I was able to recognize that it wasn’t a town’s size that inhibited my ability to find pleasure in what I previously mistook as mundane, it was my own inexperience and lack of understanding that adventure lurks everywhere.

Roughly fifteen years later my husband and I moved our children back to the same small town I couldn’t run away from fast enough a lifetime ago. I have since met a neighbor from Thailand who has enchanted me with her desire to share the foods she grew up with. She has fed me numerous spring rolls with varying fillings, as well as a seafood stew made with baby octopi; something I would have found excruciatingly exotic as a teenager growing up just a few miles away. My children and I have enjoyed unearthing unexpected finds in our nearby communities like the Mexican markets serving homemade tamales and rich, creamy ice creams infused with flavors such as papaya or queso. We have delighted in discovering the Amish markets nearby, also towns filled with the flavors of Germany or France a mere half hour away.

Now, I find my small town not only more diverse, and much tastier, but a trail head for experiencing everything the rest of the world has to offer.