Ode to Takeout Boxes
The counter is suffocated by a disarray of tupperware boxes, tinfoil, and plastic bags. Naan, paneer, daal, and what you’d think to be the whole stock of Indian food from Devon appears to be on my kitchen table. The living room smells of hot rice and thick curry.
My grandmother asks me, “Beta, where’s your measuring spoon?” I stare at her blankly, scanning an inventory of our glossy white kitchen cabinets through my head.
“Try that drawer,” I respond, fragments of air choking out in my delivery, making my response allude to more like a rhetorical question. Nope, wrong pick. My grandmother tries the drawer above and below it.
I sigh, “I don’t know Nano.”
“It’s okay, I don’t think I need it,” she lies.
Over a third of Americans cook dinner every day. 7% of Americans cook less often than once a week, and 3% never cook at home. Kitchens around the world are societally heralded as the hub and heart of the home. Some say kitchens have a way of bringing people together. Others say that while life is created in the bedroom, it is lived in the kitchen. So if our kitchen reflects our ‘ability’ to live - what does it mean if my kitchen is never used?
My kitchen is full of wooden fixtures, and fractured marble countertops. It is aesthetic, modern, and clean - but I don’t think that makes it the ‘heart of the home.’ The kitchen is our household contribution to climate change, with its trash bin overspilling with crumpled up receipts, and plastic thank you bags. There’s a drawer of unused plastic spoons and forks, and a cupboard of dusty tupperware neglected to the provided plastic ones we get. I’m sorry Mother Nature. The fridge is hidden in the walls and as its doors open, a halo of concentrated white LED light leaks onto the kitchen floors. My own mini UN of takeout boxes takes me to the streets of Lahore, Pakistan, and the coasts of the French Riviera. Where shall I travel to for dinner tonight, Fridge?
When I think of the meals of my childhood I think of the times I hated dinner so much I would shove it under the table when my mom wasn’t looking. I think of the time my mom made spinach and potato pancakes for dinner and fed them back to my brother and me the next morning since we refused to eat them. I think of driving with my dad to Devon to pick up Sabri Indian food at 5 pm every Sunday. I think of the times my mom would make us chili to eat while the Oscars were on - a meal I enjoyed eating only because it gave me leverage to argue to my friends that my mother made the best chili. I think of the McDonalds on the table when she told us our Uncle was going to prison and the Gaylords take- out Indian food we ate after she was re-diagnosed with cancer.
God, I hate Indian food.
I remember only a few things from the first time my mom had cancer. Tin Foil pans of pasta, boxes of cookies, and weeks of food schedules are emblems that define that time. Life after her re-diagnosis hasn’t been much different from what it was nine years ago. I had pasta and chicken three times last weekend cooked by the families of my friends. In growing up, I wonder if I have trained myself to associate home-cooked meals with times in my life when something goes wrong.
I had a friend who recently asked me what my favorite meal was, my response? “Summer House.” “No silly, I mean like a home-cooked meal,” she remarked as if it was a given. Now was she or I the fool? I guess because of my upcoming I’ve never really associated family dinners to be home-cooked meals. I didn’t know society thought they were synonymous.
In its Oxford dictionary definition, a kitchen is where meals are made. Nowhere in the definition does it limit meals to befood only made by those in a home kitchen. Nowhere does it invalidate the sushi I have on Monday, the pizza on Tuesday, the Mediterranean on Wednesday, the Dees on Thursday, and the Sabri on Sunday. The family meals around my kitchen table are no different nor inferior to yours of hot pans and golden-baked buns. I may not live life in the kitchen, but I live it passing white cardboard origami boxes across my kitchen table or opening my phone to a text that reads Rania can you get the food from outside. And though take-out pizza nights aren’t a celebratory treat or a mom-and-dad- aren’t-home Saturday dinner, there’s a gift behind all the years of take-out I’ve grown up eating.
To the white, plastic take-out bags in my trash bags inscribed thank you in an alphabet of red block letters, thank you. You’ve given me a story to tell and a societal standard to rid of. Thank you for the unpredictability, and the opportunity to taste the world. Thank you for the meals I know will be in the kitchen no matter if the night ends in celebration, tears, heartbreak, laughter, or love. Thank you, you silly little plastic bags, for being a constant in my life. Because as the world changes, so does life, and it's nice to go into the merest or most-defining moments of life with a stale fortune cookie or an extra piece of Naan.
