Dear World: You’ve Never Had Hummus?

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

There are a lot of unspoken rules about eating with a human mouth, and when you grow up in a trailer park in the rural boob sweat of America, you mostly learn the survival ones, like “don’t laugh when the ketchup bottle makes a fart sound.”

(Especially when you’re squeezing it unapologetically all over a country steak. That your neighbor gave you. From the cow they slaughtered. Last winter. Which you are now disrespecting with Heinz.)

I ~now~ know that putting ketchup on your steak is a hostile act in many all??? high-brow circles—the culinary equivalent of blowing bubbles with your spit at the table—but it’s taken me twenty years of traveling to decode the unspoken rules of existing in rooms where everyone else got the memo.

When I returned to my hometown one summer and accidentally bought a giant 1800s farmhouse I had no business buying, you know what surprised me the most?

Things that had become a part of my regular diet for years—arugula, goat cheese, burrata, avocado, quinoa, prosciutto, prosecco, bordeaux, the tears of douchebags in Audis, to name a few—were nowhere to be found in any local restaurant.

Salads are iceberg.
Cheese is American.
Grains are Wonderbread.
Cured meat is beef jerky.
Prosecco is Budweiser.
Wine is “fucking gross.”
And there’s not an Audi in sight (unless they’re visiting from New Jersey).

This wasn’t a menu. It was a border.

I hadn’t realized how, year-after-year, place-after-place, bite-after-bite, I’d slowly been learning another language.

“You’ve never had hummus?” I recently found myself saying, when an old friend from my hometown confessed that they hadn’t ever tried the thing I was about to serve. It was then that I remembered the very first time I had had hummus. It was in college. On scholarship. In the café by the bookstore. An older student named Jason, with big, bouncy, curly brown hair and an even bigger, bouncier personality, had once asked me the same thing, his surprise clear: “You’ve never had HUMMUS?????” I blushed. “You are seriously missing out!” I remember his words because they cut. I felt like a foolish little girl; someone who had been “sheltered.” (The worst fate I could imagine then.) I accepted his offer to try it. He plopped some on a piece of pita—another thing I had never seen. And of course, I loved it, despite not understanding how “crushed chickpeas” were something that people ate????? Or ever heard of? Or what a “chickpea” even was?

How could I have missed the existence of an entire food category?

In the 6,574 days I’d been alive, I had simply assumed I had already tasted everything there was to taste. There was the hamburger. And the pizza. And the wings. And the french fries. You know, the basics. Then, there were the things my Italian mother made, in big, Italian-like batches (even though it was just two of us in that trailer): The rigatoni. And the pasta e fagioli. And the vegetable soup. And the stew. And when the tomatoes were fresh from the raised garden beds we’d built out of old railroad ties, which they almost always were in the summer, we’d have tomato sandwiches. And tomato grilled cheese. And tomato with salt and pepper. And tomato BLTs.

I wonder if my mother knew what hummus was.

As a teenager, I had a few go-to snacks I’d make myself time-and-time again: sliced potatoes I’d put into the microwave for 10 minutes so they’d puff up like soft, fluffy potato chips, which I’d (obviously) dip in ketchup. Saltine crackers with a thick piece of American cheese folded on top. Bowl after bowl of Frosted Mini Wheat cereal, ladeled in sugar. Then there was the Fig Newton era. OH, THE FIG NEWTON ERA, PEOPLE. What a time to be alive.

Of course, the moment I realized I could control my physical appearance with food, everything changed. Rice cakes. A banana for lunch. Half a turkey sandwich for dinner. And dry tuna fish, straight out of the can. Later, in the era of Atkins, I’d subsist almost entirely on grilled chicken and Monster energy drinks. This was also right around when buffalo sauce became a thing. I started putting it on all of my grilled chicken. Because unlike ketchup? Frank’s hot sauce had zero calories.

Hummus was not only not something I hadn’t tried; it was something I had never even heard of.

I eventually learned that ignorance isn’t a failure of curiosity.

It’s a failure of access.

It took me years to understand that this is how most things work.

Turns out?

Exposure is 90% of the game. Any game. Culture. Class. Life. Business. Money. Success. Language. Power. Taste. Possibility. Without exposure, you can never know what the world is capable of—or what you are.

You can’t choose what you’ve never been shown.

The first time I had wasabi I was in my twenties in Philadelphia and on a date with a guy who confidently ordered us SOME SASHIMI, which is something I had never, ever, ever, ever, even jokingly planned to put in my body.

I didn’t want my ignorance to be on display, so I chose my lifelong coping strategy: fake it until I make it. Which, in my case, looks like laughing too loudly, speaking exclusively in fragments, and then—without consulting my brain—calmly picking up my knife and doing the only thing my body could imagine you were supposed to do with this mysterious green substance:

I spread it on the fish.

He didn’t hesitate to call me out. “Wait, what are you doing?” he interjected, like someone watching a stranger about to lick a subway pole.

And you know what I did?

I, like the absolute case study I am, I chose the worst possible option:

I DOUBLED DOWN.

“Oh, I like it this way!” I sang, before launching the little fish pellet directly into my mouth.

Now, mind you, I hadn’t just put ~a little bit~ of wasabi on. I grouted it on. I was trying to disguise the taste of the fish, which—at that point in my life—I was convinced was going to be THE END OF ME.

Thank god for this green goop! I thought, confidently assuming sashimi was one of those things rich people liked because it made them seem exotic, even though it was revolting. (My date was a senior-level engineer from Boston who drove an Infiniti and already had a million bucks in the bank. I was a 22-year-old scab.)

I took a bite, smiiiiiiling. Smiiiiiilinggggg.
Ohhhh, look at me, eating sashimi like everything is normalllllllll! I do this all the time!!!!!!!!! Yum, yum, yum, I’m so cultured!

Oh no.
Ohhhhh, no no no.

The sting.

The STING.

Oh my god, my nasal passages were being pressure-washed by Satan’s Altoid.

Nevertheless, I now know that you should not put wasabi on sashimi like spackle unless you are emotionally prepared to black out in public.

And just like that, years later, sitting across from an old friend from my hometown—

I’d become Jason.

Not because I’d changed on purpose, but because with every new thing you try in this world, you really ARE learning a new language.

The things we eat, and the way we live, are teeny, tiny codes; miniature stories about class, about mobility, and about who gets to feel at home where—and who never quite does. About taste as aspiration. About how taste is learned, borrowed, and occasionally faked. About the quiet negotiations we make every time we sit at someone else’s table and instinctively scan for the rules.

This newsletter is me following those codes—through kitchens, living rooms, borrowed apartments, hotel breakfasts, and places I was never supposed to end up—trying to understand how we signal where we came from, where we’re going, and what it costs to stay.

I’ll be here every week, paying attention. (And trying really hard not to put ketchup on my steak.) Subscribe to keep noticing with me.

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