Eating in transit (and eating in place)

plus a ridiculous list of things I've done to avoid being hungry on airplanes

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By the time this issue hits your inbox I’ll be in Boston for a conference, and predictably nervous about my paper presentation, perhaps my last as a graduate student.

I hope it is. I hope that I finish this dissertation before committing to writing more things. I want to get out, to move on from academia. But I also don’t. I know I’ll miss trips like these. I’ll miss students. I’ll miss everything I thought academia could have been.

Anyway, today is May 12th and, for these reasons and others, I can’t yet envision what this trip is going to feel like.

The last time I flew was in 2019. It was a different world. I was with good friends, the kind of friends you feel wonderfully cared for with. The kind of friends who will pack extra snacks “just in case,” or walk to the other side of the Terminal with you to find something you can eat, or ask about ingredients when you’re too anxious to. I’m fortunate to have many friends like this who make transitions and liminality feel less horrifying.

While the flight from Toronto to Boston is hilariously short— only an hour and a half blip in my itinerary— I’m already worrying over the practical things, already hyping myself up to be a functioning adult, and, true to form, worrying about my transit snacks.

It’s been a while since I’ve been on my own in transit and yet old worries still arise. They never left.

There have certainly been times when eating in transit was a relatively regular occurrence. It’s not like I was off and away monthly or anything, but I’ve traveled enough to know how my greatest travel anxieties manifest so often around food— having too much of it, not enough of it, having the wrong food, at the wrong time, in the wrong order, in the wrong place. Some of you will know what I mean.

Sure, like most, I worry over physics and flight. But there is something especially terrifying about the thought of being trapped in the sky with a limited supply of mediocre food (that I cannot access myself) that just pushes me to the point where I’ve done all of the following and more:

• spent $100 Canadian Dollars on chocolate while on a layover at Heathrow because it was raining out and what if the plane was going down and I wanted chocolate and then my neighbour wanted chocolate and their neighbour and so on and how could I deny people high quality chocolate as they plummeted to their deaths??

• taken a carry-on bag stuffed with baked potatoes onto a 15 hour flight because what if they lost my meal and then I had to sit through another 4 hour layover in a bad terminal without food (both have happened on separate occasions)

• pulled a baked potato out of a ziplock bag and eaten it like a burrito in a middle seat (whilst sleep deprived and sobbing uncontrollably at some random in-flight film whose plot I remember 0% of).

• held a bag full of 6 servings of idli and sambar on my lap for the duration of a six hour car ride in an un-airconditioned vehicle in a very hot place and carried it proudly through customs as my personal item (though I did have to eat the sambar first).

I am nothing if not motivated by food and fear!

I can poke fun at how my anxieties manifest in transit. I can see the problems. I’m aware of how this level of preparedness invites certain patterns that quickly become constraining for me. This is where I get caught in a loop and try to anticipate every single “what if?,” all of which, even the most absurd, I know are possible.

But I can also appreciate that having food with me when I travel brings much comfort. There’s something about having food on me— food that I like— that reminds me that I have a body in need of care not matter where it is. It reminds me that my body is a also a place— a place I spend much time with.

When you're learning how to care for your body maybe sometimes you overdo it, miss the mark, over-plan, forget to listen. This has been my experience in an anxious body, at least.

When I don’t know what time the plane will take off, what being in a different place will look or feel like, at least I know what I will eat (and the exact minute it will happen, or at least what the menu at the restaurant looks like, what the seating arrangement is like…).

It inevitably take away from actually being in a breathing place—both the place of my body as well as the place I’m in. It takes away from following the kinds of whims, sensations, smells, cravings and curiosities that strolling aimlessly down a side street, or sitting in a park, or watching people moving about their day may evoke.

What could it look like this time to travel differently as someone who’s thinking more carefully (not obsessively) about her own body, the place(s) it will move through, the impacts these movements might have in relation to other people? To the planet?

I want to be here, in the gutsy part of embodiment.

I want to practice what eating in transit could be, not as some practice of “embracing being untethered” or “free spirited” or whatever, but as a practice of grounding, of being oriented to a place— new or old— in some meaningful sensory way. There is a certain preciousness and ruthlessness to being with a meal, a tact to following your nose, asking the right people, arriving somewhere because your gut told you “find something with Thai basil in it,” that I’d like to learn to inhabit a little bit more comfortably, not for any other reason than I’d like to learn to listen more deeply.

I’ve not read anything this past month but here are photos of the cookbooks I want that I found on display yesterday, my first day in Boston.