“I crave my mom’s cooking, and I feel like that’s a sign that I need to prioritize it more when I’m at college,” says Sureena Lakhanpal, an Indian American student at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s a feeling most students know well, when a dish that once was common becomes an ache, now out of reach.
For many students, going to college means having to leave home. One of the most important connections a student loses when they’re away is their cultural side. In many homes, food is a symbol of one’s culture; it is an avenue through which you feel comforted by bringing familiar aspects of your home into your daily college life, a path to connecting with people and building friendships rooted in common ground, and often a part of your identity that is intrinsic and inescapable. Dishes that were once constant in childhood become a special thing to look forward to during a break to go home, and a meal you once took for granted becomes your favorite reason to go back home.
The shift makes sense once you understand what those meals meant in the first place. For Lakhanpal, dinner wasn’t just sustenance, it was a ritual. She grew up with the preparation of North Indian food in her home every night, not as something in the background, but as an intentional decision made by her family. Most of it was handled by her father during the dat since he worked from home, with her and her sisters coming in afterward to help finish it. “We would come home and like to help make dinner…that was kind of like a social activity in our house,” she says.“We all did that together and we all ate dinner together. The only time we could skip eating dinner with the family is if we had an exam in the morning.”
Izzy Morren, a French Filipino student at UC Berkeley, describes a similar dynamic. “When I’m with my family back at home, we’re cooking together in the kitchen, we’re listening to the same music, we’re making jokes with each other,” she tells Spoon. “I feel like that’s a way to spend time together while doing an activity, and it’s not always just forcing stuff.”
For both students, the important part of meals is not the food that will be consumed, but a bonding opportunity that cannot be replicated elsewhere. What’s missed most isn’t really the food itself but the act of making it together, and that is exactly what is lost the moment you’re in a dorm, with no big kitchen, no real pantry, and no family standing beside you every step of the way.
Instead, they found smaller ways to hold onto that connection. For Lakhanpal, it’s namkeen, a spiced snack she compares to trail mix, and fennel seeds, which are almost routine in themselves, eating a handful after every meal, to help with digestion but also to bring the comfort of home to a new place. “A lot of the food that I grew up eating is really intensive, and it requires really intensive preparation,” she says.
For Morren, French food is easier to find while being in the U.S., so her go-to snack choices are usually leaning more toward her Filipino heritage, making spam and rice, chicken adobo, or sinigang small comfort meals that she can easily prepare. In a way, she connects more with her family when making these, as she feels “those are less accessible, so you kinda have to make it yourself.”
It is through those same ideas that both students describe their cultural growth in college more broadly. Lakhanpal grew up in a town with a small Indian community, with no extended family nearby. It wasn’t until she was in high school that she made close Indian friends, and in college that circle grew greatly. “There’s organizations like the Indian Students Association that will host celebrations for the holidays,” she says. “ I feel like participating in those is another way to stay connected.” Interestingly, going away from home made it easier for her to meet people with similar backgrounds: “That’s the beauty of college…you’re connected to a way bigger pool of people.”
Morren’s connection to her Filipino culture has also grown while she’s been at college, though through a more personal path. She describes herself as being raised culturally “more French” than Filipino, so getting to a new environment was a way for her to explore the other side of the culture that she grew up with less. “I definitely now find myself leaning more towards trying to engage with my Filipino side, because I feel like I’ve just started breaking into that culture and trying to kind of reclaim it for myself,” she says.
Leaving home didn’t merely create a distance from their culture; it also created more room to grow into it. And that growth is pushing both students towards their next step: learning how to cook these meals fully on their own, without their families there to help.
For Morren, that means starting with basics that she hasn’t tackled yet. “I haven’t made steak frites yet just because making fries at home is so difficult,” she says, as she doesn’t have a fryer at college the way she does at home. But she’s determined to learn eventually.
Lakhanpal’s challenge is a bit different. The meals she grew up eating were engineered to feed five people, large portions with copious amounts of preparation that are just not suitable for a dorm kitchen. Scaling them down without losing what makes them feel like home is its own kind of work. Still, the craving outweighs the difficulty. “I think I need to connect with it more because it’s something that’s an absence in my life when I’m in college,” she says.
Neither student has fully recreated a home-cooked meal in their family’s style yet, but both are working toward the same goal: a day when cooking their culture’s food feels as automatic in their own kitchen as it once did in their parents’. “I get to learn how to do it by myself and once I move out full time when I’m not at school, I can recreate those dishes so that I still feel connected to family even when we’re far away.”