“This Is What They Eat Every Week?” — German Women POWs Could Not Understand American Comfort Food D
The tray arrived and she did not pick up her fork. This was not a decision. It was something that happened in the space between receiving the food and eating it, a pause that lengthened past the point where it was still just a pause. The tray held three things: a slice of meatloaf, dark and dense, the size of a paperback book, a mound of mashed potato with brown gravy that had spread to the edge of its compartment, a dinner roll, round and whole.
Steam came off the potatoes in a slow column and dispersed. She had both hands flat on the table on either side of the tray. She was looking at the food the way you look at something when you’re trying to decide if it is real. To understand why she could not pick up her fork, you need to know what meals had been.
In Germany in the later years of the war, food was a managed quantity. The ration card told you what existed. What the card did not cover did not exist, or existed in queues, or existed for other people. Meat was a calculation, grams per week distributed across days, never enough to anchor a meal on its own. The combination of meat and potato and bread in a single portion, served warm in sufficient quantity, that combination had a name in the life she had known before the war. It was called Sunday.
It was not called Tuesday. In the months before this tray, food had been thin soup and hard bread, and the particular discipline of not thinking about what you were eating while you were eating it. The women who had been in the camp longest had a way of eating that was entirely functional, head slightly down, spoon moving with quiet efficiency, the bowl empty in the same amount of time regardless of what it contained.
You ate because the body required it. You did not linger. Lingering over food you did not have enough of was a form of suffering that could be avoided by simply finishing quickly and moving to the next thing. She had been practicing this for a long time. Around her, the American soldiers were eating without looking at their food.
This was the detail that had stopped her before she even reached her table. She had watched it from the serving line. A man at the far end was using his dinner roll to push the last of his mashed potatoes onto his fork. He was laughing at something the man beside him had said. He had not looked at the roll or the potatoes once.
He was going to finish his meal without having been aware at any point that he was eating it. She had watched this and then looked at her own tray and then carried it to the table and sat down and placed both hands flat beside it. She was doing arithmetic, not the arithmetic of hunger.
How much is this? Will it be enough? How long will it last? A different arithmetic, the arithmetic of what a tray like this implied about the place that had produced it. To serve meatloaf and mashed potatoes and a dinner roll to every person in this room required a quantity of meat, potato, flour, and labor that she could not calculate from where she was sitting, but that was clearly substantial.
And this was not a special occasion. She had not been told it was a special occasion. Nobody in the room was behaving as though it was a special occasion. She asked the woman beside her what the occasion was. The woman beside her had been in the camp longer. She said she did not know of an occasion.
She said the food had been like this before. She said it changed slightly from day to day, but that it was generally like this. The foreground woman looked at her. Then she looked at the tray. Then she said, “They eat like this normally?” The woman beside her considered the question. She said, “I think so.
” They sat with that for a moment. Normally. The word sitting between them the way a word sits when it is technically correct and entirely insufficient at the same time. A mess worker passed their table and she asked him. Her English was enough. She asked, “Is this food for a special day?” He looked at the tray. He looked at her.
He said, “No, ma’am.” She asked, “What day is it today?” He said, “Tuesday.” He moved on to the next table. Tuesday. She said the word quietly to the woman beside her in German. Dienstag. The woman beside her repeated it. They both looked at the tray. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, a dinner roll. Tuesday.
Not a holiday, not a feast, not a gesture. Tuesday. She picked up her fork. She pressed it into the mashed potatoes. They gave without resistance. The gravy shifted. Steam came up and dispersed. She had eaten mashed potatoes before the war. She knew what they were. But knowing what something is and encountering it after a long absence are not the same experience.
The texture was a memory made physical, smooth, warm, not requiring the body to work at it. She took one careful bite and held it for a moment before swallowing. Around her the mess hall continued. A tray clattered. Someone laughed. The potato was the same temperature as a room where someone had been paying attention to the heat.
The meatloaf was dense and salted and unlike anything she had eaten in a long time. Not unlike in category. She knew what meatloaf was, but unlike in quantity. The portion was what you would serve to someone you were trying to restore, not simply maintain. She ate it slowly. The salt was important.
The salt said that whoever had prepared this had thought about what it would taste like, had made a decision about seasoning, had applied attention to the question of whether it would be good. Someone had been trying to make it good. This was also a thing to sit with. She ate the rest of the meal without stopping. The potato, the meatloaf.
She broke the dinner roll in half and ate both halves. When the tray was empty, she sat with her hands in her lap and did not move for a moment. The room was doing what it always did on a Tuesday evening, filling and emptying in steady rotation. Trays going out full, coming back cleared. Soldiers who had eaten this before and would eat it again next Tuesday and the Tuesday after that without the meal ever becoming remarkable to them.
She had just eaten one of those unremarkable Tuesdays. She was not sure it would ever be unremarkable to her. That evening she tried to explain it to the women who had not been at the table. This was harder than she expected. The facts were simple, meatloaf, potatoes, gravy, a roll, but the facts were not the thing she was trying to transmit.
The thing she was trying to transmit was Tuesday. The ordinariness of it, the absence of occasion, the soldiers who ate it without looking. She said, “They do not notice what they are eating.” They said, “What do you mean they do not notice?” She said, “I mean they’re thinking about other things.
” The women who had not been there sat with this. It was a difficult thing to construct from the inside of a different experience. One of the women asked, “But why do they not notice?” It was a genuine question. If you have meatloaf and mashed potatoes on a Tuesday, the answer to why you do not notice is that you have always had meatloaf and mashed potatoes on a Tuesday or something equivalent to it.
And so the tray arrives and the fork moves and the meal ends and the body has been fed and nothing has happened that requires noticing. This was not an answer the woman asking the question had any prior reference for. To not notice a meal like that required a life in which such meals were the floor, not the ceiling.
She had not lived that life. None of them had. Outside the camp was ordinary. Wire, dark fields beyond it. The flat American landscape going on past the point where it was visible. Inside the mess hall the kitchen was being cleaned, the Tuesday completed, the building moving back toward its overnight stillness.
In the barracks the conversation continued for a while and then slowed and then stopped as the day did what days do. But the word stayed in the room after the conversation ended. Tuesday. She could hear it sitting there in the dark, that word, with its full weight of everything it implied about the world that had produced the tray.
She wrote one word in her notebook before she slept. She had been keeping this notebook since the early months of the war. Not a diary, more a record of things she thought should not disappear. Most of what she had written was difficult. This was not difficult. She wrote the word Dienstag, Tuesday.
She underlined it once. She sat with it for a moment, then she closed the notebook and lay down. Tuesday, not a holiday, not a feast. Not a gesture of extraordinary generosity. Tuesday as it happened every week in a country where Tuesday contained meatloaf and mashed potatoes and a dinner roll and soldiers who did not look at what they were eating.
She had not known that country existed. The following Tuesday the mess hall served the same meal. Not identical, the gravy was slightly different, the rolls slightly smaller, but the same in category, the same in what it implied. She carried her tray to the table, and this time she picked up her fork before looking at the food.
This was different from last week. Last week she had needed to look first. This week the looking had already happened. The Tuesday had been recorded. The word was in the notebook. She knew now what a Tuesday here contained. She ate the meal the way you eat something you understand.
