The other day my four-year-old daughter, Mallika, came home from preschool, plonked her bag on the floor, and told me, ?Mummy, Ellie brought really stinky food to school today.? I was taken aback by her description of her Asian classmate?s lunch. Growing up in Australia in the late ?80s, I was the Indian kid with the ?stinky food.? Every day I dreaded opening my lunch box, and the scent of chicken biryani wafting out. I would brace myself for the chorus of ?Eeewww!? and ?What?s that"? I much preferred when I was allowed to bring money for cafeteria pizza or meatballs.
Raising kids in multicultural Canada 20 years later, I assumed that this youngest generation would instinctively value racial diversity, instead of singling each other out for ?stinky food.? Our neighbourhood of Toronto is known as both ?Tehranto? and Koreatown North. Vietnamese pho joints jostle for space with Mexican eateries, and playground banter is carried out in Japanese, Russian and Tagalog. So I never seriously worried about how our South Asian family would fit into this mix, and I never expected my own daughter to wrinkle her nose at the contents of another kid?s lunch box.
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