My raison d'être? Junk Food

Personally, I firmly believe in having immersive cultural experiences. Everybody should, at least once in their life, move to a new place and experience a new culture to the fullest extent possible, through the people, the entertainment, and the food. Doing so gives one what many career coaches call "soft skills", or as I like to much less succinctly call them, "hardly defined capacities to understand the worldviews of others and adapt to new situations." It builds character!

That being said, most of us aren't perfect. Everybody has their vice, right? Especially if we're going to survive a whole year or so, we need that ooooone thing from home. And for most expats I know, that one thing is loaded with added sugar and saturated fat.

What can I say, America is truly a land of incomparable culinary excesses. From our chips to our candy, everything has more artificial flavor, more salt, and more sugar. Sure, France is home to countless rich, enticing sweets and fatty delicacies. But that's the kind of thing one wants to eat, as one of my friends put it, on a balcony with a view, in a small quantity while discussing philosophy in good company. Sometimes, that's just not what you want. Sometimes, you just need to waste a few hours of your life on the internet, in your PJs, with dirty hair. And you don't need to bring fine cuisine into that equation at all. No, what you need is some good American home cooking.  Sure, in many large cities you can buy versions of these products adapted to local tastes or American brands at elevated costs, but neither of those really does the trick for a good night of Netflix 'n cry. Furthermore, for many of us this urge arises considerably more frequently when we're, you know, feeling lonely, overwhelmed, or just exceptionally aware of the distance between ourselves and our loved ones. So, bringing adequate rations abroad is a must.

Everybody focuses on different must-haves. For some, it's chips, for others, sour candy, and for still others, it's actually more solid non-perishables, like boxed mac'n'cheese or canned cranberry sauce (I kid thee not, I know somebody who just has to have it). Myself, I have to have peanut butter. There's plenty of it here in Martinique, but it's more expensive even at the cheapest of supermarkets, and the texture still bears some distant resemblance to actual peanuts. So, I stowed away four pounds of off-brand creamy. It may last me a couple weeks, a month at best. I was also spoiled enough to receive a jar of my stepmom's homemade apple butter and a bunch of Reese's minis. Finally, I actually bought myself a box of graham crackers; I think missing any discernible changes of season last fall really got to me, and somehow that anxiety manifested itself as a persistent craving for that exact bland goodness.

I'm just a simple, PB&J kind of gal. In my one (1) 50-lb suitcase
that I brought back from home, I made room for graham crackers,
a jar of my stepmother's homemade apple butter, a ton of mini
Reese's cups, and 4 lb of real, preservative-packed peanut butter.

While I did dedicate quite a lot of space (and weight) in my suitcase to junk food, this of course doesn't even make a dent in the mountain of food I'll eat between now and my departure. Most of my diet will still consists of local produce, and I still have a few more Martinican recipes to try. That being said, it will be comforting to know that I have a stash  for when I need it most.

N:B As of this writing, the Reese's cups are already entirely gone.