Belonging Through Food: The Sweet Potato, the Dumpling and the Ravioli

I have three children. They have lived in the Philippines, China, Brazil and Norway, and until lately they have spent less time in Portugal than in any of those countries. They have visited enough other places that I stopped counting them as trips a long time ago.

If you want to know where my children are from, I would tell you about a kitchen in Chiang Mai, the way you greet someone older than you, and a dish my youngest would go hungry for. I would tell you about a walk on Guincho beach, a family dinner, a coastline in the wind, and a table that has held every one of them. Place is not a small thing - a child needs somewhere the body remembers - and I have never once wanted to take that away from them.

Where are you from is not a short answer. I always reply: how long do you have?

During our five years living in China, our home away from home was Thailand, and the people who made it that way - dear friends from my own boarding school days, Jaja and Paul, and Jaja’s mother, who we called Khun Mae, in Chiang Mai. They were our closest family: the ones who saw them more often than their own aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins back home in Portugal.

And the food definitely influenced them, because we ate the most authentic Thai food there is - from Jaja’s kitchen. Khun Mae (คุณแม่, khun mae) is Thai for mother, or more exactly for a respected mother, and that is what she was to us. She was the one passing on our children’s manners, including the rule that you never let an elder see the sole of your foot - because in Thailand the head is high and the feet are low, both physically and spiritually. When Khun Mae spoke, we listened. My grandmother would speak too, and in her kitchen we listened just the same - and it was never really about the rule. It was about who was saying it, and the respect we gave the person at the head of the table. The food is what we eat, but the table is where we hear and learn.

That one marked me as much as my grandmother, who would not allow me to scoop my food onto my fork or rest my elbow on the table. Two kitchens, two continents, one set of rules about how you behave when you are with other people.

Today those rules read as generational manners, and as a symbol of change. The research says something quieter: children mostly do not acquire the manners of their culture through lessons. They acquire them by watching, listening and being given a part to play in what the adults are already doing. Barbara Rogoff spent decades describing this as learning by observing and pitching in, and it is the way most families have always passed themselves on.

Imagine the questions that arrive at a family like ours. Now imagine being ten, eighteen, nineteen - their ages now - answering them, again and again, from curious people who have quietly decided that your life is an interesting code to be cracked.

My children have been decoding those questions their whole lives. As have I. My own interactions have been the same long conversation: huh, born in Saudi Arabia? Grew up in Portugal? We have all become fluent in explaining ourselves.

My youngest’s first language was Chinese. Her nanny taught her routines and rituals as though it were her priority, her real job. And she is, I believe, for exactly that reason, incredibly organised.

The non-negotiable was summer in Portugal. Whatever else the year held, we went back, because I wanted them to carry some part of Portugal inside them. The spots their father and I treasure. The coastline - Guincho. A table. The family and the language that root us. The food, the music, the routines and the rituals, the way of greeting people. A sense that belonging has a physical address somewhere.

Interestingly, this is also the time my youngest would go on hunger strike.

She refused to eat our food. She wanted her nanny’s food. She wanted, in her view, the good stuff - “real” Chinese food. She was looking for her familiarity, and she was lost without it.

Manners, routines and the things we learn by watching

Nobody in my family ever sat my children down for a lecture on etiquette. It did not happen like that in Jaja’s kitchen, and it did not happen like that in my grandmother’s either.

The developmental research is unusually consistent here. Children inherit the practices of their communities through several channels at once - exploration, observation, participation, imitation and instruction - and the balance between them shifts from one family and one culture to the next. Where explicit teaching is rare, observation carries the load. Kids watch what the adults do, and then they do it.

That is why the sole of the foot and the rested elbow travel so well. Neither rule needs to be explained to a child in order to be learned. You see it corrected at the table, you see it expected, you see it honoured by the people you love, and it becomes yours.

Which is also why it is so easily lost. Family rituals are not the same as routines: a routine is functional and barely noticed, while a ritual carries continuity, commitment and meaning, and is the thing that gives the people taking part a sense of belonging. Routines can harden into rituals when they are repeated and treasured. Left untended, rituals fall back into routines and then quietly disappear.

That is the generational shift I can hear in my own house. The manners Khun Mae passed on to my children are not the manners my children will hand down by the same route, because the kitchen they learned them in no longer exists. The head is still high and the feet are still low, but nobody is standing at the counter to demonstrate it any more. What survives is whatever we deliberately keep doing.

My grandmother’s kitchen

Food has always fascinated me, and it did not begin with a restaurant or a cookbook. It began in my grandmother’s kitchen.

I would watch her cook, wedged between the counter and the fridge. That space belonged to me. It was, I liked to think, actually made for me, because I was the only one who ever stood there.

That kitchen had the most unbelievable character. Anyone who walked in could feel the history in the walls. The containers, the drawers, the marble-topped cabinets, the stove - they whispered stories about the food that had been made there. The cookery books lay open with pages marked by postcards sent from family and friends around the world, and the collected recipes spoke family tradition.

This is where my love of food, of cooking, and my curiosity about flavours and technique started.

To this day I hear my grandmother’s voice as I do certain things in the kitchen. Keep your surfaces clean. Watch the timing - what is in the oven, what is boiling, what needs resting. Tidy the surface as you go. Skills you may work out yourself in time, or simply not, and fail completely as a chef.

I like to say I can cook because of my grandmother, and because of my sense of belonging in her kitchen - in my spot between the fridge and the counter top, where she gave me abundant opportunity to fail gracefully while making me feel like a top chef doing so.

Years later I would call her from university to ask her questions about roasting a turkey, how to cook spinach - timing, technique, anything that crossed my mind.

Soon I became known for my cooking, and we came up with some house rules: I cooked for everyone, and they ate it. lol

Which came first, the ravioli or the dumpling?

My children have asked me this one seriously, the way children ask philosophical questions at bedtime.

What came first - the Chinese dumpling or the Italian ravioli? Which is the parent and which is the child? Did one travel the world and become the other, or did they each arrive separately, in kitchens that had never met?

It is a chicken-and-egg question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. The satisfying story, that Marco Polo came home from China and taught Italy about pasta, has been picked apart for decades. Frances Wood’s 1995 book Did Marco Polo Go to China? asked the wider question of whether he ever reached China at all, pointing out how much he failed to describe: tea, calligraphy, foot-binding, the Great Wall. Meanwhile durum pasta was already travelling the Mediterranean through Arab and North African trade routes long before any Venetian got as far as Beijing.

So we are left with the evidence, and the evidence is strange and wonderful.

In China, the earliest physical record of something dumpling-shaped is roughly 2,500 years old. In 1978, archaeologists opened a sealed bronze vessel from the tomb of a ruler of the small state of Xue, at Tengzhou in Shandong, and found yellow triangular pieces five or six centimetres across, with a stuffing-like crumb inside. In the cemeteries of Astana, near Turpan in Xinjiang, actual dumplings survive from the Jin and Tang dynasties, made of wheat and millet. Later tradition credits Zhang Zhongjing, a physician of the Eastern Han who lived from around 150 to 219 CE, with inventing jiaozi - dough wraps filled with herbs and mutton, he is said, to keep frostbitten ears warm.

In Italy, ravioli appear in the private letters of Francesco Datini, a merchant of Prato, in the fourteenth century. The mid-fourteenth-century Venetian manuscript Libro per cuoco describes ravioli of blanched, minced green herbs mixed with beaten egg and fresh cheese, simmered in broth and seasoned with sweet and strong spices. In the same century, “rauioles” appear in The Forme of Cury, the cookbook associated with the English royal court. Some food historians trace stuffed pasta in Italy back further still, to the Arab world’s sambusaj, a triangular piece of dough filled with meat, recorded at the time of Arab Sicily.

Even the shape has a family tree. A 2024 study of Italian pasta ripiena - filled pasta - used geography, shape, filling and cooking method to argue that, with the exception of Sardinia’s culurgiones, Italian filled pasta most likely had a single origin in the north of the country, and then divided into two branches: a ravioli clade, flatter, and a tortellini clade, three-dimensional. One family, two shapes, a thousand towns.

Put the two histories side by side and the answer arrives on its own. Neither came first. Most societies, once they got their hands on flour, made a dumpling of some kind. If there was an oven it became a little pie; if not, it was steamed, boiled or fried. The Chinese jiaozi, the Italian raviolo, the Tibetan momo, the Georgian khinkali, the Polish pierogi, the Latin American empanada and the Bengali kachori are cousins, not heirs. Nobody owns the idea.

The sweet potato belongs everywhere

If the dumpling is the argument about origin, the sweet potato is the argument about belonging - and it is the better story.

The sweet potato is American. It travelled out of the Americas on the same ships that carried everything else, and one of its journeys is recorded with unusual precision.

Chen Zhenlong, born around 1543, was a man from Fuzhou in Fujian who had gone to trade in Luzon, in the Philippines. He saw that sweet potato grew everywhere in the countryside, that people ate it raw or cooked, that it was cheap, easy and filling. He could see, as a merchant, what it might do for a province of his home that was short of arable land and regularly struck by drought.

Export was forbidden. In 1593, at fifty, he is said to have twisted sweet potato vines into a rope - or hidden them in a basket, or a bamboo tube, depending on which version of the family account you read - and carried them aboard a ship, seven days and nights, into Fujian.

It worked. Fujian was in drought. The provincial governor Jin Xuezeng had the crop trialled, and when it came out of the ground - small ones the length of an arm, large ones the size of a fist, tasting of pear and jujube - he ordered it planted across the province. People in Fujian named it jinshu, Jin’s potato, and then simply the foreign tuber. Chen Zhenlong’s family spent the next seven generations, more than a hundred and seventy years, carrying it onwards: to Zhejiang, to the Yangtze valley, to Shandong, to Henan, Hebei and Beijing. He is remembered in China as the father of the sweet potato, and his household as the only family in Chinese history devoted across generations to a single crop.

The same root went the other way too. It reached Europe in the sixteenth century, where for a while it was an expensive aristocratic novelty - “the most delicate rootes”, the English called it - before it settled quietly into ordinary life. In Portugal, batata-doce is the soft sweetness in the carrot milk we give babies, and the protected crop of Aljezur. In the Philippines it is kamote, everyday and unbothered. In China it is the roasted sweet potato sold from a drum on a winter street.

Nobody’s exotic. Everybody’s ordinary.

And look at the route: the Americas to Spain and Portugal, the Philippines to Fujian, Fujian to a country. The sweet potato never had to choose a nationality, and nobody asked it to. It belongs everywhere it landed, and it was claimed by no one.

Why a child will fight for a dumpling

Research into multicultural identity suggests that wellbeing is stronger when people can experience their different cultural identities as compatible parts of themselves. When those identities remain compartmentalised - or when the person feels required to choose one while concealing another - their sense of self may become less stable. For Third Culture Kids, identity integration has been associated with greater self-concept consistency and self-efficacy.

I have thought about that paragraph more than once at a dinner table.

A child cannot argue about culture. They do not have the words for identity integration, and most adults would struggle to find them. But a child can insist on a bowl. Food is the first and most concrete place where a mobile child gets to say: this part of me is real, and I would like it on the table tonight. It is edible belonging - the one form of identity that arrives with a smell, a temperature and a hand that made it.

Because that is what my youngest was asking for. She was not refusing Portuguese food. She was asking for a person. Her nanny had fed her in China, in Chinese, in the language she thought in first. When we left, the food was the last ordinary evidence that this woman had existed.

The same pattern runs through the resilience research I keep returning to: the single most common factor for children who end up doing well is the support of at least one stable and committed adult. What a hunger strike teaches you is that children will defend the evidence that a person loved them, long after they can no longer explain why.

Our lives and travels become the food we cook

Our lives and travels become the food we cook. It sounds like a line for a restaurant wall until you open your own cupboard and find it sitting there: my grandmother’s recipes, still in my hands, beside everything the years gave me. The flavours we carry into the food, the timing and the love we cook with - that is what a life actually leaves behind, and it is not a small inheritance. I still hear “keep your surfaces clean” and “watch the timing” in a kitchen my grandmother never stood in, cooking things she would not have recognised.

My burgers have become the inside of dumplings. That is the plainest evidence I can offer. A burger is as ordinary as food gets, and dumplings are how we eat here, and at some point the two stopped being separate meals in the same house. Nobody in my family thinks that is remarkable. It is not a fusion plate invented for a menu; it is what a household with four countries in it does with mince.

It is also, without anyone planning it, identity integration in its most literal form. You do not choose one and conceal the other. You put the two in the same pan, and what comes out is more itself than either of them was alone. That is what the research is measuring when it talks about self-concept consistency and self-efficacy; a family would call it dinner. A child who has never been asked to leave a flavour at the door grows up able to hold more than one thing at once - in a kitchen, in a classroom, in a country.

Which is why I would say food is the perfect vehicle for inquiry. We learn through food. We question and become curious through food. It is the least intimidating route into the hardest questions, and it starts with something a child already cares about: why are dumplings like ravioli? How did a root from the Americas become everyday in Fujian, in Aljezur, in the Philippines? Where does a dish come from when it has been travelling far longer than any of us can remember? Those are history, geography, economics, biology and ethics, and they arrive at the table already warm.

So I would rather not ask a child where they are from. That question assumes the answer is a place, and it usually isn’t. Ask how their food shows who they are, and you get a grandmother wedged between a counter and a fridge, a nanny who taught a child her routines as her real job, a merchant’s vines twisted into a rope, a summer in Portugal, and a burger that became a dumpling.

The question worth asking is not where are you from. It is this: how does your food show your identity?

What this means at ISI Cascais

Belonging through food sounds charming until somebody is clearing a table at one o’clock. It is a practical matter, and it asks for practical commitments.

• A child who will not eat the school food is giving us information, not making a scene. We ask what the food is standing for, and whose.
• We do not ask a child to eat their history away. A lunchbox is not a rule break; it is a passport.
• Family food stories belong in the curriculum. Mapping a recipe maps a migration, a trade route, an economy and a grandmother. Who We Are and How We Organise Ourselves are, in practice, often the same unit of inquiry.
• Belonging needs a recurring place, not a single celebration. Every family has their own version of summer in Portugal: the place they return to so that their children have somewhere to be from.
• The adults need feeding too. A parent who has given up a profession, a language and a kitchen for someone else’s opportunity needs a table as much as their child does.

Through Purpose, People, Place and Practice, we ask who is at the table, who is remembered at it, and who has been quietly left off it.

Neither came first

The children are older now. The hunger strike ended years ago, and my youngest eats almost everything - although she still says “real” Chinese food with exactly the same emphasis she used at six, and I have learned to take the hint.

So which came first, the dumpling or the ravioli? Neither. Both. They came from the same instinct: take something worth keeping, wrap it in dough, seal it carefully and cook it for the people you love. Every culture that found flour arrived at the same answer, and the differences are in the filling, the shape and the argument about how to fold it.

Look at who is standing in this story. A grandmother between her counter and her fridge, still telling me to watch the timing. Khun Mae, who taught my children how to greet someone older than themselves. Jaja and Paul, who made a foreign country into a home. A nanny whose food a six-year-old went hungry for. A merchant called Chen Zhenlong, twisting vines into a rope four hundred years ago, on the same route my own family would one day travel. None of them ever met. All of them are at the same table.

That is the sense of belonging I wanted for my children, and it is the one we are building at ISI Cascais. Not one country to choose, not one passport to explain, not one language to defend. A table with room at it, a few dishes that travelled a long way to get there, and an adult who notices when a child is asking for something that is really someone.

The thread running through these journals is the same one, told this time from the kitchen: when the child belongs, the whole family can sit down.

Where am I from?

I said at the start that the honest answer to where are you from is how long do you have. The deeper truth is that the question is not static. It is always in the making - a journey we are still creating, a chapter that is still being written. Change and development are the only constants in it, and anyone who answers it once and files the answer away has stopped paying attention.

So where am I from? Can I even answer that?

I know my home is Portugal. I know that without hesitating - the coastline, the language, the family, the summer we never gave up on. But then I look at what is actually on my table: the dumplings, the ravioli, the sweet potato that came into Fujian disguised as a rope and ended up in Aljezur and the Philippines. That table has been in more places than I have, and some of it has been there longer.

Which leaves me thinking that home is not a place I arrived at. It is something I keep making.

I know my home is Portugal. But when you look at my food, I think it tells the story better than I could.

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