TL;DR: I'm not white and I ate a cardamon pod. Gross. Be thankful.
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// RANT:
Just had the coolest ‘I grew up in a multi-cultural, non-white household' moment:
Scene: I'm eating leftover chana masala, which I made in my instapot from a recipe from My Heart Beets – it's delicious and it's even better a day or two later.
I bit into an elachi and immediately try to spit the shell and small black seeds out. “Ugh, ELACHI!” I both think and say out loud.
My husband, who can tell by my face what I've bitten into says, “Ha! It wasn't me this time!”
After a few more minutes of spitting, I say, “I just said elachi and after thinking about it, the recipe called for cardamon. IS ‘Elachi' THE HINDI WORD FOR CARDAMON?”
Husband: “Yeah, I didn't know what that word meant…”
I proceed to verify that indeed, ‘elachi' is the Hindi word for cardamon, and somehow my brain is wired to associate that taste to that word in not-my-first-language, entirely unrelated to the English word ‘cardamon'. And that is the freaking coolest.
Thankful that my parents were their authentic selves and made my non-white, multiracial, but-grew-up-in-FoCO neural network extraordinarily fascinating.
I'm sure other multiracial folks may have similar experiences, and I genuinely love to celebrate those moments when they happen to me. Being so many colors isn't easy, I find people struggled with basic idea of biracial, and only if 1/2 of the ‘bi' is white. My beautiful and complex heritage of 3 entirely different and all non-white ethnicities is beyond the mental faculties of many.
Ahh, the deeply innate use of non-english words to describe visceral experiences… A small and wonderful reminder that I do have so much to be thankful for.
