Hamburg, December 2018
As we walked from Keziah’s house to the U-Bahn [subway] station, I asked her how she learned to cook. “My grandmother was a caterer,” she told me, “like my dad is.” She always used to help when she went home from boarding school in Ghana, she continued. When she came to Germany, she thought she wouldn’t have to do that anymore, but she does have to help her dad with catering. Her younger sister, who has grown up in Hamburg, only cooks ‘German food’ like lasagne and Kartoffel [potatoes], but doesn’t know how to cook Ghanaian food. As we entered the station she said, “It’s one of the advantages of growing up in Ghana, that by age 11, you know how to cook.” I didn’t hear her clearly walking down the windy and cold stairs onto the platform, and I asked, “Did you say ‘advantage’?” – “Yes, it’s an advantage, because here kids don’t learn it, but in Ghana, you do, and you get those skills.”