Standing in front of the Cheese Case at Trader Joe’s
Today marks my second Trader Joe’s anniversary. For many, this occasion doesn’t exist. But for me, it’s a monumental day. During my two years in a cold, lonely country, TJ’s gifted me a small weekly ritual — the act of planning meals, crafting my Google Keep grocery list, and nourishing myself with novel snacks. For 30 minutes each week, I could cocoon myself in the soft, slightly flirtatious atmosphere of Trader Joe’s, always accompanied by their light, mood-lifting music.
I remember my first Trader Joe’s outing particularly well. And the most important thing I remember about it is the cheese case.
About a few months ago in a wedding hall turned training center in Ranchi, Jharkhand I was conducting surveyor training for about a 100 surveyors on our dietary diversity module. After our daily chai and samosa break, we’d hit the inevitable afternoon slump. The module was particularly repetitive — a barrage of food items. I had done my usual explanations about what to count under tubers, legumes, reminding everyone to categorize okra as an “other vegetable” and making sure to train everyone to ask the “did you eat non vegetarian food yesterday” questions discreetly. I had reached the question “Did you/your child consume any milk products such as milk, paneer, dahi, or cheese yesterday?” when I was stopped by a surveyor. “Ma’am what is cheese?”
I paused, feeling the spotlight of 100 pairs of eyes on me. How do you explain cheese to someone who’s never encountered it? It’s like trying to describe color to a colorblind person, or explaining the internet to a time traveler from the 1800s. I fumbled through an explanation. I tried another route of explaining it by explaining the cheese-making process. I tried to explain that sometimes people ate it with bread, or on top of pizzas. I got a few understanding nods but my words mostly fell flat, adding to more confusion.
“Is it like butter?” someone asked. “Not really, but for this purpose, you could think of it like so, maybe…” I replied.
“No, it must be something sweet if you put it on bread, like jam?” another chimed in.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” I said. I could sense this would be a surveyor question that leads to murmurings and an eventual confusion that ripples around the room while I can do nothing but stand doubtfully centre-stage with a mic in my hand while waiting for an inspirational answer to hit me. I found myself wishing I’d brought cheese slices to pass around for show-and-tell, kicking myself for not having anticipated this question and being more prepared.
Recognizing my dilemma, our Project Associate, Arun ji, stepped in. With his booming voice, he declared, “The RESPONDENT is the one who has to answer this! If she has eaten cheese, she will OBVIOUSLY know what it is. You’re supposed to ASK the question, so it’s fine if you don’t know what cheese is!” And just like that, with the confidence of a man who’s never let anyone stump him over dairy products, we moved on.
Fast forward to August 2022, I found myself physically before the Trader Joe’s cheese case, but mentally back in Ranchi surrounded with all things that back then were unfamiliar but now I achingly longed for as my familiar. The stark contrast between then and now hit me sharply. In mere months, I’d transitioned from being the “Ma’am from Delhi” in Ranchi to confused slightly scared student in Cambridge — two vastly different worlds, yet in both, I remained an outsider.
In Ranchi, I was the privileged outsider, acutely aware of the income disparity between myself and those I worked with. My position was one of relative power and knowledge, yet I constantly felt humbled by the resilience and wisdom of those I met. It was a constant reminder to myself to never take things for granted, to always acknowledge my privilege and always be aware of the space I took and all that I had to learn from our field team and our respondents.
Now, standing in this gleaming aisle of fancy sounding cheeses, in Cambridge, surrounded by the polished classrooms at HKS and the unnaturally clean streets I was a different kind of outsider. One I didn’t have the vocabulary for yet. I was scared — scared of accidentally revealing that I definitely did not know enough of the world to belong at HKS, and then a deeper fear — of forgetting the things I had seen and how profoundly they had changed me.
I hadn’t changed, but everything around me had shifted dramatically. This raised pressing questions: How do I reconcile my two worlds? How do I justify to myself that inhabiting the world in Jharkhand helped me be here in this world? More importantly, how does the world justify to me that these two realities co-exist on our planet, a mere 20-hour flight apart? Where one starves and the other feasts? And then the deeper question that made me go to graduate school in the first place. How do I use my responsibility that comes with my privilege which will only grow once I complete my degree to do something about this?
The income inequality I had witnessed first hand in Jharkhand now seemed to stretch across continents, a stark reminder of how our world has unjustly created winners and losers. In our survey districts, a family’s entire monthly food budget might equal the price of a single artisanal cheese here. Now, two years later it is not as if I am any closer to having the answers to my questions but I am more sure of what exactly is the piece of the development puzzle I care most deeply about.
In a pessimistic view of things, I know now even more surely than before that there is not much I can do alone. But I am fully convinced now that there is power in trying anyway. In this trying there is potential for change — however small it may be.
