My son clutches his Tupperware container. He is dressed in an Aran knit. Strikes mean we escaped World Book Day and find ourselves at an altogether more amenable replacement – Journey Day, in which each member of the class wears national dress and brings food from their own culture.
I’d heard of such things before, specifically the time my nephew Donncha had been tasked with the same, resulting in a now legendary photo of him beaming at his Tottenham school gates, sporting an Irish rugby shirt and a potato the size of his own head. Alas, we could not repeat this shot, as our heritage food offering was mandated to be bread. Limiting things to bread seemed oddly specific, and started me worrying about those children in my son’s class whose countries or cultures do not feature bread as a cornerstone of their diet. I needn’t have worried, as an hour on Google confirmed – and with a degree of certitude that seemed suspicious for such a strong claim – that there is not a country on earth which does not eat bread as some part of their culinary tradition or does not have a bread of their own. Our contribution was soda bread – made with flour, baking soda, salt and buttermilk, topped with Irish butter – which my son distributed to his table, accepting Indian chapatis, French madeleines and Romanian pasca in return.
