For Omolola “Lola” Lawrence, growing up as the first child and only girl in a Yoruba family in western Nigeria meant being expected to cook. If things were happening in the kitchen, she remembers that “as a girl-child, it was rude to be watching TV and not help out.” Her mother, a busy career woman, brought in her younger sister to help with the kids and household, a common practice in Nigeria, and Lola learned a great deal from this auntie. Before age nine, she explains, “I was boiling rice, frying fish, making plantain — basic stuff.”
As is standard in communal societies, Nigerian children receive praise for learning behaviors that uphold traditional social values. One of Lola’s strongest memories is hearing her mother brag about a friend’s daughters who were already making “swallow,” slang for starchy balls made of pounded yam or reconstituted flours from yam, cassava or plantain. Dipped into stews or soups and swallowed without chewing, these soft balls compose the basis of Nigerian meals. Lola remembers wanting to prepare this staple so that her mother could brag too. “Once you hear yourself being compared to someone your age or a little younger, it makes you want to beef up your kitchen skills.”
It was in her food and nutrition class at boarding school in Lagos State that she received positive feedback on her vegetable cooking skills, mastering dishes like ewa riro (creamy black-eyed peas stewed in palm oil) and efo riro (spinach stew made with locust beans and dried fish). For the final, students planned their meals, purchased the ingredients at the market, and presented their dishes. Like on the cooking competitions now popular on television, teachers would visit each student’s table with a spoon, tasting and giving feedback.
“It was a controlled environment,” Lola remarks. Perhaps this paved the way for her work as an ethics and compliance manager, a position she moved into six months ago after joining Hormel Foods as a senior internal auditor in 2020. She describes her current job responsibilities as vast, encompassing providing policies, procedures and structures for compliance with industry regulations, creating safe spaces for workers to report concerns, and doing a continual risk assessment.
In the meantime, she seizes every opportunity to share her Nigerian food culture at neighborhood parties. She even did this once at an informal team event at Hormel Foods, and she looks forward to doing more.
“I don’t keep quiet about where I’m from!” she declares with a laugh. As nearly all Nigerian celebrations involve food, she views gatherings as invitations to connect with others and tell a cultural story. She describes making savory meat pies from scratch, and taking “Nigerian-themed chicken” to neighbors. “I want people to have a taste of how it was for me back home,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Please when you eat this, picture yourself in Nigeria.’”
Using food as a travel portal to cross time, space and culture is a time-honored practice shared by homesick immigrants. As Lola puts it, “You have a taste of something, and you remember the old times when things were like this, people were like that, and we didn’t have so many screens and devices. Food culture is memory; it’s how we can show how we celebrate who we are.”
