How our food culture in Trinidad and Tobago can offer healing
Originally written for Namaste Caribbean. All photos by Candice Alaska. Do not replicate without permission.
“Food rituals are intergenerational, just as trauma is. So perhaps traditions of eating hold the key to healing emotional injuries.”
A few weeks ago, I made friends with someone in the line by the mechanic while waiting to get an inspection done. If you know how long car inspections in Trinidad tend to take, then you know how much time I had on my hands. One thing led to another, and the topic of conversation eventually landed on– where it have to dine in Trinidad that serves local food?
We have a very rich food culture in Trinidad and Tobago, and it’s one of the things that we most pride ourselves on, but finding good dine-in places that serve our food isn’t easy.
Eventually, after a lot of research, I ended up finding a great dine-in restaurant in Price Plaza, Chaguanas, that serves local food, called River Lime.
For those not familiar with the language, a ‘lime’ in Trinidad is like a gathering, although much more informal than the word ‘gathering’ may connote. To lime is basically to hang out with somebody or in a group, and a ‘river lime’ is, as you can probably guess, a lime that takes place by a river.
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“Food-sharing is an important way we relate to one another in Trinidadian culture.
A river lime is a cultural experience. People tend to carry pots and cook food by the river. Sometimes you make friends with people by the river and end up liming and sharing food with them, too.
Food-sharing is an important way we relate to one another in Trinidadian culture. In a lot of Trinidadian households, you don’t leave without at least eating something. Many of our traditions involve sharing food and our relationships are often created and sustained over food. Food is how we remember many of our relatives expressing their care. Like my aunt who makes bake and salt fish all the time now, because I told her one time that I really like the way she makes it. These little gestures say, I want you to be fed and happy. You are cared for.
We can’t underestimate the significance of food in our relationships.
Ann-Marie Boodram, who co-owns River Lime with her husband, reminisces over growing up in Chase Village where her grandmother would make roti for the entire neighbourhood.
“I think where I got entertaining and taking care of people from is my grandparents. My grandparents were always cooking and feeding people. Sometimes, people with big families didn’t have enough, so my grandmother would cook big pots of food for everybody. Sometimes, she would make fifty, sixty rotis. I grew up with her feeding the village.”
The restaurant, River Lime, was opened in late 2021, by Ann-Marie and her husband, Errol Boodram, who wanted a space where people could eat local food and feel as comfortable as if they were liming by a friend.
Some of the elements that distinguish River Lime from other restaurants is the communal atmosphere, where, unlike other restaurants, people tend to make friends and lime with people from neighbouring tables.
“When you go to a river in Trinidad, you set up your pot, you have your little space there, but whoever is your neighbour at the river, you tend to lime with them on both sides,” recalls Ann-Marie. “When you go to a fine dining restaurant, you don’t speak to the people next door. And it’s not just about speaking to the people next door, but it’s also about appreciating our uniqueness as Trinidadians.”
Liming and making old talk with people you just met are things that Trinidadians tend to do– like with the person waiting next to you in the line for a car inspection, for example.
Errol has always found joy in cheering people up, and food has been a central part of that, from hosting and cooking for guests at his home in Penal to organising a cook for somebody because they were feeling down.
Errol’s grandparents were passengers in the last ship to arrive from India with indentured labourers, and preserving his Indian heritage has always been important to him.
Standing in the kitchen with Ann-Marie at River Lime as one of the cooks rolls out the dough for a sada roti with a bailna and waits for the tawah to heat up, she tells me how this place has only been established a little over a year ago, and already the demand for it has been high.
There are many reasons for this, one being the fact that eating with utensils is only optional here. “At River Lime,” she says, “if you want to eat with your hands, you want to eat rice, dhal and duck and you want to eat with your hands, it’s fine.”
Importantly, Ann-Marie notes that at other restaurants, “you have to eat with knife and fork, you have to follow certain ‘protocols’, because the person next to you might look at you differently.” Eating with your hands is not only a significant part of Indian culture, but in many other cultures around the world as well, including African cultures.
“There are a lot of medical and scientific benefits to eating with your hands. Also, growing up with my grandmother, she used to feed me with her hands. And that is like a different level of love and connection that you feel.”
These traditions around eating and feeding others with your hands reflect how touch is an important part of Indian culture.
“The food just tastes better also,” she adds.
Food as a form of healing
Historical trauma, a concept developed by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart, is the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma”-- such as indentureship.
One of the most notorious impacts of historical trauma is that, through various means, it leads to a loss of culture. That loss can reverberate for generations, and it takes care and intention to make culture a stronger part of our lives.
Trauma, of all kinds, is also inherently deeply isolating.
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“Our traditions around food can actually remind us that we are connected to a collective, including to our ancestors.
Spaces like River Lime can offer Trinidadians access to our cultural elements and to community. Reconnecting to our cultural traditions can actually also help us heal from our historical trauma.
For one, culture can be a great source of connection. Trauma interrupts our sense of belonging, and suffering can increase when people feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Our traditions around food can actually remind us that we are connected to a collective, including to our ancestors.
Our traditions around food are connections to our ancestors-– even if our recipes and some of our traditions have evolved over time to become uniquely Trinbagonian.
Tomato choka, for example, a staple in Trinidad, is reminiscent of Bihar’s litti choka.
Bangalore-based journalist, Ruth Dsouza Prabhu, writes, “The litti choka possibly travelled with [the indentured Indians from Bihar] but, with only white flour being available to them on the journey and on the plantations they worked, the litti died out leaving only the choka (the relish) and the roti.”
The foods we eat, the spices we use, even the utensils that we use to cook with are evidence of our relationships to our past, even as our food culture evolves over time. And the connection to our ancestors and to one another that they evoke is a powerful tool in disrupting the isolation and sense of belonging nowhere that often accompany trauma.
Culture reminds us in a visceral, felt sense that we belong to something larger. Our interpersonal bonds may break sometimes, as often happens when trauma occurs, but culture is a reminder of our connection to a collective, and, across cultures, food in particular has often been a way that people have connected to one another.
As psychotherapist, Resmaa Menakem, writes, “More than anything, culture creates a sense of belonging– and belonging makes our bodies feel safe.”
Another way that our traditions around food in Trinidad and Tobago can facilitate healing is by their communal nature. Food is often a communal activity in Trinidad and Tobago— sharing food with loved ones, cooking for one another, organising limes around food— and they create opportunities for co-regulation.
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“Healing doesn’t only happen in clinical spaces like a therapist’s office— it also happens in our kitchens, in our neighbours’ homes, by the doubles vendor, at a river lime.
Co-regulation is the process by which we become more settled and feel safer in the presence of others. Resmaa Menakem refers to it as “an energy exchange”.
Co-regulation is a key part of a therapeutic relationship, but it also just takes place in a lime, sitting and eating buss-up-shot with friends, eating doubles with others by the doubles man. It’s an act of connection and it happens in our everyday lives, often around food.
As Ann-Marie says of River Lime and other spaces where Trinidadians get to lime and eat cultural foods, “It gives people a space to just be yourself and vent sometimes, because the pressures of this world… it’s a lot.”
Healing doesn’t only happen in clinical spaces like a therapist’s office— it also happens in our kitchens, in our neighbours’ homes, by the doubles vendor, at a river lime.
Our food cultures are significant because they link us to one another across time and space. They offer connection and belonging.
According to Ann-Marie, for many of the younger generations who visit River Lime, the cultural elements of the space help to reconnect them to their grandparents through memory:
There are people who would say that the younger generation kind of lose touch with their culture. But that’s not it; there’s not much offered to them. Growing up, we were exposed to a lot more, because even on the TV channels, they would have Indian movies on a Sunday and, then, there was Mastana Bahar, there was Indian Variety. But now, it kind of dwindled.
Those Mastana Bahar and Indian Variety shows, people maybe didn’t realise it at the time, but that was like a staple and it was something that really reminded you of where you came from, where you could be going.
And, so, it wasn’t planned this way, but [River Lime is] bridging that gap, because we have a lot of youths coming here and they say, “Aunty Ann-Marie, we happy we could come and sit down and eat dhalpurie and we listening to this music. This remind me of long ago with my grandparents, when we used to go by my Nani, by my Aja”.
Food can bring a feeling of home and a sense of safety, which is the antithesis of trauma that deprives us of feeling safe. The pursuit of healing from trauma involves finding a way to feel safe again, and for many, our cultural foods, like eating a bake and salt fish prepared by somebody meaningful to you, can offer a sense of safety.
Maintaining our culture through food can be one way that we disrupt our intergenerational inheritance of trauma in Trinidad and Tobago, and it’s what makes spaces like River Lime that allow us to keep that culture alive so important.
Food can mean belonging, connection, care and safety. What other possibilities exist for us in Trinidad and Tobago to use our rich food culture as means of connection, joy and healing? In what other ways can we bring our foods and our cultural practices around them into easily accessible spaces?
Candice is a writer, photographer, anti-oppression mental health advocate, and founder of Trinidad-based mental health movement, Not Okay.