And maybe potato salad is a better way of saying it.

Quoted from Will D. Campbell in Sustenance & Desire by Bascove.

As I drove in she was walking into the house with eggs for breakfast and home made biscuits ready for baking.
Somehow in rural Southern culture, food is always the first thought of the neighbors when there is trouble - that is something they do not have to discuss or feel self-conscious about. "Here, I brought you some fresh eggs for your breakfast. And here's a cake. And some potato salad." It means "I love you and I am sorry for what you are going through and I will share as much of your burden as I can." And maybe potato salad is a better way of saying it.

I first became consciously aware of this endearing Southern cultural attribute when I was ten or twelve, as an expatriate kid in Stockholm, Sweden.

Stockholm's was a small expatriate community, the American contingent about evenly divided between embassy staff and executives for American multinationals. A handful of whom were Southern.

I believe in this specific instance it was a terrorist hostage-taking, though in later cases it covered suicides, severe illnesses, and other traumas. As American kids in a hostile world, we had been drilled on varying our routes to school, maintaining situational awareness, what to do with over-solicitous strangers, what to do if you are grabbed, what to do if someone tells you your parents have had an accident and you need to go with them, etc. All just kind of background realities for third-culture kids having lived in countries from third-world to barely developing, to modern but plagued with turmoil.

The husband of one of my mother's friends was on a plane seized by terrorists; I think it might have been the Baader-Meinhof group. The wife was of course distraught - dealing the event at all of course; disorienting anyway but especially so in a foreign country, in a foreign language, and with virtually no network of family or institutional support. The American embassy being notorious among expatriates, at least in that era, for providing no support of expatriate Americans regardless of the circumstances.

There were the couple's kids to be fed and put to bed and gotten to school, etc. Somebody needed to be with the wife.

The Southern contingent of the American expatriate community swung into action. Who can get the kids to school? Who can be with her? And of course, almost over everything - Food. From the moment the community became aware of the hostage taking, everyone was already baking, everyone was already thinking ahead about food supplies and meals and keeping things warm and all the small elements of domesticity and love in a tight community lightening the burden of someone suffering.

As a kid, all this is going on in the background. Why all the telephone calls? What's going on? Why all the hushed conversations among adults?

My Mom explains. Well, why all the food? "Its what you do when something bad happens. It always helps."

You can't learn culture by reading about it. You learn it from living it.