Camp food

Published online on Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008

When people think of camp food, images of summer camp with crowded mess halls and less than adequate food come to mind. Add to the mental picture: the opportunity to eat with kids your own age and away from parents. Imagine tables of your own!

For Japanese-Americans during World War II, the idea of "camp" had different meaning. About 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry spent their summers, winters, springs and autumns in relocation camps, isolated in desolate prisons scattered across remote parts of the United States from 1942-1946. Their crime: They looked like the enemy.

Every year as spring breaks, I think about my family in "camp." I was born afterward, but my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles endured camp food. Their experience has become part of their lives, part of a Japanese-American history that completes their identity.

I recently journeyed to Gila River Relocation Center, south of Phoenix, Ariz. My family was interned at Canal Camp, one of the two sites at Gila, each housing more than 5,000 Japanese-Americans. Today, citrus groves have replaced the desert and the nearby small towns in the 1940s are now growth areas of an expanding Phoenix. A casino and resort lie a few miles to the north.

But Canal Camp remains secluded, tucked behind a dike and canal bank. When I entered the site, the starkness returned. Among the sagebrush lay scattered cement foundations that supported hundreds of barracks, housing thousands of Japanese-Americans from our Valley. The crushed gravel roads still make a grid pattern etched into the desert earth. In the breeze and wind, I could almost hear voices of the 5,000 who were forced to call this home.

I traveled with my wife and children. I wanted them to walk the ruins and understand some of the stories my parents, their grandparents, had told them. The cement pillars, the rusting tin cans, even a strand of barbed wire -- these relics represented stories that refused to be forgotten.

We stood where my mom lived: Block 22-2-D. My dad was in the next block, 23-3-C. All the camps were divided into blocks, each housing 400-500 residents and had a central area for showers, lavatories, laundry and a mess hall. Each block had barracks (the second number) and each barrack was divided into sections (the letters). My folks shared a barrack with three other families; initially, they hung blankets and sheets as walls.

The everyday life intrigued me the most. Denied freedom of travel, meals became focal points of social exchange. Summer camp mess halls? Not quite.

Food became a major issue. Evacuation and relocation had caused major upheaval, a radical change in diet.

For Japanese-Americans, rice had become a staple at every meal. Like most immigrants from Asia, rice was synonymous with their sensibility. Japanese had to have rice -- a culinary reality, a comfort food providing a sense of identity. Denying rice was akin to rejecting a sensory need, forsaking a part of who you were.

Suddenly, nontraditional diets became part of their routine. They ate government commodity foods such as hot dogs, kidney, Spam and potatoes. Often the meat was from Army surplus supplies.

"Mutton," my dad once told me. "We had to eat mutton. Old mutton. Bad mutton. Someone told me it was like lamb, but boy, were they wrong. Don't ever serve me mutton again."

As time passed, the authorities did respond to the complaints and protests. Rice finally found a place at the table. But in the meantime, something had been erased from meals: family. Uprooted from homes and dinner tables and thrust into a communal eating environment, many families suddenly stopped eating together. Kids, especially teenage kids, ate with their friends.