As you may have noticed, I changed the name of the blog. Same look, same feel, same sparkling wit—just a new name.

I thought an explanation was needed, so here it goes.

I named Baby Ghetto Gourmet when I was pregnant and unemployed. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those things, but at the time I was making on-the-spot decisions without much forethought, pretty much due to the emotional ups and downs that come with pregnancy and unemployment.

And I had just seen Julie & Julia, and thought that having a food blog would be so cool. Silly me, I didn’t realize that everyone else thought having a food blog would be so cool.

Also, the name Baby Ghetto Gourmet might just seem downright weird to anyone who doesn’t live in the Bay Area or is a huge foodie. (Named after the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley, blah blah blah.)

So the change to Third Culture. Why Third Culture, you may ask? I first heard the name from a friend and former coworker, CE, who had taught high school to expats in Austria. Apparently, it’s a term for kids of expats who grow up all over the world, and at some point lose a sense of belonging to their “home” country. The State Department website has a pretty extensive description of it.

Well, when I was preggers and unemployed, I’d meet up with CE (also unemployed at the time, though he wasn’t pregnant) once in a while, where we would discuss our idea for a TV show, which in our mind would be called Third Culture.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about the term, and wanted to make it somehow mine (CE doesn’t mind—I already asked his permission).

I thought the term was much more representative of what I wanted the blog to be about. Neither I nor A were born in the U.S. He moved here from Italy as an adult, and I moved here from Iran when I was 9. But my 20s were spent in Italy, so I have spent almost half of my life living on non-American soil.

I carry and American passport and an Italian passport, but don’t feel like either fully represents who I am. I don’t have an Iranian passport, but you can’t really shake the culture in which you were born. So I’m neither here nor there, nor the other place.

A carries an American and Italian passport, but definitely feels more Italian than American, and rightly so.

Now we have a daughter who was born in the U.S., but into a family that is going to be somewhat different from her friends’. She’ll have the advantage of amazing fusion cuisine, and will hopefully have tri-linguist tendencies. But she will also have to deal with parents who don’t know all the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and never took PB&J to school for lunch.

So I hope the new blog name will inspire me to post about the challenges and joys of this aspect of parenthood. Although I will probably still write about my favorite recipes, cool buildings, and random things that have nothing to do with the Third Culture culture.

So stay tuned.