Contents: On the Table: Pathways between Food Studies and Food Writing (Issue 52)
Contents: On the Table: Pathways between Food Studies and Food Writing (Issue 52)
Posts tagged ‘Food Studies’
Jan 29
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Guest-Editorial – On the Table: Pathways between Food Studies and Food Writing
By Somrita Urni Ganguly
Food is science. Food is art. Food is economics. Food is sociology, politics, and anthropology. Food is poetry, drama, culture, and identity. Indeed, as Amit Chaudhuri points out in the opening lines of his poem ‘Sweet Shop,’ from his 2019 anthology of verses Sweet Shop (Penguin Random House), food encompasses an entire universe in itself.
Hushed Husks
By Sufia Khatoon
I feel the impulse of life leaving my body –
first the heart
then the shadow of love from the nucleus of the skin peeling the husks.
炒面 | chāu-mèing | chow mein | চাউমিন
By Somrita Urni Ganguly
In Calcutta, chowmein was ubiquitous in the '90s in urban Bengali households./ Through a strange semantic change, the word was shortened to chow: the stir-friedness of the mein gaining precedence over the meinness of the mein in the foreign tongue.
A Review: Chandramohan S’s “Beef Poem”
By Appu Jacob John
He is an Indian English Dalit poet who is known for his outspoken poetry. “Beef Poem” tells us of the subaltern entity of a beef-eater. The poem is divided into fourteen stanzas or sections. Each section is a haiku on beef and how it represents the modern days of subaltern reality.
Chicken Khirmich Pilaf: Recreating A Lost Bengali Dish, And My Memories Of My Kitchen
By Manjari Chowdhury & Somrita Urni Ganguly
Much later, I realized that if I do really want to know about my Bengali culinary roots I must do what I believe the only way to gather knowledge, that is read books. What I discovered has left me brimming with pride: in Bengal women were publishing their own cookbooks at a time when women’s rights and women’s emancipation were unheard of in most parts of the world.
Inherited Recipes: Memories of Albina’s Lithuanian-American Kitchen
By Kathleen Rose Kahn & Justin Eli Kahn
Albina was proud of her Lithuanian-American heritage and her recipes are a testimony to that. She married into a Polish-American family, and together the family tried to assimilate into American culture and society. However, the three recipes that I share with you – comfort food for me – harks back to their strong East-European roots.
Strange Fruit: Or, to be Dalit, and Eat
By Rahee Punyashloka
Today, the Dalit culinaire faces a curious paradox. On the one hand, she feels like she has to discard practices from a past life. On the other hand, the alternative often means the pressure to gentrify her taste-buds to suit an order of things that she feels is out of place. All her life she has had to negotiate with this double-edge, hiding her own culinary identity as she navigates the new-found urban-public spaces, often, at a great cost.
Deceiving the Aam Aadmi: Sting Operations on Food Adulteration
By Diksha Narang
The food of the marketplace, in these news pieces, is described as deceptively shiny and inviting, but also dangerous. In such a reportage on the issue of adulteration, the food supply is problematized as potentially poisonous rather than being nourishing. To decipher the dividing line between poison and nourishment, the news media position the need for hypervigilance.
Too Gay an Oreo!: The Cultural Connotations of Queer(ing) Food
By Anil Pradhan
The socio-cultural connotations of both the identification between food and ‘queer’-ness and the subsequent objection to such transgressive relations point out to the crucial importance of food as/ in sexual politics. The controversy ensured that Oreo was inducted into the hall of fame of ‘Gay Food.’ But what is ‘Gay Food’? And how does this relational politics play a crucial role in sustaining and/ or resisting non-heteronormative sexualities in the socio-cultural schema of culinary associations?
Culture in my Curry: Food as a Site for Communication, Translation, and Cosmopolitanism
By Gaurav Kumar
This paper will consider food as a site of cultural complexity to analyse the ways in which certain comestibles, cuisines, names or prohibitions become sites for communication, translation or cosmopolitanism. The literary text at the focal point of this analysis will be Richard C. Morais’ The Hundred-Foot Journey, which narrates the story of Hassan Haji, a Muslim chef, born and raised in Bombay, but compelled, through the course of the novel, to make sense of the people and cuisines of London, Lumiere, and Paris.
Delicious Fictions: Reading Food in Literature
By Nimisha Sinha
Food has a fascinating ability to transform itself completely: its materiality is always in flux, continually changing until it is embodied and eventually discarded. Each stage of this change holds distinct interpretive peculiarity, and studying the complex networks of food can allow us to locate it in relation to other modalities of power.
Zahra Foundation, and Food as Community Service: A Report
By Taiyaba Ali
Zahra Café and Restaurant opened its first outlet in August 2018, the second one came up in the very next month, and by November they were able to open the door of their third and the biggest venture. While the café is Saif and Javed’s brainchild, their childhood friends and fellow students at the University – Shaghil Iqbal and Fahad Masood Farooqui – joined Zahra’s core team and now all four manage the Café as well as its charity initiatives. The instant popularity of their food made them a local favourite and helped them generate more funds for the iftar distribution drive in the slums of Batla House, Madanpur Khadar, and also the Rohingya refugee camps in Kalindi Kunj and Shram Vihar. Since 2017, the Zahra Foundation has been helping nearly 500 families each year during the month of Ramzan.
Café Dissensus 