May 6
By Aratrika Das
But the hungry faces continue to appear in Ray’s films. In the Apu trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959), Apu and Durga’s mother, Sarbajaya, is constantly worried about food and feeding. The old aunt, Indir Thakrun, is desperately hungry. In Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955), misti signposts a lack, it is something that young hungry villagers desire and cannot have. Misti foregrounds the protagonists as pitiable bodies.
Jan 29
Contents: On the Table: Pathways between Food Studies and Food Writing (Issue 52)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jan 28
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Café Dissensus 