Consumption of food as nostalgic practice...

This week’s articles on the consumption of food as nostalgic practice and a mode of processing experiences of displacement centre on several aspects. For Anita Mannur in “Culinary nostalgia,” diasporic community construction is a heterogeneous engagement, with the issue of availability playing a central role in the construction of this imagined community. The heterogeneity of culinary diasporic experience is shown in Mannur’s own retelling of migration, and the temporal and spatial diversity of this. Temporally, the changes in availability of spices and grocers, in the United States, and spatially, the move from Malaysia to Papua New Guinea, do in fact illustrate the difference in diasporic community engagement and practice, but simultaneously illustrate the continued presence and perseverance of food as a mode of collective identity construction around ‘the familiar’ (2010).

David Sutton takes a more rigorous scholarly take on the role of food in diasporic identity, and in particular, the nostalgia inherent in the partaking and consumption of specific foods which fit into the diasporic schema of ‘home’ - for examples, the role of basil and its scent (2001). In his article “Whole foods: Revitalization through everyday synesthetic experience,” Sutton takes on an anthropological examination of food as a means of reconstituting community post-displacement. He places this examination within notions of “the whole,” and the desire to return to this ‘whole’ following displacement, and the “recognition of a wider integrity of things....specifically triggered by the memory fo taste and smell” (2001, 125).

These two articles are not the most appropriate to directly compare and contrast, as they are written for different purposes and thus attempting to achieve differing objectives. While Sutton’s piece is a seemingly typical scholarly articles, Mannur’s piece was written for consumption (ha!) an Indian diasporic community on the internet. Nonetheless, I find there are interesting overlaps between the two. The first of these is clearly the links between movement/migration and food, and the role of food as an element in diasporic identity (re)construction. More interesting, to me at least, is the role of nostalgia in engagement with and consumption of foods which are linked in one’s own mind, or that of one’s community, as being connected to ideas of ‘home.’ Sutton places this nostalgia within the discourse of xenitia among Greeks. This xenitia, the “terrible overload” of this on people, is relieved, albeit only momentarily, by the consumption of ‘home’ - the consumption of food which grounds the consumer, individually and collectively, who otherwise feel(s) disconnected from the current position as displaced.

While this is certainly an interesting idea Sutton proposes, I think we should be careful to place too much emphasis on food as constituting an enormous part of diasporic identity construction, and rather focus on the relational aspects involved in ‘food.’ This is to say, while the very food itself may certainly be vital, the rituals surrounding the preparation and consumption are equally, if not more important in my view, and should not be ignored from discussions of ‘food.’

(1) For those of you who consider yourselves displaced (however you wish to define that), are there any particular foods that you miss and/or are able to consume?

(2) Do you feel the consumption is as ‘grounding’ of this displacement as I think Sutton argues?

(I personally have an unusual for rye bread - REAL rye bread, as it were. Very, very dark and dense. While it is available in certain less-than-ideal ways here in Toronto, I find these sorely lacking, and do not really derive any emotional satisfaction from this consumption.)