The Sutton piece is a discussion on how food represents much more that just sustenance, but is also a means of creating identity. From preparation to consumption, Sutton explains that it fosters the same feelings of home that was once enjoyed. Specifically, Sutton is making reference to the Greek Diasporic community and their use of food to further national identify and pride amongst themselves…whereby doing so, re-creating a collective Greek identity. It is a discussion on the reconstruction of this “lost” identity that Sutton is trying to focus on. In this “loss” I mean to say the feelings of home and community that have either been shifted away from those individuals, or taken away all together due to, what Sutton calls, displacement. Sutton is taking Jim Fernandez’s retrospective ideas on sensory anthropology, and furthering it. The idea of wholeness, which Sutton touches on throughout the piece, is the reconstitution of the aforementioned sense of community, which has been lost in transition, from home to the new environment. This fractured sense of identity is brought back together through food, made in the new home and or old… but essentially, it is a reminder of who “we are” as more than just individuals, but within the context of shared ethnical distinctiveness and culture.
Much of these same core ideas are brought into discussion in the Mannur piece, where she is discussing nostalgia as a means of reconstituting home, through food.
Mannur delves into her own past by referring to the cuisine she had as a child…and the inventive way her mother would use spices and uncongenial methods for re-creating the food they enjoyed back home. This innovative way of taking something new and making it familiar again is part and parcel to what Sutton was referring to in his point on “wholeness”… patching up fragments of the old with things from the new.
Mannur also takes this idea further by bringing the idea of entrepreneurship into play. By taking these new ways of cooking and successfully re-creating memories through food, there begins to be a niche market for this ethnic food, which ties into the feeling of being closer to ethnic identity. By offering a passage way to “home,” this food is able to transport the consumer back to comfort and familiarity…and this is what Mannur is saying can also be profitable… ultimately giving back to the community by contributing to the success of those in it.
Questions:
1. Simply, this imagined home (I refer to second generation immigrants, which some of us are) that is conjured by cooking affects the parents and grandparents who prepare them, but what of ‘us’? What emotions do we garner from it? The story that we’ve been told about home?
2. Do you have a dish that reminds you of home… but which home if any are we talking about? Canada, or one re-created here?
Hi Neil
ReplyDeleteAbout question 1: when we eat we gather the emotions from stories told to us, but over time i believe we turn those stories as our own memories and experiences. I believe we transform the experiences of our grandfathers with our own experiences of home and create a 'new' association with a type of food.
Hi Neil,
ReplyDeleteI like your summary of Sutton's article. I found it somewhat difficult to stay 100% focused on the connections between Sutton's use of Fernandez's theory of "the whole," and the main objective of the article and I think you do a good job of condensing the points. Nonetheless, I don't find Sutton adequately argued how food acts as a reconstituting glue.. I think your first set of questions points to the links though - how we talk/act around food is important, perhaps equally so, as the food itself. The narrative of food and its consumption enable narratives of home/present/identity (collective and self), intangible notions, to be articulated around a tangible object. So, that's not really answering your question, but I clearly agree that the story we tell about food is important!