You Love My Food, You Hate Me
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Almost all mediums that can transport us towards a feeling of “home” do not encompass all of our senses. Videos are visual and auditory, clothing is visual and tactile, perfume is olfactory. Food, however, is visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory. A remnant of home that can be embodied. Munnar explores the diaspora's relationship to food, especially within the context of cultures that are being viewed as ones the “enemy” inhabits. Eating, and eating within a restaurant becomes an act that has social and political weight that complicates the diaspora’s feeling towards finding community through food.
“Culinary citizenship” (29) allows diaspora members to conceptualize their identities through food. I don’t believe taste can be linked to a certain place, time, or person. Rather it is an intermingling, or conversation between past generations, the cultures that imposed themselves, and the cultures that found love with the other, along with the influences of individual migrations, colonization, and religion. My mother a Muslim craves Panettone, an Italian Christmas speciality, every December. She associates it with growing up in Asmara. And when I am in Montréal or Toronto I lament how horrible the shawarma is compared to Ottawa. I miss my mother’s Sudanese, and Habesha cooking. The smell of coffee, its associations with peace, and a moment to sit down and conversate. My father’s configuration of shatta and lime which he puts on everything. My father's consistent choice of vanilla ice cream, linked to it being one of the only flavours he had available growing up. Even sometimes, I miss the berbere my mother gave me when I said a bad word. How this was the cause of my love of spice, and my mouth's insistence on using bad words. If nostalgia is defined as a “cultural practice” (252) , I see food as a labour of nostalgia, when engaging in its creation, memory, and taste.
As some embrace cuisines, but reject the people behind them, food consumption acts as a selective form of acceptance or rejection within public and private spaces. Enemy Kitchen encourages these conversations about the meaning of eating together. Munnar writes that these curations of spaces can be seen as “queer curation” (126) that ,“ bring together unlikely friends to destabilize the machinations of neoliberal multiculturalism”(126). In this past year many of us have brought more thought into eating, and food. That our deliberate choices into where we choose to eat can directly benefit people who align with or oppose our politics and identities. This is an important consideration in the context of America's culinary diplomacy initiatives, as to what truly distinguishes it from 'food washing'?"
This selective acceptance/consumption of components of the people but not the people themselves is reflected in almost all aspects of society today. They accept and desire the immigrant art, clothing, jewellery, perfume, skincare, and even elements of physical features but them, the actual people? Now that is going a bit too far.