Pistachio or mango or strawberry or almond?
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Prompt: How do we develop tastes for food? How is food linked to migrant melancholia?
While walking home after daycare, my grandpa and I would stop by the local grocery store under Noor-e-Madina mosque in Parc-Extension. He would get calling cards and I would get kulfi. Pistachio or mango or strawberry or almond? I could never choose, so sometimes he got me two, one for later.
According to narrative theory, humans create stories to make sense of the world. These narratives are shaped by emotional connections we hold towards memories of people, places, food, and so on. The stories we compose today are translated onto the customs of our descendents. For instance, historian Sucheta Mazumdar explains how for contemporary Punjabis, eating makkai ki roti and sarson ka sag in the spring is more an ode to their rural roots as “sons of the soil” than it is a reflection of the levels of maize their community historically consumed (Mannur, 35).
The role of a migrant’s memories are no different. Ketu Ketrak chronicles how “the disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection with home.” (27) Tastes are developed through years of exposing our palette to various meals & cuisines, and our feelings associated with them. These feelings are exacerbated when the conditions in which they were born are lost. Bodily displacement from that in which one’s sense of self is grounded further exacerbates the migrant experience of dislocation. As a result, the migrant longs for that which is familiar, such as the tastes of home, in order to relive their connection to what is now a part of their imaginary.
For Madhur Jeffrey, “cooking “Indian” food stands in as a signifier of a connection” (31) with India. Even if mango chutney didn’t possess “any independent intrinsic value as comestible; its value inheres in its symbolic connection to an articulation of national identity.” (35) As trivial as the spread may be, the nostalgia associated with one’s homeland enhances the value of the cuisine associated with it.
Immigrant melancholia is characterized by remembrance and holding on to the traditions of the homeland, including cuisine. For this reason, Brits continue to claim that “cultural practices that were seen to demonstrate that Muslims isolated themselves and lacked appropriate political and religious moderation.” (Buettner, 164) As with football, the idea of “cultural citizenship” emerged and Muslims’ loyalties to England were once again questioned. Despite molding the UK’s now highly esteemed curry culture, British commentators in the 80s shifted all credit to their own “multiculturalism” and stripped the South Asian community of any agency.
In a word, food serves as an emotional and intellectual anchor to a far removed part of our imaginary, where our memories survive and the narrative lives on.
My sister & I had mango kulfi today. Inflation didn’t let us buy two, but nana would have.