All in the family: New York food voice narratives

Abstract

New York is ripe in its potential for expression and grounding through food where, throughout the city, production, processing, preparation, gathering, and eating occur in varied forms. One part of a book about New York City foodways (Columbia University Press, forthcoming) includes four food voice narratives. This presentation excerpts three of them as illustration of the common ground of family with different food voice tenors. Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn-based narratives are in process: one uses Joseph Campbell's mythic structure as a frame to tell the story of redemption through food and an enduring peace with/piece of her Bronx grandmother's soul. In another, the owner of a Manhattan-based ethnic food store ponders the history of and his relationship to the family business and finds that there is a soul within. Finally, a writer describes her foodways-centered upbringing which, after archival and ethnographic research later in life, connects and weaves into the fabric of the food history of Brooklyn.