Food Voice Research Articles

Biryani with the Golden Girls: Muslim South Asian-American women’s food voices

ABSTRACT Muslim women communicate through food to express family and community belonging. This paper applies Hauck’s concept of the “food voice” (1992) as a tool to unpack multiple aspects of identity for Muslim Indian American women. Cooking together, eating together, and preserving these recipes and dishes is an important part of resistance work for women of color, and the history of racialized women in the United States (Williams-Forson 2006, Abarca 2006). For the Muslim Indian women in Florida with whom I spoke, halal food reveals ethnic, religious, political, and gendered identities. Using charlas culinarias or kitchen chats with a small group of Muslim Indian women, I learned about Muslim women’s contribution to maintaining their ethnic and religious identities in Tampa, Florida, through their food voices.

Decentering Food Pedagogies

In this collaborative essay, five gastrofeminists from various disciplines, mainly literature, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and diverse locations of Global South and Global North, share four collaborative experiments built around two axioms: to integrate experiences of students as gendered and racialized subjects in their experiential learning irrespective of disciplinary boundaries, and to integrate critical feminist scholarship that destabilizes ethnocentric notions around consumption, production, and distribution of food. Through the four collaborative experiments: students’ food voice, autobiographies, collective kusina, and food walks, the pedagogues bring embodied lived experience in conversation with critical pedagogy, expanding some of the foundational ideas of feminist pedagogy, especially of not treating theory, research, and experience as independent silos. Each of these collaborative experiments calls for a need to create dialogic space through a collaborative co-learning process and offers a decolonial reading of texts through recognizing the difference and diversity of our classrooms.

Curious Emblems

Abstract As mainstream examples of Polish foodways, pierogi and pączki function as what Michael Owen Jones refers to as “emblems of ethnicity,” symbolizing Polishness for Americans with no ancestral ties to this ethnic group. In this article, I explore the opposite: foods that serve as emblems of ethnicity when the emblems in question are of contested ethnic origin. I also examine what that uncertainty means for the construction and transmission of ethnic identity. As documented in the literature, ethnic identity can be performed through food. Family recipes provide the script for this performance, allowing members of an ethnic group to navigate the boundary of inclusion with foods that—to them—symbolize ethnicity. Drawing on a case study involving a special-occasion cookie served at Wigilia and multigenerational interviews with my Polish American family supplemented by analytic autoethnography, I argue that an ethnic emblem need not be authentic to transmit ethnic identity. Informed by Annie Hauck's concept of the food voice, I posit that something as fragile as one family recipe can speak with multiple food voices to reproduce and resurrect ethnic identity, regardless of authenticity or provenance because, as objects of material culture, family recipes are linked not to a place but to the people—and the ethnic identity of the people—who made them.

The Food Voice Emerges in an Ethnography of Polish Americans

The Food Voice Emerges in an Ethnography of Polish Americans

Review of Canadian literary fare by Nathalie Cooke, Shelley Boyd, with Alexia Moyer

This review looks at Canadian Literary Fare by Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd, with Alexia Moyer. The book gives an unconventional exploration of 'food voices' in Canadian literature. The authors examine the food narratives of celebrated Canadian writers, like Alice Munro, Eden Robinson, Fred Wah, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tomson Highway, Rabindranath Maharaj, and others. The book explores the interactions between literary characters and food, challenging preconceptions about Canadian cuisine. It highlights the voices of Indigenous and immigrant writers, emphasizing the role of food in decolonization and reshaping identities. The authors discuss iconic Canadian foods, the symbolism of food markets, and food as demonstrative of struggles with poverty. Canadian Literary Fare is a valuable resource for those interested in the interplay between food culture and identity. It provides a refreshing departure from traditional approaches, examining Canadian culture through alternative 'food voices'.

Charlas culinarias (culinary chats): A methodology and pedagogy expanding a food consciousness

ABSTRACT Charlas culinarias as methodology and pedagogy, simply put, is about democratizing knowledge to impact the formation of a food consciousness. It is through the development of a food consciousness that allows students to take their familial culinary knowledge and practices and reflect how they form part of larger complex, complicated, and contradictory food systems. Over the years, I’ve learned that for students to think critically about Belasco’s claim that “food matters” and that “it has weight” and “it weighs us down,” they must develop a food consciousness (2008, 2). This consciousness increases their ability to understand the impact that “food voice” has in shaping their cultural views and social opinions. They recognize that their food choices are never neutral, but governed by social, political, economic, and cultural ideologies that continuously re-shape their individual, familial, and cultural sense of self. While food has the power to define us, with the development of a food consciousness, students also understand how people can and do (re)write the importance of such power by how they express what food means within the construction of their own food narratives.

Food and war, war and food: how to listen to food voice in war memoirs

ABSTRACT Both food and war are inherently political and provide insights into the priorities and character of a society. However, they are often viewed in opposition to each other (domestic priorities versus foreign policy) or the weaponized nature of both. While these perspectives mention the impact had on people, they fail to acknowledge the person living in the moment. There is a strong tradition of using food and war in memoir, but rarely do the paths cross. Memoir, while a vehicle for person’s reflections on the meaning of their life experiences, also places those lessons within broader society via a mechanism that readers can more easily relate to. Admittedly, food memoirs are generally viewed as more accessible than war memoirs, and as such there is something can learned from that. Using a ubiquitous element, such as food, to broach complicated and usually foreign experiences is a more accessible entry point. Moreover, by paying attention to how food is discussed and utilized in war memoirs, the food voice, the audience can learn more about the author, the conflict, and the society involved.

Reading Ms. Bea’s Food Voice: An Ode to My Grandmothers and Black Women across the World

Reading Ms. Bea’s Food Voice: An Ode to My Grandmothers and Black Women across the World

Language, food and identity in the borderlands of El Paso

The border is a contested space. It is a site where physical and discursive violence act to enforce hegemonic understandings of nation, citizenship and belonging. However, the spaces at the border also create sites where resistance to border discourses is possible. Using interviews conducted by the El Paso Food Voices project in 2018 and 2019, I examine the construction of identity through foodways in the US border town of El Paso, Texas. I view these interviews, called “food stories,” as entextualizations of the semiotic food system. Through critical discourse analysis of these food stories, I identify discourse strategies that construct identity in opposition to border discourses. In the borderlands, people have multiplex identities. Through foodways, residents of El Paso construct identities that do not conform to the dichotomizing and hierarchizing discourses of the border and create counter discourses that build possibility outside of border discourses.

Commensality: Networks of personal, family, and community social transformation

Commensality is a term that has been used by social scientists to address the practices that lead people to share a meal at a common table. Recently, food scholars have focused beyond the actual act of sharing a meal to specifically study the networks of relationships that come together to make this sharing of a meal possible. Through the analysis of three food-centered oral histories I gathered in 2018–2019 for El Paso Food Voices digital project, part of the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, I illustrate how an individual’s evolving relationship with food gives form to everyday commensalities. To understand the kinds of social transformations that emerge at the personal, familial, and community level, I am calling these commensalities ancestral, embodied, and responsible. The stories I present emphasize how each individual reached a turning point that changed them as cooks, infused food with culturally specific symbolism and socio-economic realities, and transformed cooking into an act of social responsibility. The overall goal is to stress that food is transformative and acts of significant social change are experienced through individuals’ everyday culinary practices.

‘Food for Life and Palliation (FLiP)’: a qualitative study for understanding and empowering dignity and identity for terminally ill patients in Asia

ObjectivesWith ‘eating’ posited as Singapore’s domestic pastime, food experiences for Singaporeans constitute national, social, ethnic and personal identities. However, though they form significant parts of Singaporean existence across the lifespan,...

Listening to Zenani’s food voice: recovering contemporary Black foodways in southern food studies

ABSTRACT Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jackson, Mississippi, this paper uses the food voice of Zenani, a working poor Black mother, as a case study to explore how structural inequalities around housing profoundly shape contemporary Black foodways in the urban South. This case study reveals how narratives in southern food studies overlook the food stories of Black folks like Zenani. For her, the southern food landscape is proliferated with social structures that dictate her foodways. By placing Zenani’s food voice in the context of southern food studies, this article proposes an addition to Angela Jill Cooley’s typology of the three main debates in the field. The fourth debate centers around the interaction between social systems, inequalities, and food access that builds on the food-centered era of southern documentary work in the early 20th century. In this way, this paper provides important implications for scholarly and public discourses in southern food studies. These implications point toward a more complete picture of southern foodways that captures the complexities of the present southern foodscape. It also contributes to the work of food justice activists and scholars in their efforts toward creating a more just future in the US South.

‘Food Voice’: The Culinary Landscape in Cecilia M. Fernandez’s “Leaving Little Havana. A Memoir of Miami’s Cuban Ghetto”

The article discusses the ‘food voice’ as a substitute for verbal communication in the memoir Leaving Little Havana. A Memoir of Miami’s Cuban Ghetto by Cecilia M. Fernandez (2013). The culinary landscape of the memoir is examined through the anthropological perspective as the foodscape overlaps with the diasporic experience of the protagonists. Foodways show how Cuban identity is constructed in response to social and political developments. The geography of the memoir determines foodscapes by fusing Cuban cuisine with American regional cooking styles. The literary portrayal shows Cubans’ flexible attitude towards acculturation as their Floribbean cuisine maintains continuity with Caribbean cooking styles but, at the same time, it presents readiness to embrace new ingredients available in Florida. The emerging new food culture indicates the formation of complex hybrid identities.

Black Women’s Food Work as Critical Space

Black American women have long sustained a complex relationship to food—its production, consumption, and distribution within families, communities, and the nation. Black women, often represented in American culture as “natural” good cooks on the one hand and beset by obesity on the other, straddle an uncomfortable divide that is at the heart of contemporary debate about the nature of our food system. Yet, Black women as authorities in the kitchen and elsewhere in matters of food—culturally, politically, and socially—are largely absent, made invisible by the continued salience of intersecting vectors of disempowerment: race/gender/class/sexuality. In this dialogue, we bring together a variety of agents, approaches, explorations, and examples of the spaces where Black American women have asserted their “food voices” in ways that challenge fundamentally the status quo (both progressive and conservative) and utilize the dominant discourses to create spaces of dissent and strategic acquiescence to the logics of capital ever-present in our food systems.

Editor's Introduction to CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, Issue 5:2

Contributors to CuiZine 5.2 all engage with the food voice. Some -- like Taiaiake Alfred -- describe how they and their community speak in a food voice, and offer a translation for us in written words and images of what it means to create, serve, and share a particular meal or dish. Others -- like Florence Pasche Guignard -- describe their encounter, when coming to Canada, of food voices that seem different to their own. Others provide analysis of the foods voices we can hear if we listen and read astutely to historical cookbooks.

How To Make Love To A Lobster: An Eclectic Guide To The Buying, Cooking, Eating and Folklore Of Shellfish, Marjorie Harris and Peter Taylor, Whitecap Books, 2013, 144 p.

How To Make Love To A Lobster: An Eclectic Guide To The Buying, Cooking, Eating and Folklore Of Shellfish, Marjorie Harris and Peter Taylor, Whitecap Books, 2013, 144 p.. An article from journal Cuizine (Speaking in the Food Voice), on Érudit.

Assisted‐living elderly and the mealtime experience

Although there is increasing evidence of barriers to nutritional health among elderly assisted-living residents, there has not been the same emphasis when examining the ways in which these individuals experience their mealtimes, as well as the factors that they perceive as contributing to their overall sense of health and well-being. Mealtimes may be disregarded as being particularly unimportant or hurried and overlooked, especially for those residents who may be lonely and have feelings of isolation, ultimately leading to a reduced food intake and poor nutrition. A convenience sample of 38 men and women, aged ≥65years, were selected from four assisted-living facilities in and around Montclair, NJ, USA, to participate in focus group discussions. Data were analysed using content analysis procedures. Participants described their experiences of mealtimes, and the factors contributing to an overall sense of well-being during these occasions. The ability to make healthy food choices, socialise, interact with staff, friends and family members, and enjoy a tasty meal in a warm and inviting dining environment, may provide a dignity that is unmatched by other services. The findings of the present study highlight the importance of maintaining the health of elderly assisted-living residents through strategies that enhance their mealtime experiences. Listening to the food voice of elderly through research such as that carried out in the present study will help policy makers develop a plan that will effectively deal with systemic barriers prevalent in these facilities, and incorporate strategies to motivate and encourage their residents to increase their food intake and improve their health and well-being.

Food-centered discourses: Intellectual communities across fields of knowledge

In Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader , many contributors point out the ways in which Chicana/Latina writers used a multi-genre interconnection in their creative and non-creative work. This tradition is not new. Rosaura Sanches, Guillermo Padilla and others, working on the Recovery Hispanic Literary Project, indicate that the literary production of the late 1800s and early 1900s also reveals a combination of genres: folklore, ethnography, autobiography, prose and lyrical fiction. The argument set forth by the interconnection of genres is that writers speak for, about, to, and within a diverse community. Voices in the Kitchen , my forthcoming book, follows this history. I refer to the diverse communities I address within it as forming part of a non-academic and academic world. The different styles and multiple voices in the book aim at revealing the different discourses used mainly by feminist academics and working class-women on diverse issues dealing with acts of agency within the realm of food. The non-academic community's discourses are reflected by the ethnographic aspects of the book where Mexican working-class women and I charlamos (chat) about food. The academic communities’ discourses of theorizing and analyzing manifest themselves in the language of philosophy, architecture, anthropology, geography, literary and cultural criticism. The shift of food voices in my writing is rather prevalent. The theoretical implications of this methodology and the paradigm it offers involve a three-part exploration. First, how does the language of food speak differently according to its localized place? Second, what are the conceptual ways in which food-centered discourses overlap in such places? This overlap creates what I call a borderless boundary zone . The final exploration is to ask: what are the strengths, as well as the limitations, in bridging the food voices from different places and spaces?

All in the family: New York food voice narratives

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.

Making place with the food voice in the san Luis Valley of Colorado

Food-centered life history interviews have been collected since 1996 in my fieldwork in the small Mexicano town of Antonito in the southern San Luis Valley of Colorado and the. The relationship between voice and place in anthropological method and theory can be explored along two paths. One path is how these interviews gathered in this place have created a space for my own writerly voice at the same time as they have posed questions about insider vs. outsider location, relation, power, and authority. The second path is how Mexicanas’ diverse constructions of landscapes, rivers, homes, gardens, kitchens and the like portray culture, express gender, construct history, and establish powerful claims to space. Stories about places by traditionally silenced people like the rural Chicanas I interviewed are particularly important in enriching the historical record. Their food-centered life histories contest stereotypes about the relegation of women to the home and about Chicanos’ disregard for environmental conservation. They reveal longstanding roots in the land, which can provide cultural legitimacy and economic sustenance, hallmarks of Chicano cultural citizenship.