This memory was what made me want to read this book.
But even resisting tropes and expectations of immigrant food and immigrant writing have begun to feel like a trope to me—like what Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about as the resistance/assimilation binary in Race and Resistance. Resistance = good. Assimilation = bad. Sometimes, I just feel tired from resisting, from working so hard to make sure that my writing isn’t for the white gaze that it distracts me from what I need to really write. And sometimes it feels like resisting that gaze is just commodifying my work for another kind of gaze—the kind of white gaze that gets off on that resistance.
The result is a series of essays that explore food and memory in related, emotionally-charged chapters: "Illusions", "Discovery", "Struggles", "loss" and "Coming Home".
The combinations are infinite, the connections of food and memory profound, at least in the words of the authors in this unique book: Dorothy Allison, Chang-Rae Lee, Billy Collins, Yiyun Li, Patricia Marx, Tucker Carlson, Kiran Desai, Pico Iyer, Manil Suri, Allan Shawn. Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what does belonging in a new place look like in the foods carried over from the old country? These questions are integral to the author’s own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what’s now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents’ memory alive through her Bengali food. What makes a family whole? Is it the people in it, tradition, or love? Today many people including Nancy Gibbs would say an essential part of family life is the dinner table in her article “The Magic of the Family Meal” she shows us that having dinner together is perhaps more important than people would think. After all spending time together as a family and expressing love in the form of food or conversation is how a family’s ties bond and agreement or discussion occurs.… Writing food as an immigrant body is always fraught. Food memory in so-called immigrant fiction has its own constellation of cliches all of which can and have been commodified, translated into English, sentimentalized on the internet (do you remember the jokes around cut fruit that haunted Asian diaspora Twitter a few years back?), used to sell cookbooks and TV shows. Food is the salve of the immigrant child brought to them by their otherwise stoic, silent immigrant family in the popular imagination. I want to surrender sometimes to my desire to write about the things that hurt me and heal me even if they’ve been written about before, even if they’re expected of me, even if they’ll be bitten and devoured by someone who doesn’t really understand it. I want to remember what it was like to return in mind to the place I had at the end of the dinner table, being coddled by my family with the crispiest parts of the fish and the softest part of the chicken. From that vantage point, I want to write about the world just like that spoiled, useless, completely clueless kid would have. Is this too sentimental an image to end an essay on? What if all I have of my grandmother now is a gold bracelet in a box that she reluctantly gave me on the eve of my wedding (and often asked for it back) and a handful of memories, some of which I can viscerally taste when I prepare and eat the same food she made for me as a child. Should I never speak of it, feel it, write it. Writing that tries to elude the shadow of other writing can start to feel so Levitican: do not eat, do not touch—clean and unclean. If a million other people have written about their bitter and loving and angry grandmothers, I hope my book sits within that genealogy.
Memory Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
This is what makes Kathy Biehl’s witty food memoir such a delicious reminder of what awaits me on the other side of the food desert I’ve been living in.
My Best Memory With Food - 716 Words - Cram
What I remember most about that day is how depressing our kitchen looked when we walked in the door. The blinds were down. The little white radio that’s always tuned to NPR was silent. The air smelled of funky cat litter and rotting fruit, and the large stockpot that always sits on our stovetop was covered in a thin layer of dust.
Whats your favorite food memory? - Quora
JESSICA KEHINDE NGO is a memoirist with a Nigerian-American background. She is an associate professor of English at Otis College of Art & Design. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as the New York Times, Epicurious, Whetstone, the James Beard Foundation blog, and The Counter. She was a 2023 winner of an IACP Food Writing Award.
My Food Memories- Childhood Edition
Luckily, I landed on a masterpiece. In a 2012 HuffPost blog post, food writer Michael Ruhlman presents one of the most convincing reasons to write about food that I have ever heard. Humans do two things that no other animal does, Ruhlman writes: cook our own food and tell stories. If we are prevented from doing either of these things, he says, life is unsustainable. “Cooking and telling stories. That’s what makes us human. So telling stories about food and cooking is not only natural, it’s necessary for our survival.”
My Favorite Food and Childhood Memories - Free Essay Example
In Amanda Hesser's ( food editor) collection of essays from some of America's leading writers, draws with literary aplomb the correlation of what and how we eat to who we are. Eating is such an essential and sensual experience, it is as revealing a personality trait as any writer could examine. Except of course if you're George Saunders, who claims in his essay to have given up eating four years ago. Extreme, yes, but on the plus side, he has gained 70 pounds!
Food Memoirs Essay - Free Essay Example - EduBirdie
Personally, one of the main reasons I write about food is that doing so offers a direct connection to my Nigerian roots. If you are a memoirist or personal essayist who uses writing to explore your heritage, digging into the food of your ancestors and incorporating your findings into your work could be transformative. For example, the powerful journey Michael W. Twitty takes readers on in his James Beard Award-winning The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (2017), in which he learns to cook like his enslaved ancestors. Or the emotional twists and turns and ultimate triumphs readers witness as Michelle Zauner learns to cook Korean food as a means to cope with losing her mother in the bestselling Crying in H Mart: A Memoir (2021).