Full Description
Food, being a great mnemonic, nourishes, sustains, and elevates human experiences. It is deeply intertwined with one's identity, culture, community, and history. Be it a humble family recipe or a grand feast or a nursery rhyme on food, it is always aspirational. This book is a collection of essays written by scholars and academics specializing in niche areas of food and cultural studies research. It explores how food narratives in different genres—novels, short stories, children's books, cookbooks, memoirs, and famine narratives—represent, critique, and shape our understanding of culture, identity, memories, and human predicament. These essays offer interdisciplinary perspectives on how food in literature becomes a potent symbol, connecting readers to themes of culture, memory, identity, and social dynamics. Food in select short stories and novels traces the history of particular food habits; it depicts how the culinary reflects emotional excitement and trauma. Food in children's literature, for instance, often embodies innocence and adventure, while famine narratives use the absence of food to depict suffering and resilience. Cookbooks and memoirs, on the other hand, bridge storytelling with everyday life, blending recipes with memories.
Contents
Introduction - Acknowledgement - Chapter 1: The Heterotopia of Food: Exploring the Expressions of Desire and Dissent through Spaces of Food in Melissa Broder's Milk Fed, Alina Udayan, Jeyalakshmi Subramanian - Chapter 2: Sweet Dish, Bitter Truth: Food as a Metaphor for Sorrow in Githa Hariharan's Gajar Halwa, Alka Jain - Chapter 3: Rice of the Novel: Class Struggle and Caste Trouble in Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Randitangazhi, Ananthajith K. R. - Chapter 4: Eat, Eat, Eat: Expressions of Food in Selected Children's Storybooks, Nithya Mariam John - Chapter 5: Mapping India through Flavours: An Analysis of Select Non-fiction Works on India's Foodscapes, Parvathy Vijayan - Chapter 6: The Sociocultural Dimension of Food in Select Works of Amitav Ghosh, Pushpa R Menon - Chapter 7: Dalit Food Culture and Deliberate Forgetting; Exploring the Dalit Food Culture through Memories, Prarthana Manoj - Chapter 8: Politics of Memory and Identity in Reem Assil's Cookbook - Arabiyya, Aysha Sana - Chapter 9: Cooking Up Diaspora: A Study of Padma Lakshmi and Madhur Jaffrey's Memoirs, Tanishqa Vaish - Chapter 10: Cookbooks as Cultural Ambassadors: An Analysis of Select Culinary Narratives from Kerala, Gigy J. Alex - Chapter 11: Eating Hunger: The Famine Food Narratives of Travancore Famines with Special Reference to the Great Famine of 1860, Swathilekha Thampy - Chapter 12: Survival through the Ages: Tracing the Persistence of Famine Foods in Bengal, Diyali Bhattacharya - Editor and Contributor Bio Notes - Index
