Food and Culture

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.

Gigy J. Alex is with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Dept of Space, Valiamala, Thiruvananthapuram, India. Her areas of interest include Food and Cultural Studies, and Science Fiction. She loves teaching and actively engages in culinary research from the cultural studies perspective.