By Annima Bahukhandi
British-Iranian food writer, Yasmin Khan, opens her recipe book, “The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen” (2016), with a frank admission of her lifelong obsession with pomegranates. She fondly recalls the multi-sensory pleasure of eating pomegranates—from the visceral feel of the fruit’s leathery skin, to the crunch of the pomegranate pearls, to the deep red color that stains hands, tongue, fingers, and even clothes. For her, pomegranates transport her back to the warmth of Iranian culture and cooking, a stark contrast to the negative portrayal of Iran in the British culture she grew up in.
Cooking and consuming food is not only a subjective sensory experience but also a cultural and political assertion of diverse ways of living. In this piece, I explore food ingredients as powerful signifiers of gastro-nostalgia and as sites for the construction and reconstruction of immigrant, intergenerational cultural identities. The 21st century is witnessing more people moving away from their natal homes and regions than ever before. For many refugees and exiles, their migration is a question of survival, while others move away for better lifestyles or work aspirations. Despite untethering from their geographic homelands, individuals keep the psychological representation of home alive through cultural practices like food habits, language, and everyday lifestyle. Food, in particular, plays a crucial role in evoking cultural identity due to its multi-sensory impact, imbued with intrapsychic and interpersonal meanings.
David E. Sutton, in his seminal work “Remembrance of Repasts” (2001), argues that food and memory are perfectly intertwined when exploring identity, as both encode powerful hidden meanings. Food evokes strong gustatory and olfactory memories, nourishing us both visceral and intra-psychically. For members of diaspora communities, even a single food item can evoke a deep connection to one’s homeland. For example, many Koreans go to great lengths to carry their mother’s homemade kimchi, regardless of its pungent smell.
For many Indians traveling abroad, carrying homemade pickles and ghee (clarified butter) helps them stay rooted in their home culture. For Tibetan refugees exiled from their homeland for decades, eating tsampa (roasted barley flour) with salted butter tea maintains their connection with their homeland.
Social media is a powerful site where diaspora identity and cultural reproduction are consolidated through the popularization of food networks, food bloggers, and channels celebrating indigenous, local, and lesser-known cuisines. Indian food representation is a prime example, as Indians form one of the largest and most diverse diasporas globally. For decades, the global representation of Indian cuisine has been limited to a narrow Northern Indian scope, with dishes like butter chicken, naan, and dals synonymous with Indian food. Yet, for most Indians in the southern, eastern, and western parts of the country, these dishes are far from their everyday home meals.
It is heartening to see a widening space where regional cuisines thrive online, emboldened by diaspora desiring the visual and gustatory appeal of their ancestral foods. Much like regional cookbooks, social media sites like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube have become powerful visual cookbooks preserving and spreading cultural cuisines while also creating communities of succor through gastro-nostalgia.
For the Indian diaspora which has diverse food histories linked to their specific regional identities, social media has allowed for many under-represented dishes and ingredients to find a larger audience. Many home cooks and chefs in India and abroad now emphasize their regional identity and bring hyper-local ingredients to the fore—kokum (garcinia flower) in Konkani cuisine, sattu (roasted gram flour) in Bihari cuisine, bamboo shoots in Naga cuisine, and kulith (horsegram lentil) in Garhwali cuisine. While many of these ingredients are often shared across multiple cuisines, yet it is their unique usage or over-presence in one’s own cuisine that strongly connects these ingredients to one’s geographic and psychological sense of rootedness.
Sutton recounts the nostalgia for “patridha” (greek for homeland) that the fragrance of a basil plant evokes in many Greek immigrants living away from their homeland. He argues that objects can become more powerfully loaded with identity when experienced in new or different contexts, crossing boundaries of nation-states and cultures. In a similar view, in this piece I talk about ghee making as a gastro-nostalgic exercise for me, recalling subjective memories of my grandmother’s cooking as well as evoking larger cultural imagery of my under-represented Garhwali identity.
For many of us, uprooted or not yet fully rooted, familiar food ingredients operate like transitional objects, soothing our anxieties and giving us a sense of safety as we navigate unfamiliar experiences. Basking in the fragrance, touch, and taste of familiar ingredients often creates a sense of wholeness in an increasingly alienating world. Sometimes, the waft of basil, the taste of ghee, the crunch of pomegranates, and the spiciness of kimchi added to any dish are enough to maintain and creatively reconstitute one’s memories of one’s homeland and remind us that we are safe indeed.
REFERENCES
Khan, Yasmin. The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen. Bloomsbury USA, 2016.
Sutton, David E. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Berg Publishers, 2001.
Annima Bahukhandi is a psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher with a profound interest in psycho-social research. She holds a Master’s degree in Psychology and an MPhil in Sociology. She has taught psychology at the University of Delhi and B. R. Ambedkar University, India. Her primary areas of interest include memory, migration, and psychoanalytic theory. She has published work on the silenced exile in Burma and the Tibetan refugee community in India. Currently, she practices as a psychologist, and in her free time, she enjoys exploring the cultural and historical roots of both popular and lesser-known cuisines. Writing about food and culture allows her to blend her passion for diverse cuisines with her academic pursuits, providing a rich, conceptual anchor for her gustatory explorations.
