The coronavirus pandemic and its attendant restrictions have ignited a trend for home baking and eating in. Just look at the transnational ...
The coronavirus pandemic and its attendant restrictions have ignited a trend for home baking and eating in. Just look at the transnational craze for banana bread over the past year. Millions of delicious images have been uploaded on Instagram, attesting to the universality of food, its ability to act is an accessible point of entry into a culture and often a positive representation of it.
This was part of the thinking behind my decision to edit an anthology on food. Entitled Desi Delicacies, the book collects 18 life-writing essays and short stories about food from Muslim South Asia and its diasporas. The anthology was produced as part of a research project, Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This Scroll.in series also belongs to the project.
Desi Delicacies diverges from the issue-based or problem-centred subjects South Asian Muslims are often expected to write about. Instead, it aims to offer an exploration of the adage “we are what we eat”. Put differently, food is an important marker of identity for any culture. What people consume (or refuse to consume) becomes a detectable or, indeed, delectable identity marker in the context of (post)coloniality and migration.
Food’s flexible, identity-oriented qualities evidently whetted the writers’...
