I seize the sugar mill’s singing throat
Desiree C. Bailey,
crush its hymn its grind nailed
to a settler’s lust merciless thief
of land limbs
excerpt from Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade
The relation between food, culture, and identity is an intimate one. Food serves as a conduit of collective memory. Collective memories that have been shaped by the history of plants, places, and people manipulated by white settler colonialism. Collective memories that have memorialized moments of the past and present in everyday communication between members of the same society (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995). Collective memories that have defined the tenets of groups’ cultural identities. In this way, “food is a system of communication… inseparable from social, political, historical, economic, and cultural contexts” (Dusselier, 2009, pp. 331-332).
Food, as a system of communication, is defined through foodways. Darnton (2012) defines foodways as:
all of the traditional activities, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors associated with the food in your daily life. Foodways include customs of food production, preservation, preparation, presentation, gathering, marketing (both buying and selling), uses of food products other than for eating and food folklore.
In other words, foodways serve as windows into culture and history that define group’s identities. I have decided to study foodways through examining the culture and history of Black Creoles in Louisiana in a project titled, What Brings Us Together: Honoring the Labor and Love in Creole Cuisine.
What Brings Us Together is an autoethnography of the cultural, economic, and historical landscape in southern Louisiana through focusing on my family’s relationship with agriculture and Creole cuisine. The final product will act as an archive, cookbook, and novel by integrating interviews with the elders in my family, a collection of family recipes, and essays emphasizing the role of food in shaping and reflecting culture, identity formation, and economic history in this region. I have begun by concentrating on three research questions that are guiding the goals of my final product: How has colonial systems impacted the development of agribusiness in New Iberia Parish and in affect shaped residents’ relationship to food? What are the similarities and differences between Creoles and Cajuns in terms of culture, foodways, and identity? What does it mean to identify as a Black Creole?
References:
- Assmann, J. and Czaplicka, J. (1995) Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique 65, 125-133.
- Dusselier, J. (2009). Understandings of Food as Culture. Environmental History 14(2), 331-338.
- Darnton, J. (2012, December 12). Foodways: When food meets culture and history. Michigan
- State University Extension. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/foodways_when_food_meets_culture_and_history