A feminist study of food in select culinary narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT newlineThis research studies Indian immigrant women s relationship with food in the twenty-first century globalised, capitalist, multicultural, American society. It adds to the limited scholarship on the genre of diasporic culinary narratives by looking at the works of Shoba Narayan s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes (2003),Amulya Malladi s Serving Crazy with Curry (2007), Bharti Kirchner s Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries (2009) and Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta s Bong Mom s Cookbook (2013). The research thus views food as a means for immigrant women to articulate their sense of self and critique the standardization of women s relationship with food by the capitalist food industry. Moreover, critiques of capitalist notions of women s relationship with food further enables the select texts to re-envision women s relationship with the kitchen and domestic work. Finally, the study analyses select culinary narratives as paradoxical texts for its simultaneous critique of the commodification of ethnic culture and performance of cultural self-commodification .