Six Memories of Food

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the sensory experience of food and cooking, how these sensory phenomena interact with questions of authenticity and memory and how this affects the process through which migrants rebuild a sense of home in theirhost nations. The data for this study has been collected through a version of short-term ethnography, where the researcher also participated in cooking sessions, which were video-recorded, in conjunction with the interviews. The findings of this study are that the sensory qualities of food are important markers of the authenticity of the food, and that this sensory authenticity has a strong ability to invoke both memories and feelings of connectedness. The conclusion drawn is that food and cooking undergotransmutational change when affected by migration, turning them from important but everyday phenomena into a series of ritual actions. The effect of these rituals is to temporarily suspend the liminal state inherent to migration and they are thus very important to the ability of migrants to be able to recreate a stable sense of home in a new place.