Food, Memory, and the Everyday

Abstract Food and memory permeate all aspects of the everyday lives of individuals and communities. The sensorial turn in humanities and social sciences in the 1990s, alongside the proliferation of food studies scholarship, has contributed to interdisciplinary perspectives on how food and memory shape and change culture and are essential to transmission of knowledge, rituals, and identity. Since many historical processes—colonialism, enslavement, forced relocations—resulted in the oppression and marginalization of peoples globally, memory work is essential to cultural revival and thriving. The many facets of food memory, ranging from nostalgia to erasure, are embedded in human bodies and in the private and public spaces that they occupy. In a global environment marked by mobilities, memories of food are often personally and collectively deployed to re-create home in the diaspora, often resulting in adaptation rather than re-creations. In kitchens, markets, restaurants, and shops, food’s materialities are rich in recollections, nostalgias, and forms of forgetting. Trauma—another facet of memory—impacts relationships with food and memory in the present but can often be a pathway toward healing.