Reading Tradition in Food: An Interdisciplinary Study of Bengali Food Writing

Food Studies has been a prominent part of Interdisciplinary Studies in the West from the 1980s and it is catching up in India as well. A close study of recipes and other forms of food writing can offer insights into the everyday culinary negotiations and the constitution of a cultural ‘tradition’ of taste. These insights of gastropolitics may help us better understand the functioning of subliminal hegemonic technologies and everyday resistance to the same. In our era of postcolonial globalization, where domination and subjugation happen through micro-politics of power, our readings of food writing may open new doors of reading and theorizing heritage and history.

Iranian Women’s Food Writing in Diaspora

In light of the recent surge of Iranians’ autobiographies and fictions in the West, this article will examine ‘food writing’ as an emerging genre of diasporic narrative dominated by Iranian women. It will explore the multiple avenues through which these cookbooks/food memoirs seek not only to make accessible the highly sophisticated Persian culinary tradition but also to ameliorate the image of Iran. Such attempts are partly in response to the challenges of exilic life, namely, the stereotypical portrayal of Iranians in the Western media. Three books with strong memoir components will be further discussed in order to demonstrate how the experiences of the 1979 revolution, displacement, and nostalgia for prerevolutionary Iran are interwoven with the presentation of Iranian food and home cooking abroad.Résumé : À la lumière de la vague récente d’autobiographies et de fictions d’Iraniens dans l’ouest cet article examinera “l’écriture culinaire” en tant que genre émergent de récit diasporique dominé par les femmes iraniennes. Il explorera les multiples voies pas lesquelles ces livres de cuisine / mémoires culinaires cherchent non seulement à rendre accessible la tradition culinaire persane très sophistiquée, mais aussi à améliorer l’image de l’Iran. Une telle tentative est une réponse aux défis de la vie en exil, à savoir la représentation stéréotypée des Iraniens dans les médias occidentaux. Trois livres avec de fortes composantes de mémoire seront discutés plus en détail afin de démontrer comment les expériences de la révolution de 1979, le déplacement et la nostalgie de l’Iran pré-révolutionnaire sont entrelacés avec la présentation de la cuisine iranienne et de la cuisine maison à l’étranger.

Technologies of Taste: Restaurant Guides, Diners, and Dining Halls in Interwar Tokyo

After the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, Tokyo rebuilt and extended its transportation infrastructure to bring the major areas for residence, business, and pleasure within walking distance, and that sparked a new genre of food writing, the Walker's Guide to Dining (tabearuki). First published in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, and continued up to the mid-1930s, the books by different authors that shared the title Walker's Guide documented affordable places to eat and new communities of restaurant customers, while pioneering new ways to write about food. Gaining particular attention in these books for their inexpensive and varied menus and their mixed gender clientele were trending restaurants called shokudō, a term that referred both to diners and dining halls in department stores. The Walker's Guides and the diner / dining hall can be called technologies of taste for the way they assembled diverse culinary experiences and made them legible for a mass market.

The New Development of Contemporary Food Writing and the Value of Chinese Courses

Delicacy is one significant theme of literary and artistic creation. Since the 1980s, excellent delicacy writing industry has become an important part of Chinese teaching in middle schools. Since the beginning of the new century, the carrier of food writing has changed from the literal one to full-view video, audio-visual television documentaries. The essence of new form of contemporary food writing does not change; it still implies the meticulous and warm humanistic care. The value of it in Chinese courses still has much room to expand.

Mexico’s Early Cookbooks

During the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519–1521), gastronomic literature was already prevalent in Europe, yet not so in Mexico. The use of the printing press in Mexico was limited to print and disseminate ecclesiastical and legal documents; it was not used for subjects as seemingly superfluous as recipes and food. This is not to say that food was not a source of fascination, or a means of social control. Kitchen manuscripts written before Mexico became independent of Spain (between 1810 and 1821) show that there was an abundance of food writing before Independence, especially by nuns in colonial convent kitchens. However, the earliest printed cookbooks did not make their debut in Mexico until 1831, a decade after Independence. Mexican cuisine can be examined beginning from the diaries of conquistadors and missionaries to colonial kitchen manuscripts to the cookbooks published after Independence through the Porfiriato (1876–1910) and Revolution (1910–1920). Reading between the lines of the recipes in these sources, one sees the shifting attitudes toward food, as it ceases to be a status marker and a divider of classes and becomes a tool for unifying the country.

Genre-Based Aproach in L2 Writing Classroom

This conceptual paper is aimed at examining the application of genre theory to an L2 classroom in a local university in Malaysia in the learning of specialized vocabulary in a food writing course. All three types of genre theory will be discussed, namely literary, rhetoric and linguistic genre theory to give a holistic understanding of genre. This will allow the coverage of both similarities and differences through all disciplines, and subsequently inform the richness of these theories, how it can be applied, and the significance of using these genre theories in the ESL writing classroom. This paper will also discuss the relationship between genre approach and genre writing and its application in the food writing classroom.