Identity Imprints
Cornish Food Identity in the "Land Apart": The Land of Oggie
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrea Broomfield
I begin with an overview of the pasty’s beginnings as a cereal paste surrounding a filling, to its ubiquity as the miner’s croust (dinner), to its identification with Cornwall proper. Over the last century, the pasty has come to encapsulate many Cornish virtues, including self-sufficiency. Containing a full meal in a sturdy edible pouch helped thousands of laborers avoid the need to pay others to make food for them. Equally important is the pasty’s identity with hardship and the Cornish tendency to embrace and learn lessons from struggle. In this regard, the pasty’s ingredients and construction mirror both economic booms and busts. When hundreds of mines closed down in the 1860s, putting many Cornish families out of work, the pasty was reduced to a barley-and-water paste encasing potato, onion, and swede. It baked in the ashes of the meagre family fire. In boom times, the pasty was enhanced, with wheat and fat replacing the barley and water crust, and beef bulking out the insides. As present-day Cornwall grapples with Brexit, debates a Cornish Assembly (Senedh Kernow), introduces Cornish into schools, and confronts the complexities of globalization, the pasty as both food and symbol gains importance. The hard-won victory to secure its PGI status in 2011 is indicative. No longer can a food called a Cornish pasty be made outside of Cornwall, and it must be made to exacting standards and ingredients. This delicious hand-held food joins the Cornish Pirates, St. Piran's flag, and Tintagel as an enduring symbol of pride and resistance to being “Britished out of existence” (See G. Evans, The Fight for Welsh Freedom, 2000, p. 124).
Better Nourished, Healthier, and Economically Stronger: Appalachian Foodways and the Rhetorical Possibility of Regional Identity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ashli Stokes
Food speaks, telling a story about who we are and seek to become. Appalachia’s food has a lot to say. Indeed, if Southern U.S. American food has rhetorical possibility in constituting positive Southern contemporary identities (Stokes and Atkins-Sayre, 2016), what does that mean for the frequently misunderstood people in the region’s Appalachian corner? Recent media attention praises Appalachia for being “authentic” and “distinctive” in an increasingly commercialized and homogenous American food culture, but some coverage of the cuisine reinforces stereotypes of the region’s food as male-dominated, traditional, simplistic, unhealthy, and somewhat “dying” and “backward.” This essay combines rhetorical fieldwork and criticism to examine how several Appalachian foodways associations and initiatives rely on regionally specific approaches to help create a healthy and sustainable food environment that helps combat negative media portrayals. Exploring how Grow Appalachia, Appalachian Food Summit, and various Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia community organizations share the region's culinary history to “connect its foodways heritage with the next generation of Appalachians” shows rhetorical possibility (AFS, 2018, para. 1). By crafting a contemporary Appalachian identity that honors women’s contributions, preserves cultural touchstones, and allows for more inclusivity and diversity, these organizations rely on foodways to fortify residents while revising perceptions of an underestimated region.
Food, Family and Failures
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emily Gray
In the TV show Transparent, food and the family are intertwined with identity, the complexity and changing nature of relationships, Jewishness and queerness. For the protagonists, the Pfeffermans, the table is a place where food is shared but also where revelations are regularly aired, resentments surface and the emotional dimensions of the family are revealed (Alpert, 2017). Because of this, the family table is one of the affective cornerstones of the show and one that is a deliberate narrative device. This paper offers a queer reading of the family meal through key scenes from Transparent to illustrate the family meal as a site of failures. These failures should not, however, be read negatively but rather as a spaces through which to escape the "punishing norms" of heteronormativity (Halberstam, 2011). Such norms regularly present the family meal, situated at a table, as a declining pillar of society – and one whose resurgence could bring about an end to a myriad of social problems (Gray et al. 2017; Pike and Leahy, 2014; 2017). Conversely, a queer reading of the family meal allows us to fail, try again, fail again and find comfort in food, the familiar and, most importantly, in the strange. We reconfigure the shared table as a generative, affective space within which we acknowledge that there are no simple solutions to ‘social problems’ related to food, family and identity.
The Cultural Image of Food: Ethnic Food Habits
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Afshana Parveen Hoque
The paper used an online survey to investigate whether people associate meanings to the food behaviors of other cultures, and if people’s like or dislike for a particular ethnic food group impact their outlook on people belonging to that ethnicity. Open-ended questionnaires were used to gather data for the study. A total of 114 undergraduate and graduate students of a large mid-western American university participated in the study. Thematic analysis identified themes from participant’s responses, guided by semiotics and social identity theory. Participants described three major food groups, Chinese, Italian, and Mexican, that they perceived as the most popular international cuisines. The themes that emerged fell into two broad categories: themes about the food and themes about the people of that culture. The findings of the study demonstrate the importance of food-signifiers that play a central role in shaping people’s perception of different food groups. The study further indicated the presence of stereotyped opinions by participants while describing their perception of other cultures.
