Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Food carries the embodied memory of a common cultural and socio-historical past of a particular community (Nadia Seremetakis), and can serve to trace global migrant trajectories. Narratives of cooking have often figured in national cinemas of the Balkans, not only as representations of social and cultural practices of the everyday, but also as a way of delving into difficult (hi)stories. In this paper, I analyse how the film Politiki Kouzina /A Touch of Spice (2003, Tassos Boulmetis) addresses a traumatic and contested national history of Greece and Turkey, through the trajectory of a shared cuisine, and how it suggests that food, like people, carries transnational identities. “Every culture privileges certain sense modalities as vehicles for knowledge” (Marks 2000: 225), and in the Balkans, food practices become a driving force for memory. In Politiki Kouzina, food functions as a “recollection-object” generating sensations in the viewer’s body, and offering sensory experiences of the protagonist, his community and ultimately national histories. The complex political relationship between the two countries is explored through gastronomical allusions; notably, the sensitive issue of forced migration of ethnic-Greek minorities from Turkey is broached without recourse to nationalist rhetoric but through culinary practices. Food becomes a perfect purveyor of subtext (Poole 1999:3), acting as performative cultural memory of “home” for Greek ethnic minorities in Asia Minor now settled in modern Greece. The cultural difference of Istanbulite Greeks is attributed to a particular cuisine, which is transnational: Greco-Turkish, and unable to assume a distinct national identity like the people themselves.