Food matters

This conference will be about two separate but related sets of ideas around food.

First, I will present an inter-disciplinary course I have been teaching for several years, which I simply call Food. Food is not only about nutrition and the need for sustenance; it is packed with social and cultural meaning. Although all human beings eat, we don’t all eat the same things or in the same way, and our eating habits change over time, altered by new information, the availability of new foods, and by our own changing tastes.

Second, I will talk about food and the metaphorical uses to which it has been put in the context of Indian writing in English. Salman Rushdie famously called his language in Midnight’s Children “chutnified.” Chutneys and pickling—the transformation and preservation of food—have offered significant ground posts for Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, amongst others. In contemporary Indian writing in English, food is, of course, deployed in the myriad ways one might expect from a culture which pays great attention to food and social/and cultural encodings therein. In addition, though, Rushdie’s comments suggest a different way of approaching food, where the transformations it undergoes become a means of discussing colonial and postcolonial history and language.