Beyond A Gastronomic Expedition: Reading Chitrita Banerji’s A Taste of My Life as Food Talk

Abstract

Women throughout history have had an enduring association with food, but it is only with the advent of food studies that the multi-faceted role food has played in women’s lives has started getting documented. Food studies has ventured beyond its focus on food in recipe books as a vehicle to satisfy physiological requisites and had begun to consider them as narratives that record women’s voices. Women through archiving recipes in their works become an active contributor as well as transmitter of their culinary heritage. They publicize their traditions and blend it with their personal stories thereby becoming culinary custodians. The memoir A Taste of My Life by Chitrita Banerji lays emphasis on the significant role that women play in preserving and disseminating culture. Being an Indian expatriate writer living in the United States, Banerji’s works are usually studied in the light of transnational perspectives for their role in addressing the issues of identity and diaspora. This paper focuses on reading the memoir from a feminist food perspective. It questions the trivialization of woman’s role in the transmission of culture, in the light of women’s centrality to food practices and attempts to read Banerji’s memoir as a valuable document of woman’s history. The evocative memoir is analysed as a medium through which Banerji engages in a food talk with her readers which triggers their imagination and personal experiences.