ABSTRACT
Increasingly, there exists work that shows a strong and intimate entanglement between emotions, memory, food and the senses. Relevant cultural anthropological and sociological literature have very convincingly engaged with the centrality of sensory perceptions and embodied experiences in cultural interpretation (Classen 1993, Howes 1991, 2003, Low 2005, 2007, Sandelowski 2002), which includes the means through which personal, group, and national memories are embedded within foods and foodways (Choo 2004, Law 2001, Sutton 2001). These connections, however, become particularly amplified when they are located in transnational and/or unfamiliar contexts. They highlight, amongst others, the pertinence of the senses and food in remembering emotive experiences of the ‘home’ that social actors have left behind as a result of migration-be this short or long term. The association with ‘home’ also suggests that different (and often intersecting) levels of identity can be reproduced and/or reconfigured when experienced in such new contexts. Food and the attendant sensory registers then readily become quotidian expressions of multiple belongings and embodied connections social actors have with ‘home’. An encoder of experience, memories and histories, these provide media through which ‘stories and histories are told and remembered, places described, identities formed and communities imagined’ (Choo 2004: 206). The embodied experience of preparing, cooking and consuming food-akin to Proust’s (1981) ‘madeleine moment’ in his ‘remembrance of things past’—reconnects and triggers memories of ‘home’, as well as the concomitant smells, sights, sounds, textures and tastes, which are consequently relived and experienced in an unfamiliar present.1
