ABSTRACT
Migration stories about immigrant families and displaced ethnic communities rely on well-documented connections between food and memory to underline migrants' links to their former homes: food is used to demonstrate the ties that persist between migrants and their pasts even as they undergo processes of assimilation and acculturation abroad. The tropes of migration narratives require members of families and other extended communities- in-exile to utilize diasporic networks to confront the meaning of tradition and synthesize love for the old country with the need to belong in the new. More than delicious, this bread is productive, from it can be extrapolated an entire cuisine. It symbolizes what DeSalvo, as a child, thinks of as "real food", as opposed to her mother's tasteless, "fake" food. Wine and steak are, for Barthes, both foodstuffs and entire sets of consumption practices and social realities surrounding those foods.
