Eating the Homeland

Although the role of remembering places in the creation of the concept of ‘homeland’ is often emphasised, the objects that belong to those places are just as important (Gupta 1992, Malkki 1992). ¹ They are the representations of homeland inserted into the interstices of day-to-day life expatriates once lived. Expressing identity in terms of food is both the widespread and long-standing (Murcott 1996). Food is often seen as the epitome of everything the expatriate misses about home. This feeling is especially strong in the case of immigrants and refugees, for whom food may remain the only link with the life left behind, as Helen Bush and Rory Williams have demonstrated in the previous chapter. A similar issue will be dealt with here, although I shall focus on a different category of displaced people.