ABSTRACT
Since prehistoric times food has played a major part in the migrant experience, humankind being propelled into movement in order to procure food for self and family. Whilst biblical references to the 'land of milk and honey' may have been as much metaphorical as real there is no doubt that one of the major 'push' factors in migrant history has been food scarcity. In the 1840s the Irish potato famine drove hundreds of thousands of the population across the Atlantic and the Irish channel, whilst between the July and October of 1974 two million people in Bangladesh migrated from their homes to find food, some walking more than 100 miles.1 Even in the twenty-first century hunger and famine2 still drive people across hundreds of miles of parched land in search of food and water - the Food and Agricultural Organisation estimate that, in this century's first decade, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, chronic hunger will be a continuing and growing problem. However, the past few centuries have shown that it is not only hunger which impels the migrant. Perceived economic opportunity either in the exporting or importing of 'exotic' foodstuffs or in the transportation of culinary cultures has been a determining factor in the migrant's rationalisation of destination. The burgeoning of ethnic food purveyors and restaurants bearing witness to this phenomenon of voluntary migration. Within the British context it has to be recognised that, allied to the beacon of upward economic mobility has been the legacy of imperialism which set in place the chain migration of immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh,3 countries which today provide the bulk of Britain's Indian restaurant owners and workers. It is a chain forged out of a British colonialism which employed Indian lascars, mainly from east Bengal, to work on the ships that carried the spices, fruits and tea - that most English of drinks - from lands far away to the heart of the Empire.
