Edible Justice: Between Food Justice and the Culinary Imaginary

Abstract

This paper examines how eating illuminates the operations of memory, on one hand, and how practices of memory sheds light on the ways that our material food practices are imbued with meaning. In order to do so, I develop some ideas from Jennifer Jordan’s recent book Edible Memory. In that work, she identifies the ways that eating food is a deeply personal experience, but one that shapes and is shaped by our social and material world. Edible memory, in other words, describes processes through which historical meaning is transmitted and how it is received and incorporated into one’s life. While developing Jordan’s analysis of edible memory, I also want to trouble it by suggesting another dimension of memory that remains under-theorized in her account. In particular, while edible memory can be seen in a variety of mnemonic practices surrounding food, Jordan’s account underplays the relationality of memory and how memory operates to co-constitute identities. As such, her account needs to be further supplemented with a description of the ways that forgetting and appropriating culinary traditions can marginalize others’ identities. By providing an account of this, I show how edible memory is implicated in, and framed by, relations of power, and how it can nevertheless operate as a site of mnemonic resistance that can challenge oppressive culinary practices.