You Are What You Eat The award-winning novelist, Jhumpa Lahiri, centers her writings on the theme of identity negotiation. Her characters are often immigrants to the United States, who struggle to preserve their own identity in their adopted home. Her writings are characterized by an omnipresent image of food consumption and rituals of cooking. Food represents cultures. By consuming certain kinds of food, we human beings mark our membership of a particular community conforming ourselves to a collective identity and, by the same token, we distinguish ourselves from other communities thereby defining the otherness (Fischler, 1988). Hence, the seemingly ordinary narrative of food in Lahiri’s stories not only bridges the gap between self
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The uncanny gaze implies that it is unlikely for Americans to relate a blood-lined bag to one containing a dead fish because they simply do not have such knowledge in their schema. In India, on the contrary, such association is possibly immediate given that fish, especially a whole fish, forms the basis of their diet. The fact that Mrs. Sen only consumes whole fish entitles her with an outsider identity; to put differently, denies her existence. Apart from the food Mrs. Sen eats, a bulk of the story is dedicated to describing how Mrs. Sen prepares her meals, how she “took [takes] whole vegetable between her hands and hacked [hacks] them apart” (p. 114), how she “stroked [strokes] the tails [of fish]” (p.127). Early in the story, readers can infer that food preparation and conversation forms the axis around which Indian communities are organized:
“Whenever there is a wedding in the family,” she told Eliot one day, “or a large celebration of any kind, my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night.” (p.
The uncanny gaze implies that it is unlikely for Americans to relate a blood-lined bag to one containing a dead fish because they simply do not have such knowledge in their schema. In India, on the contrary, such association is possibly immediate given that fish, especially a whole fish, forms the basis of their diet. The fact that Mrs. Sen only consumes whole fish entitles her with an outsider identity; to put differently, denies her existence. Apart from the food Mrs. Sen eats, a bulk of the story is dedicated to describing how Mrs. Sen prepares her meals, how she “took [takes] whole vegetable between her hands and hacked [hacks] them apart” (p. 114), how she “stroked [strokes] the tails [of fish]” (p.127). Early in the story, readers can infer that food preparation and conversation forms the axis around which Indian communities are organized:
“Whenever there is a wedding in the family,” she told Eliot one day, “or a large celebration of any kind, my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night.” (p.