Digging To America Analysis

In her essay “Feel Good Reel Food: A Taste of the Cultural Kedgeree in Gurinder Chadha’s What’s Cooking?”, Debnita Chakravarti claims that “food is employed as an eloquent indicator for attitudes and constituents of characters, a perfect conveyor of subtexts that often lie too deep for the spoken word” (18). The novel Digging to America by Anne Tyler models this concept by using food to help construct the identities and behaviours of its characters, revealing the complex tensions that exist in their interactions with one another as they try to negotiate cultural barriers both socially- and self-imposed. Tyler examines the processes of producing and consuming food and how they create opportunities to strengthen, blur, or reconstitute the seemingly definitive borders that are drawn between different communities. Bitsy and Maryam in particular embody very different relationships between the “modern” America and traditional, ethnic Other, which allows for an exploration of how the identity of an individual and the borders of a culture are compromised by the intermingling of diverse peoples and practices.
The intermingling of those peoples …show more content…
For Bitsy, food is a way of establishing her personal identity as a modern American woman. Bitsy positions herself as forward-thinking by engaging in certain western ideologies of parenthood and food consumption: she restricts Jin-Ho from drinking soda and consuming too many refined sugars, and limits her family’s consumption of red meat. These choices are reflective of a larger American discourse on food, in which this kind of dietary conscientiousness is a response to the industrialization and mass production of food. In the essay “Betty Crocker and the Woman in the Kitchen,” Laura Shapiro outlines the history of food production in North America