Critical Food Studies Network | Lunchtime Seminar

 

We invite all members of the network to join us online for our lunchtime seminar next Monday at 12pm/midday. We are delighted to invite two exciting speakers,  offering us different views relating to analysis and interpretations Indian food culture and policy in the 18th and 19th centuries:

 

Mallory Cerkleski (PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): Food Rationing in Kerala, India: A Quotidian History of Consumption, 1943-1997

 

This presentation offers an overview of the completed portions of my dissertation on food rationing in Kerala, India. The overall project examines how rationing evolved from a wartime emergency in the 1940s into a durable system of everyday provisioning and a symbol of egalitarian governance. Drawing on price data, diet surveys, administrative records, culinary and social histories, and oral histories,  I reconstruct pre-1943 food cultures in the regions of present-day Kerala–Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar–in order to situate rationing within longer histories of subsistence, adequacy, and regional difference.

 

By foregrounding the “politics of adequacy” and the lived pursuit of a “decent meal,” as coined by food anthropologist Hanna Garth, I argue that Kerala’s later public distribution system (PDS) must be understood not simply as a wartime innovation, but also as entering a landscape already structured by hierarchies of care and deservingness rooted in caste, gendered labor, and localized redistribution. I conclude by reflecting on emerging themes and inviting feedback on the project’s analytical framing, sources, and directions for the remaining dissertation chapters.

 

Esmé Curtis (Recipe Editor and Freelance Cookbook Copyeditor): Reimagining Recipes: Imperialism, Negation and Control in the ‘Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook'

 

Cookbooks can be found in households across the U.K. and are sold in their millions every year. Many people read recipes weekly if not daily, and yet despite their ubiquity in bookshops, they are rarely studied in English literature departments. This talk will argue that despite its bareness and brevity, the creation of a recipe is an active and literary act. In particular, this talk will look at the construction and use of the recipe in one of the most important cookbooks of late Victorian culture, The complete Indian housekeeper & cook (1888) by Grace Gardiner and Flora Annie Steele. In Indian Housekeeper, recipes are used by Gardiner and Steele to construct a fantasy of Imperial control over an Anglo-Indian household which both contrasted with – and aimed to correct – the existing views and values of its readers.