Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women

Chapter 5. The Literary Kitchen: Writers-as-Cooks

C H A P T E R 5 The Literary Kitchen Writers-as-Cooks Food is life. Food as knowledge feeds our hunger for understanding, for belonging, and our need for change. Literature explores the depth of our hunger. Food in literature pacifies such hunger. M. F. K. Fisher, food writer, cooks because she is hungry for love, for understanding , and for community.1 Lorna Dee Cervantes, Chicana poet, writes with the muse of hunger as “the first sense” and “Imagination [as] the last.”2 Food and literature feed the hunger of our body and soul, but they also feed our intellect while nourishing our creative expression helping us claim our cultural, social, political, and personal space. This chapter focuses on analyzing culinary social symbols found in literary works by women writers, mainly Chicana and Mexican writers, though Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Marge Piercy’s “What’s That Smell in the Kitchen?” form part of the following literary analysis . The reason for including these three literary productions is twofold: food as a literary voice is not exclusive to Latina literary creations , and food as voice shows that despite all of our differences— age, ethnicity, class, religion, sexual orientation—we, women, do speak with our sazón. What we say differs, but we understand the sensory-logic of food’s cognitive discourse. Kitchenasspace,sazónasknowledge,cookingasart,andkitchen talk as empowering stories discussed in the previous four chapters are now explored within the realm of literature. This literary kitchen analysis is a salpicón, a touch of this and a touch of that, to create a meal with an aromatic flavor that enriches the savoring taste of an empowered voice. While this chapter will not focus on the grassroots theorists of the charlas, their way of expressing themselves about their kitchen space, their sazón, their arte culinario casero, and general attitude about their culinary lives influence the approach and questions I ask about literature. In 1986, I read my first novel in college , Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and in 1989 I took my first courseonfeministtheory.Sincethen,theliteratureandtheoryIhave read is such that I cannot possibility remember it all. Yet every story and every theory expands my analytical approach to literature. Likewise , the charlas culinarias that began in 1996, and continue, inform my interpretation of literary culinary metaphors. Thus, the conceptualviewsonfoodandtheworldfromworking -classwomensharedin the charlas, and expressed in previous chapters, influence the inquiries of this literary analysis. Food as the Muse of Writing Phyllis Stowell and Jeanne Foster in Appetite: Food as Metaphor (2002) describe food in poetic expression as the “organizing metaphor for life’s imperatives.”3 In A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction (1996) Anna Shapiro describes literature as “brain food, food for character, [for] mood altering.” Literature, she says, “feeds the starved soul as well as the merely bored one. It is the nitrogen that makes the imagination bloom.”4 Tey Diana Rebolledo seals the connection between food and literature with the term “writers as cooks” in Women Singing in the Snow (1995). Rebolledo develops this term because of the overwhelming presence of kitchens and food in the works of Chicana writers, and because the idea of “writers as cooks” emphasizes the activity of writing and cooking as icons of self-identity. Rebolledo argues that in “the process of formulating an identity, both ethnic and female, one area that is distinctly original is the concept of the writer as cook. It seems that one way to express individual subjectivity (while at the same time connecting to the collective community) is by reinforcing this female identity as someone who cooks. One of the spaces traditionally construed as female is the kitchen, and Chicana literature is filled with images of active women preparing food. These images 136 Chapter 5 are a far cry from the anorexic Victorian heroines of nineteenthcentury Anglo-European novels, who sublimated their hunger as well as their sexuality.”5 The “writers as cooks” use food as symbolic representation of tradition, sexuality, gender, generational and class differences, and struggles for cultural, political, and social spaces. While kitchens “epitomize women’s work in terms of food preparation and production,” write Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivera in Infinite Divisions (1993), they “also delineate symbolically the nurturing aspect of many women.” Rebolledo and Rivera explain how in “much Chicana literature...