The Empire Bites Back: Food Politics and the Making of a Nation in Andrea Levy's Works

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

—George Orwell, on the English people

"The destiny of nations," declared French philosopher of gastronomy Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "depends on how they nourish themselves" (1). And indeed, consumption trends are often considered intrinsic components of a nation's identity. Curry is synonymous with India in such a manner that one generally connotes the other in the mind's eye, while the common British reference to the French as "Froggies" and France as "froggyland" derives from the French custom of eating frogs' legs. In her explorations of the subtle and complex signification of food and eating in contemporary women's fiction, Sarah Sceats has even argued that if people define themselves "in relation to what is other," what is outside the contours of their social and geographical space, "this is nowhere more evident than in questions of food" (162). Accordingly, investigations of the intersection of food and national identity almost always extend into the multifarious relationship between nation, language, race, gender, and even class. Food is, after all, very much a matter of taste, that sense of distinction that Pierre Bourdieu identifies as "the basis of all that one has—people and things—and of all that one is for others" (56). Recognizing in taste the capacity to unite and separate individuals, Bourdieu stresses taste's intuitive ability to connect those who belong to similar backgrounds, solely by differentiating them from all others. In this way, taste is intimately bound to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and not belonging. Shared taste inevitably connotes shared discrimination.¹ As communication and cultural studies scholar Peter Bishop has argued, "diet's relationship to cultural identity is not just a jingoistic one, nor only one of literal hunger or consumption.… it is on par with language in terms of cultural definition" (32).² And yet, here-in lies the catch: if diet is synonymous with culture and citizenship, one of those cultural traits psychologists claim humans learn first,³ we regularly venture beyond the borders of our accustomed tastes, and our cultural obsession with them. In fact, far from being fixed concepts, gastronomic tastes are evolving all the time, influenced by surroundings and happenings of many kinds. Like linguistic borrowings which are commonly a consequence of cross-cultural contacts and exchanges, culinary borrowings form the basis of food cultures across the world as assimilated foods become naturalized and normalized in the course of time. Deconstructing the supposed "authenticity" of national cuisines, therefore, has the potency to tear down the scaffolding upon which essentialist and static notions of identity were mounted.

Over the last decade, food, cooking and (not)-eating have constituted major lenses through which issues of trans-national/diasporic belonging, as well as the multicultural, race and gender nexus are problematized. Among those who have picked up the theme and exploited its potential are Caribbean writers, scholars and critics. Given the historical significance of Caribbean migrations and diasporic communities in Western Europe and North America, the semiotic function of food has been particularly effective in diasporic invention and (re)invention. In her exploration of the trope of food in Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1996), for instance, Valérie Loichot contends that in this text, food is "an unavoidable and complex form of language necessary to remember the past and to heal the self and communities in the aftermath of diaspora, immigration, and exile" (92). Through food and its sensory connections, Loichot maintains, characters in Breath negotiate the slippery terrain between the past and the present, to become integral agents in the construction of contemporary American identities. In highlighting the potency of food as a vehicle for "transnational or 'transcolonial'" imaginaries, Loichot further argues, Danticat inscribes herself within a diasporic tradition widely practiced by Ntozake Shange, Paule Marshall, and Audre Lorde, that of "turning food into a historical text and mode...