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Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities

Article · June 2014

DOI: 10.1353/sor.2014.0015

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Fabio Parasecoli
Food, Identity, and
Cultural Reproduction in
Immigrant Communities

when i first moved to the united states in 1998, my grandmother’s sister,

who had emigrated from her village in Abruzzo, Italy, to America in the
early 1930s, invited me to a dinner in Delaware organized by her daugh-
ters and many of her descendants. Food, abundant and delicious, elimi-
nated any distance between my numerous cousins and me during that
emotional and unforgettable event. I soon realized some of the dishes
served had the same names as those I used to eat back home, but they
looked and tasted different. Moreover, the way they were served was
new to me: most dishes came to the table at the same time, and there
was no trace of the sequence of appetizers (antipasti), primi, secondi,
side dishes (contorni), and desserts that structures big, festive meals in
Italy. However, the interactions around the table, the body language,
the sounds, were reminiscent of many of the family occasions that
took place in Italy. Somehow, I was at home away from home. After my
first exposure to Italian-American cuisine, puzzlement was replaced by
amusement and curiosity, which over time led to more systematic and
theoretical questions.
How do culinary traditions develop as they do among migrants?
Why are certain food objects, behaviors, norms, and values from their
places of origin maintained, more or less transformed, to become im-
portant points of reference in the formation of a sense of community
and belonging, while some disappear and others resurface only after
periods of invisibility? What role do cooking and other food-related

social research Vol. 81 : No. 2 : Summer 2014 415

practices play as migrant communities negotiate their presence in
postindustrial societies where individuals and groups define their
identities around lifestyles and consumer goods? Among other strat-
egies, immigrants cope with the dislocation and disorientation they
experience in new and unknown spaces by recreating a sense of place
around food production, preparation, and consumption, both at the
personal and interpersonal levels. In fact, the solidification of these
practices and the norms and ideals that develop around them is not
just a by-product of the relationships within already existing dynam-
ics, but actually constitutive of their emergence.
Food is as exclusive a human behavior as language. Lévi-Strauss
has pointed out that

cooking, it has never been sufficiently emphasized, is with

language a truly universal form of human activity: if there
is no society without a language, nor is there any which
does not cook in some manner at least some of its food
(1978, 471).

In this sense, like any other cultural phenomenon that can be inter-
preted and understood, food can be considered as “an ensemble of texts”
(Geertz 1973, 24). Every ingredient, each dish, the meal structure, and
all the elements forming a culinary culture are connected. They are
inf luenced not only by the past, frequently interpreted and practiced
as tradition, but also by new occurrences resulting from both internal
dynamics and the incorporation of external elements. As a result, mean-
ings attributed to food are never completely defined once and for all
but are uninterruptedly negotiated and transformed through practices,
discourse, and representations. However, despite constant changes, food
cultures present an internal coherence, which provides parameters for
defining behaviors and objects as acceptable or deviant and that can be
interpreted as a form of culinary competence.
A concept originating in linguistics, competence is

416  social research
 the ability to perceive phenomena in our environment as
signs, i.e. to understand the connection between present,
(partially) hidden, and entirely absent phenomena. . . the
ability to store information and form interpretive habits on
the basis of either genetic programming or memory and
learning processes (Johansen and Svend 2002, 30).

The concept maintains analytical validity when applied to food, as users

make sense of what they eat, at least when they stay within the realm
of the familiar. Culinary competence also functions as a practical toolkit
acquired through embodied experiences and practices directed toward
concrete goals. However, the cohesion of a culinary system, based on its
users’ competence, is far less binding than a linguistic system and could
be described as “thin coherence.” Although individuals and communi-
ties are able to engage in effective interactions, the meanings and behav-
iors they produce can never be totally stable, revealing themselves as
“variable, contested, ever-changing, and incomplete” (Sewell 1999, 57).

MAKING SENSE OF CHANGE

These competences, ref lected in the experiences and memories of
immigrants, can be explored through four conceptually distinct but
often overlapping categories: personal, communal, collective, and insti-
tutional. These categories describe phenomenological aspects of the
migrant experience and do not constitute an exhaustive taxonomy span-
ning discrete spheres of social life. No single category has priority in
terms of time, space, or relevance since most experiences may present
more than one or all of the undertones highlighted by each aspect. This
approach dispenses with the identification of monolithic and essen-
tial identities—both for individual subjects and larger groups—while
embracing the idea that multiple subject positions may be experienced
and performed when dealing with different situations and environ-
ments.
“Personal” experiences in food production, preparation, and
consumption are the most immediate and idiosyncratic. Individuals

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  417

find themselves at the juncture of necessity, inputs from outside real-
ity, and the inner world of drives and instincts. Senses and memories
do not limit themselves to mirroring nature more or less precisely.
According to emergent research in the neurosciences, their contents
are the result of ongoing interactions between external stimuli and
the various emotional and rational activities of the brain (Parasecoli
2007). Memories are not fixed and ready to be accessed when needed,
but are relived each time in different ways and with different emo-
tional attachments. In fact, the embodied and emotional experiences
connected with them (pleasure, pain, fear) influence their storage and
retrieval. This is particularly evident in the case of food-related recol-
lections.
When migrants find themselves in unfamiliar sensory and cul-
tural environments, eating is an inevitable component of daily life that
forces them to interact physically, emotionally, and cognitively with
the surrounding Otherness. When it comes to ingestion, the contact
is intimate to the point of becoming, at times, uncomfortable or even
invasive, because the positions of the Self and Other involved are fun-
damentally different in terms of sociopolitical power, cultural capital,
and sheer economic clout. However, reactions may vary enormously in
terms of participation in foreign culinary practices, from enthusiastic
embrace to participative negotiation to active resistance, all the way to
total refusal. Through these interactions, migrants transform anony-
mous and threatening spaces into significant and culturally meaning-
ful places that blur the apparent dichotomy between the global and
the local. As semiotician Setha Low observed,

it is through embodied space that the global is integrated

into the inscribed spaces of everyday life where attachment,
emotion, and morality come into play. . . . Embodied space
is the location where human experience and consciousness
takes on material and spatial form (2009, 22, 25).

Memories of the past, a more or less traumatic displacement,

and interactions inside and outside their familiar circles all contrib-

418  social research
ute to shaping migrants’ new culinary competences in their physical,
emotional, and cognitive dimensions. Newcomers are aware that any
element of the environment around them can potentially become part
of their diet, and they may painfully experience the constant tension,
described by Claude Fischler, between neophilia, the curiosity to try new
foods, and neophobia, the concurrent fear of unknown substances, which
could be potentially dangerous or even poisonous (Fischler 2001; Rozin
1988). Unknown ingredients or dishes, after finding their place in a ba-
sic edible/inedible opposition, can be considered more or less familiar
and more or less palatable on two continuums that go from “totally
exotic” to “totally familiar” and from “totally palatable” to “totally un-
palatable” (Long 1998, 187). Furthermore, a whole set of denotations
are established, hinging on the physical and identifying characteristics,
such shape, color, smell, texture, temperature, and taste.
The basic traits (sensory characteristics, edibility, familiarity,
palatability) that migrants may employ to sort new foods are never
developed in isolation as a result of exclusively individual experiences
and memories. In fact, the personal understanding and use of foods—
how, where, and from whom they can be obtained, how they can be
stored and for how long, and, above all, how they can be processed,
cooked, and consumed—is enriched by the contribution of others who
share the same or a different background, which establishes the “com-
munal” aspects of the experience. Unless migrants find themselves
alone and refrain from any contact, the adaptation process to the new
land is shared, influenced, and constructed through interactions at
least within the intimate circles of family, friends, neighbors, cowork-
ers, and the immediate social sphere. These familiar connections are
particularly important as migrants have to adjust to puzzling seasonal
cycles, foreign calendars, and strange holidays where their food plays
no part. As immigrants collectively expand and reshape their culinary
competence to make sense of new situations, the communal reposi-
tory of memories and experiences related to the place of origin may
also influence the way they relate to each other.
While easing the anxieties caused by the constant and invasive
exposure to Otherness, communal practices such as food preparation,

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  419

shopping, and celebratory meals simultaneously strengthen a sense
of belonging through specific ingredients, dishes, and practices from
the migrants’ place of origin. These can become sources of emotional
ambivalence between the need for comforting food that echoes the
migrants’ past and the awareness that the consumption of those very
foods might mark them as outsiders in the host society in terms of
flavors, smells, and behaviors. As important for the cultural reproduc-
tion of social life as they may be, such foods frequently undergo vari-
ous degrees of transformation due to the availability of ingredients,
the exposure to different flavors and techniques, and the need to adapt
to a dissimilar rhythm of life. These negotiations, where the partici-
pants often do not enjoy the same positions in terms of power and
privilege, constantly shape and reshape culinary systems.
The table can be a safe place, but tensions and contrasts are al-
ways lurking. Due to gender, age, or occupation, some migrants might
find themselves exposed only to limited and filtered contact with the
host community, in which case the communal aspects of their expe-
rience are particularly relevant. Women are likely to be in charge of
cultural reproduction through food, trying to meet expectations that
certain dishes and meals maintain similarities with preexisting cus-
toms. However, they are also likely to be the ones who engage more
intensely with consumer cultures brimming with products, shopping
modalities, eateries, and festivities, whose values and significance are
filtered through media, medical discourses, education, and labor rela-
tions. As a consequence, they can assume a variety of positions in a
spectrum that goes from the staunchest defense of what they perceive
as traditions to the enthusiastic embrace of culinary elements from
the host community, which in turn entails further negotiations with
other family members who may assume different approaches.
These personal and communal experiences are often embed-
ded in and influenced by practices, norms, and representations that
could be defined as “collective” since they transcend individuals and
tightly knit social groups that presuppose direct acquaintance among
members and as a consequence are numerically limited and contigu-

420  social research
ous. Collective experiences are supposed to be shared by individuals
and groups that might not be in direct contact but somehow share
the same origin and story. For instance, groups of immigrants coming
from different parts of Italy at different points in time with different
motivations, speaking mutually unintelligible dialects and eating very
different food, found themselves establishing a new shared identity
as Italians, partly because the host community bunched them into an
undifferentiated group and partly because they often shared neigh-
borhoods, jobs, and a variety of social activities. Recipes started circu-
lating beyond immediate circles of acquaintances, importers provided
certain products and not others, and a set of holidays and relevant
occasions slowly acquired more importance than others.
The “collective” aspect of migrant culinary experiences is con-
structed through constant interactions not only among community
members and the host community but also with the communities of
origin. Many migrants, especially those who are first generation, main-
tain close connections with their place of origin through relatives,
friends, remittances, participation in events and special occasions, and
occasional trips. However, migrant culinary canons often develop fol-
lowing their own dynamics that are not necessarily the same as their
cuisine of origin: the context, the external pressures, and the internal
structures are not the same. Within these canons, dishes and practic-
es connected to special occasions and celebrations assume particular
visibility and relevance. We can mention the Italian-American “Seven
Fish” dinner on Christmas Eve, Seder for Jewish communities, Lunar
New Year menus for immigrants of Chinese descent, Diwali specialties
for the Hindus, desserts for the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and dishes
sold at the Caribbean parade in Brooklyn. Interestingly, these practices
have the potential to become objects of dissension among older and
younger generations, who might have very different takes on their rel-
evance in the new environment. Furthermore, food-related traditions
are filtered through cookbooks, media, and other discursive elements,
together with restaurants, stores, and other institutions, which over
time establish conventions and expectations, often shared and rein-
forced by the host community.

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  421

 The last aspect of migrant experiences can be defined as “insti-
tutional,” referring to behaviors and representations shaped and sus-
tained by public and private institutions as diverse as business firms,
cultural institutes, and governments in order to immortalize, protect,
and promote specific foods and food practices. For instance, a set of
practices can be inscribed in the United Nations Educational, Scien-
tific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Representative List of the
Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as in the case of the Medi-
terranean diet, the gastronomic meal of the French, and traditional
Mexican cuisine, which all have enjoyed this prestigious status since
2010, or the “Washoku: Traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese,”
for which Japan received recognition in 2013. Such inscription is prob-
lematic from several points of view: who claims authority to decide
which aspects of a certain culture are “authentic” and as such wor-
thy to be included in the heritage? Does establishing a definition stop
the practices from evolving in unpredictable—and possibly exciting—
directions, as happens when no definitions are imposed?
Similar questions haunt the interventions of local and national
government to regulate the production of foods perceived as tradition-
al and connected to a specific territory, manufacturing techniques, and
even sensory characteristics, influencing the way those foods are actu-
ally made and experienced around the world. The World Trade Organi-
zation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights, negotiated in 1994, established a system based on trademarks
and geographical indications that contribute to selectively defining
and crystallizing specific versions of products that, due to their pres-
tige and the legal instruments that accompany them, are then likely
to interact with perceptions and practices in popular culture. The vis-
ibility of these products is often enhanced by the production of media
and marketing material. Associations of food producers, as in the case
of Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy and Tequila in Mexico, generate adver-
tising posters, merchandizing objects, commercials, and documenta-
ries. These images and texts often provide consumers—including im-
migrants abroad—with material to create experiences and memories.

422  social research
 Administrative bodies, tourism boards, and business associa-
tions at all levels also use food to promote their locations as tourist
destinations. As dining and discovering new ingredients and cuisines
is considered an essential component of a vacation by an increasing-
ly large segment of tourists, in particular those with higher spend-
ing power, it becomes a priority to provide visitors with a clear set
of choices of dishes and traditions that can be experienced in a safe
and pleasurable way and that somehow distill the culinary essence of
a place. Political and economic negotiations determine what dishes
get included in the canon, which versions are considered “authentic,”
and what dishes are excluded. Certain places are identified as the cru-
cible or quintessential expression of migrant culinary traditions: New
York City, Little Italy, Chinatown, Jackson Heights, and Washington
Heights have all been turned into imaginary projections of homoge-
neous communities.

FOOD AND THE EMERGENCE OF “ETHNIC” IDENTITIES

These multilayered dynamics, embedded in specific and constantly
shifting situations, illustrate how food may be invested with great
emotional significance and passionately embraced by all actors involved.
Ingredients, dishes, and practices have the potential to become cultural
markers that identify and rally individuals and communities, who
frequently display fierce attachment to their food traditions. Even when
it is historically possible to trace sources, derivations, and transforma-
tions that contradict the narratives embraced and taken as true by the
communities that originated them, norms, attitudes, and values that
migrants experience as food traditions are not artificial and dispensable.
From an emotional and existential point of view, it does not make any
difference whether traditions are invented in the sense proposed by Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger of a “response to novel situations which
take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their
own past by quasi-obligatory repetition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
It does not matter if the rediscovery and the actualization of forgotten
objects and practices can also take place through their transformation

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  423

into heritage, which—as performance theorist Barbara Kirshemblatt-
Gimblett aptly argued—“is a mode of cultural production in the present
that has recourse to the past” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995, 369). Solidly
rooted in modernity and in the global f lows of goods, ideas, practices,
capital, and people, the establishment of food heritage and traditions
plays an important role for the imagination and the cultural capital of
migrants, not to mention for their economic outlook as producers of
appreciated consumer goods.
The identification and reproduction of foodways constitute a
crucial component in the emergence and operation of migrant com-
munities, establishing boundaries and securing stability through sub-
mission to expectations and rules that nevertheless shift and evolve
with the community itself. Overlapping with several interweaving net-
works of discourses, practices, and interactions, the full spectrum of
the meanings and values of a migrant culinary culture cannot be fully
grasped without analyzing its interaction with other apparently unre-
lated domains. We can define these networks as “signifying” because
they help individuals and communities make sense of their cultural
environment. The analysis of these various signifying networks is fun-
damental to understanding how food is recognized and interpreted by
different actors, whose identities are constructed and performed pre-
cisely in their use of these meaningful structures and in their interac-
tion and negotiations with others actors to define them.
From this point of view, ingredients, dishes, cooking techniques,
commercial exchanges, consumption practices and the categories
used to understand them reveal their nature of “floating signifiers”
(to use Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s terminology)—that is to
say, elements whose temporary meaning and place within a cultural
ecosystem are established and constantly modified by the emergence
of new situations and different centers of interest, as well as by the
power negotiations within these shifting contexts (Laclau and Mouffe
1985). These dynamics, socially and historically constructed, deeply af-
fect the subjective experiences of communities and their members, in
terms of personal and collective identification processes. Meals unite

424  social research
and divide. They connect those who share them, confirm the eaters’
identities as individuals or as part of a collective. At the same time,
meals exclude those who do not participate in them, marking them
as outsiders. Participants in the same culinary culture acknowledge
each other by the way they eat, by what they eat, and by what their
diets exclude. Food is not only central to the emergence of a shared
identity that is framed by the host community as “ethnic”; it is also
paramount to the formation of the migrants’ opinions on their own
history. Within the same population, the past can be projected as per-
fection and happiness, where food was healthier and more tasteful, or
remembered as marked by hunger and deprivation. These perceptions
cannot be belittled as fantasies and imagination because, as Arjun Ap-
padurai has argued, they constitute functional social phenomena. In
fact, they interact with and have actual consequences for the econom-
ics and the politics of the communities involved (Appadurai 1996).
The rediscovery, protection, and promotion of “traditional”
foods and foodways, together with the construction of historical nar-
ratives around them, actively contribute to the creation of a sense of
a shared experience among migrants. These discursive formations are
not mere reflections of communities that already exist but instead
shape the very emergence of the set of dynamics that is retroactively
projected as a coherent and stable social structure, the “community.”
Communities might not exist prior to the issues that precipitate their
activation; instead, they come into being at the very moment when
they rediscover certain elements of their material culture as central to
their shared identity. For this reason, “community” can be interpreted
as a shifting series of both concurrent and successive configurations,
even when composed of the same members. If this is the case, com-
munities should rather be considered as emerging from specific situa-
tions, calling on individuals and groups in their various and complex
subject positions to generate new and ever-evolving formations. From
this point of view, communities are never stable, not having any kind
of essential and enduring traits.

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  425

EMBODIED COMMUNITIES
However, this apparent instability should not lead us to believe that
communities inhabit a theoretical space of unreality and self-delusion.
The crucial roles played by food and other material practices remind us
that they are firmly rooted in the tangible world, visceral bodies, and
definite places. The exploration of foodways can function as an antidote
to those contemporary political approaches that interpret present-day
globalization in terms of almost immaterial f lows and currents and that
project the concrete dimension and uniqueness of places into the past,
interpreted as a leftover of long gone experiences or pushed into the
category of imagination and nostalgia. From this point of view, an analy-
sis of food-related practices of migrant communities and their connec-
tion to specific environments, cultural needs, and embodied desires may
counterbalance the detachment from physicality that we can at times
detect in globalization theories. In fact, the difficulty of political sciences
in dealing with the role of material objects, unruly bodies, and specific
places in the formation of contemporary community experiences seems
insidious. The widely evoked and analytically effective concept of “imag-
ined community,” for instance, as proposed by Benedict Anderson,
underlines the lack of reality of a political category such as the nation:

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an

imagined political community—and imagined as both in-
herently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the
members of even the smaller nation will never know most
of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,
yet in the minds of each lives the image of their commu-
nion. . . . [I]t is imagined as a community because, regardless
of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in
each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship (Anderson 2006, 6–7).

For Anderson, a horizontal camaraderie cannot exist in actual

places, where social and economic stratifications are evident and deep-

426  social research
ly felt, but needs to be projected onto imaginary spaces. However, An-
derson also wonders about the actual power of such a seemingly flimsy
and recent concept as the imagined community known as nation, re-
minding us that many of its members were, and still are, ready to die
for it. The specter of the Motherlands, the Fatherlands, the Holy Lands,
and the Promised Lands that has scourged human history is too close
for comfort. When talking about the willingness of people to sacrifice
for an abstract concept, Anderson admits that the concept must be not
only politically viable but also “emotionally plausible” (51).
The emotional and ultimately embodied aspects of the human
experience are often problematic for political theory, since they can
be easily identified with irrational phenomena such as witch hunts,
crowd behaviors based on anger or panic, and rallies hailing dictators.
Insurgencies do not limit themselves to questioning the status quo and
asking for new beginnings: they have been known to generate fren-
zies that are likely to end up in massacres. As Mao Zedong famously
stated, revolutions are not dinner parties. In all these extreme cases,
the emotional aspects of social behaviors are connected to a physical
dimension of spatial proximity, highlighting the role played by the
actual bodies of the participants, beyond their rational motivations
and their political projects. Anonymous bodies, moving in their own
accord and following unknown priorities, can be scary, especially in
close proximity, as Nobel Prize recipient Elias Canetti reflected in his
1960 masterpiece, Crowds and Power:

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the
unknown. . . . It is only in a crowd that man can become
free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation
in which the fear changes into its opposite. . . . Ideally, all
are equal there; no distinctions count. . . . The most impor-
tant occurrence within the crowd is the discharge. Before
this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge
which creates it. This is the moment when all who belong
to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal
(Canetti [1960] 1984, 17–20).

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  427

Canetti points out two elements we have already noticed: the ad hoc and
impermanent nature of the specific kind of community he is examining,
the crowd, and the importance of proximity, a relationship based on
places where human bodies are located close to each other.
Although connections between place, body, and community
deserve further inquiry, this kind of reflection is not new, as contem-
porary trends in sociology and anthropology clearly indicate (Low
and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2006). From the nineteenth century, this theme
emerged by frequent focusing on cities, the very locus of modernity.
For good and for bad, eating became a visible aspect of urban commu-
nal life in the first gourmet itineraries traced in Paris by Greymaud
de la Reynière in his Itineraire nutritif ou Promenade d’un gourmand dans
divers quartiers de Paris (Nutritive Itinerary, or, The Promenade of a
Gourmet in Diverse Neighborhoods of Paris); in the cafes described in
Walter Benjamin’s flâneur walks; in Emile Zola’s dark exploration of
Les Halles market in Le ventre de Paris; or in Upton Sinclair’s horrifying
description of Chicago’s slaughterhouses in The Jungle (de la Reynière
1978; Benjamin 1992; Zola 1974; Sinclair 1995).
Of course, any fleeting sense of community, connected with new
situations and environments, was also built on layers of exclusion. The
powerful and the privileged created common identities by stigmatiz-
ing large segments of urban populations on the base of class, race, and
provenance. The downtrodden in turn resented and ridiculed them
in their own interactions. Compared to city dwellers, whatever their
status might have been, the countryside and its inhabitants faded into
oblivion, marginalized in civil society despite their role as providers
of edible goods for the metropolis. The same destiny befell colonial
subjects, utterly deprived of any participation in the modern political
community while being condemned to produce and ensure the spiri-
tual well-being, the moral superiority, and the consumable wealth of
the Western countries that controlled them. In both cases, power and
control of one social segment over another coincided with the physi-
cal ingestion of edibles. Consumers severed food products from any
connection with their producers and fetishized them by having their
intrinsic value determined by the infallible rules of the market.

428  social research
 Paradoxically, because of the economic and social dynamics
that determined its inevitable and unstoppable expansion, the city,
the exemplar modern community, was always at risk of being tainted
by the lack of actual communal life, especially painful for those mov-
ing from the rural world or from the peripheries of the empires. It is
no wonder that the newcomers found in their own bodies and in what
they ingested the points of reference to build new communities and
fight the tendency that cities demonstrate to alienate its inhabitants.
When examining The Image of the City by urban planner Kevin Lynch in
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederick Jameson
defined the alienated city as

a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds)

either their own positions or the urban totality in which
they find themselves. . . . Disalienation in the traditional
city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense
of place and the construction or reconstruction of an ar-
ticulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and
which the individual subject can map and remap along the
moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. . . . Surely this
is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in
the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to
enable a situational representation on the part of the indi-
vidual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable
totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a
whole (Jameson 1992, 51).

A disalienated city, understood as a communal and inhabited

place, would offer a cognitive map based on and inextricable from
embodied experiences that trace physical trajectories and coalesce
around places of existential relevance, such as shops, markets, super-
markets, restaurants, and even dumps. The cognitive map, which al-
lows individuals and groups a sense of belonging to a place, would not
have any real impact if it did not involve their physical experiences
and their embeddedness in inhabited spaces. In other words, the sense

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  429

of belonging to a community may be generated by the reappropriation
of lived-in places and specific localities in which preparation, distri-
bution, and consumption of familiar foods play a crucial role. This
dimension may be especially sensitive for individuals and groups, like
immigrants, who are excluded from the participation in other higher-
status fields of cultural production.

COGNITIVE MAPS AND LOCALITY

Jameson’s idea of the cognitive map is very useful for understanding
not only the formation and behaviors of urban migrant communities
around food practices but also their emergence in rural environments,
as in the cases of the Vietnamese among the shrimping communities of
the Gulf Coast and Latino farm workers in California. Cognitive maps
can also be employed to examine contemporary phenomena such as
locavorism, green markets, community supported agriculture (CSA),
alternative food networks, and the growing preference for artisanal prod-
ucts, interpreted as attempts to establish social relationships by reclaim-
ing positions in an alienated territory. These very diverse communities
all reflect the behaviors Michel de Certeau (1984) defined as “tactics,”
devised by consumers acting in environments defined and controlled by
the “strategies” imposed by institutions and structures of power experi-
enced by the consumers as external, pervasive, and threatening. It is not
surprising that tactics often include the bodily dimension of eating and
ingestion, which metaphorically and physically allows individuals and
groups to police the incorporation of those elements of their environ-
ment that are considered safe.
Migrants can, around food, establish spaces and experiences
that they can open to outsiders on their own terms, thus experiencing
a stronger sense of control over their choices. In the case of “ethnic”
restaurants and food manufacturers—as embattled as that definition
may be—migrants develop tactics that employ their culinary know-
how to occupy social and economic positions in the territory of the
Other by transforming the members of the host community into con-
sumers of their products. Participants in alternative food networks re-

430  social research
act in a similar way to the pervasiveness of corporate food distribution
networks, controlled by big conglomerates and agro-businesses and
increasingly experienced as abstract, dehumanizing, and socially un-
just. The consequence is, for instance, the success of value-based labels
such as “local,” “traditional,” “organic,” and “artisanal,” which at any
rate, to be fully effective, need to be paired with actual human connec-
tions and relationships among the actors involved—in other words,
the emotional experience of community.
At times, the members of these alternative food networks, often
well-meaning in their effort to establish or reconstruct better stan-
dards of life, seem oblivious to the uncomfortable reality that their
shopping and consumption practices tend to exclude those who do
not have the financial or cultural means to take advantage of them,
including working-class and minority consumers, as well as the mi-
grants involved in the production of the goods they acquire (Binkley
2008; Zukin 2008). In fact, migrants grow vegetables and pick fruit,
slaughter animals in inhumane conditions, cook and wash dishes in
the back of innumerable restaurants. In many cities, they sell coffee
and snacks at street corners and deliver meals riding their bicycles at
breakneck speed. They make the entire food system function, but they
remain invisible, exploited, and unable to contribute anything from
their own culinary knowledge. A growing awareness of these issues
among food activists is now originating practices that are meant to
avoid elitism and promote justice also in terms of food sovereignty
(Alkon 2008; Block et al. 2008; Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005).
Despite their tactical approach, food-related communities, both
those established among immigrants and the alternative food networks
originating from a social awareness about food systems and quality of
life, all coalesce around the same desire to defend an often imagined
past that is perceived as threatened with extinction, and to claim roots
that are constantly antagonized or negated by the surrounding envi-
ronment. These communities seem to operate in ways that, despite
their embeddedness in specific places, move beyond them to feature
what Arjun Appadurai defines as “locality” that is,

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  431

 primarily. . . relational and contextual rather than scalar
or spatial. . . . A complex phenomenological quality, consti-
tuted by a series of links between the sense of social imme-
diacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of
contexts. . . which expresses itself in certain kinds of agency,
sociality, and reproducibility” (Appadurai 1996, 178).

It is not just a matter of proximity or connection with places of origin.

For Appadurai, “even in the most intimate, spatially confined, geograph-
ically isolated situations, locality must be maintained carefully against
various kinds of odds” (179). Examined from this point of view, the
communities we are discussing are the outcome of situations that are
constitutive to the lived experiences, social structures, and economic
dynamics of contemporary urban and rural spaces. These communities
are far from stable and fixed: they evolve to respond to transformations
and imbalances in power relations; they start, they grow, and they die to
be reborn in myriad other forms.
For migrants, locality is experienced through the production,
preparation, and consumption of foods, the performance of practices,
and the reproduction of cultural categories that reinforce their con-
nection with their places of origin and with other migrants in other
countries, with friends, family members, and with other nearby or far
away migrants. Their cognitive map spans from their block to their
place of work, from the importing companies that provide them with
familiar ingredients to the stores where they shop, from the kitchens
where traditional dishes are prepared to the restaurants they patron-
ize. Community is then experienced as a network of food producers,
distributors, consumers, physical spaces such as malls, supermarkets,
and markets, as well as means of transportation, phones and the Inter-
net, the banking system, cash money, and mailing lists. Migrant con-
sumers may be a part of networks whose other members they do not
know directly but toward whom they may feel a strong emotional con-
nection, leading to various degrees of personal involvement. In some
cases their understanding of connectedness may be limited to occa-

432  social research
sional encounters with other migrants, rare trips to the mother coun-
try, or even the perusal of an ingredient’s origin on product packag-
ing and restaurant menus. In these cases, familiar food practices and
dishes can counteract the sense of distance from one’s community.

EMBEDDING NETWORKS
Faced with increasingly tenuous links among individuals and groups
that nevertheless consider themselves as belonging to a community, it is
understandable that the attention of many theorists has turned towards
connectivity and networks. For instance, Hervé Le Bras (1997) used
the expression “urban filaments” to describe those areas that connect
metropolitan centers to each other, which host most of the economic
and productive activities and large segments of the population. These
filaments often shape the f lows and activities of migrants, determining
their choices and sense of connectedness. Marc Augé spoke of a “triple
decentering,” which defines what he labeled “supermodernity”: big
cities measure their relevance “by the quality and scale of the highway
and rail networks linking them with the airports” (2008, vii); in private
homes, televisions and computers replace the hearth; and the individual
“can thus live rather oddly in an intellectual, musical, or visual environ-
ment that is wholly independent of his immediate physical surround-
ings” (viii). This decentering corresponds to the spread of what Augé
calls “empirical nonplaces,” spaces of circulation, consumption, and
communication that differ from “anthropological places,” where social
bonds and collective history are deeply inscribed. When moving to new
places, migrants find themselves constantly negotiating between the
fascination with these nonplaces that represent modernity and where
consumer culture fully expresses itself, and the desire to establish safe
places where their cultural identity and their otherness is appreciated
and reproduced.
Swiss sociologist Rudolph Stichweh highlighted the capacity of
networks to connect heterogeneous elements and to make physical
space irrelevant:

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  433

 Individuals must be allowed to enter into network relations,
and the potential global extension of these structures is
based on the social acceptance of “weak ties”; “weak ties”
being characteristic of most translocal networks. Networks
are lateral, they do know centers but do not necessarily have
a hierarchical top and they can be very big, including thou-
sands of nodes. Networks are evolutionary, that is they are
based on point-to-point relations which can be changed lo-
cally by continually adding and losing network ties (2003, 4).

These networks in fact constitute “small worlds” that may exist inde-
pendently from any sense of scale or distance (Stichweh 2004, 15).
Immaterial networks attract attention as true expressions of
globalization and as interpretive instruments to understand contem-
porary social developments. However, as Augé himself admits, “an aes-
thetic of distance tends to make us overlook all the effects of rupture”
(2008, xvi). That is to say, a point of view that abstracts from actual
places and from the living bodies that inhabit them may not be able to
get the whole picture. In Augé’s words, “walls, partitions, barriers are
appearing on the local scale and in the most everyday management of
the space” (xiii) since the “clamor of particularisms rises; clamor from
those who want to stay at home in peace, clamor from those who want
to find a mother country” (28).
Communities, and in particular communities somehow emerged
around individuals that find themselves eating in specific places, can
offer a strong resistance to supermodernity. They cannot be considered
only leftovers from the past or discounted as dysfunctional clusters
that hinder evolution. Ethnographer Anna Tsing (2004) has explored
friction as a metaphor for physical and often messy encounters as the
constitutive dynamics of contemporary global connections. When
thinking about communities exclusively in terms of networks, we can-
not forget that their members are actually embodied and experience
life not only in spirit but also in the flesh (Valentine 2002). What could
be better than food-centered practices to remind us of this simple fact?

434  social research
Through food, communities highlight the physical aspects of social
ties and obligations and the relevance of bodies that feel, affect, and
are permeable to the outside (Mol 2002). Eating bodies are not there
just to be passively inscribed by cultural and social norms, as mal-
leable masses that cannot talk back; they show that nature and culture
are deeply entangled, existing in complex relations that are contingent
and mutable (Blackman 2008, 34). There is no presocial natural body,
fixed and static, always ready to be molded by fluid and ever-chang-
ing social dynamics, no authentic and pure physical self that can be
masked by various personas in social performances. These bodies are
always unfinished and in process (83). When considering ingestion, it
is actually easier to think in terms of enactment, of what these bodies
can do, of dynamic processes rather than static substances (105–106).
Rosi Braidotti uses the metaphor of “nomadic subjectivity,” referring
not only to ever-changing subject positions but also to bodies consid-
ered as porous, mixing and interconnecting, always morphing, in pro-
cess, transient, and mobile (2002, 70).
These reflections on the role of food in the emergence of mi-
grant communities echo Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections about the
rhizome, an excretion that “assumes very diverse forms, from ramified
surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers”
and that “includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the
weed” (1987, 7). According to the French theorists, the rhizome as an
interpretive tool emphasizes connection and heterogeneity, revealing
the inherent multiplicity and apparent disorder of cultural formations.
Rhizomes expand across different surfaces, connecting diverse elements
into a temporary arrangement, teeming with inordinate life; similarly,
migrant communities originate and change not in abstract spaces, but
in actual places, where food practices allow languages, bodies, politics,
economics, sciences, and other fields of experience to connect in un-
predictable fashion. Rhizomes are always ready to expand or to shrivel,
depending on the situation and the elements that coalesce to initiate
them. In rhizomes, nothing is permanent and stable; for this reason,
nothing is univocal and essential; everything rather pulsates in continu-
ous movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities  435

 The dynamics that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to the rhi-
zome offer a better understanding of the formation of a sense of com-
munity around food practices, which can also be understood as concre-
tions grown in specific geographic areas in connection with biological
and climatic elements, and further shaped by the presence of humans
interacting with their environment through language, practices, and
continuously evolving social and political structures. This fluidity can
temporarily solidify into more stable formations that, when not al-
lowed to transform and evolve, risk ossification, deterioration, and
eventually decay. When migrant food traditions are turned into heri-
tage, they can become museum objects that may be admired but not
experienced. In these degenerative processes, communities, just like
rhizomes, lose their capacity for expanding and connecting to extra-
neous bodies, a phenomenon that inevitably leads to the refusal and
eventual destruction of any element that can be perceived as a foreign
pathogen.
It would seem that the food-related practices of migrant com-
munities are able to challenge nonplaces, networks, and the supermo-
dernity of globalization. Bodies, in all their materiality and unbridled,
messy, emotional vitality do exist, and so do the environments to
which—through ingestion—they are more closely connected than we
at times care to admit. Migrant communities stubbornly insist on plac-
ing food-related norms, practices, and ideas at the core of their identi-
ties, which can nevertheless be easily unpacked to reveal the underly-
ing social and economic power relations that sustain them. Traditions
and authenticity, hotly debated categories from the theoretical point
of view, constitute an emotionally important element in the lived ex-
periences of individuals and groups that value them and are ready
to argue against those who reveal their inconsistencies (Bendix 1997;
Abarca 2004). These reactions are visceral, instinctive, and poignant,
revealing the chaotic and slippery nature of embodied experiences re-
lating to food.
Migrant communities remain effective and significant to indi-
viduals and groups precisely because they are founded on bodies and

436  social research
embodied experiences that at the personal, communal, collective, and
institutional levels constantly negotiate not only with such ideals such
as nation, identity, authenticity, and tradition, but with the pull of
more abstract networks that highlight connections while disregarding
the emotional impact of embeddedness in specific places. A full under-
standing of food-related practices, norms, and ideas among migrants
reveal their shifting and instable nature of their communities, but also
their existential relevance. A reflection on food, whose main function
is to be destroyed by ingestion, could help to anchor contemporary
theories of globalization in the physical, emotional, and imperfect di-
mension of the body, with its pains and its pleasures.

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