Kitchenspace Ethnography and Edible Landscapes: A Testimony of Ancestral Food and Memory in Transit

Scholarship on the body and memory address how bodily sensory memory is both a biological and social cultural phenomenon. What is often overlooked is how this embodied epistemology is transferred and received through food.... [ view full abstract ]

Scholarship on the body and memory address how bodily sensory memory is both a biological and social cultural phenomenon. What is often overlooked is how this embodied epistemology is transferred and received through food. This paper explores the ways ancestral food memory is sustained and travels in becoming edible transferable sensorial knowledge—taste memory. In locating ancestral memory, this paper chose Indigenous edible and visual landscapes—Indigenous culinary art and cuisines—as its anthropological site. Through ‘cheffing it up’ and kitchenspace ethnography, this research brings into perspective ways in which ancestral memory is rebirthed, reclaimed, transferred, embodied, and sustained through food, recipes, cooking, and eating, towards the health and healing of the Latina/o body.

Keywords: Ancestral Food Memory, Taste Memory, Indigenous Culinary Art and Cuisine, Kitchenspace Ethnography

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