Food Values Beyond Nutrition - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 545

whom they live and who are the subjects of their studies. Thus, no ethnographer can fail
to notice food, no matter what their research focus may be. Everyday processes of learn-
ing and consuming involve not just etiquette, taste, and cost, but often kinship, ritual
practice, and kitchen skills however rudimentary.5 My breakthrough moment came on
a return visit in 1997 to a home where I had dined occasionally since 1979 and where
I had recently resided for several months. While living in the heart of this household,
I had never been invited to do more by way of food preparation than to join the very
young children assigned to peel garlic, and I never volunteered to help in the kitchen
due to an overly acute awareness of Hindu sensitivities absorbed more from books than
observations.
As it happened, my arrival in the summer of 1997 coincided with preparations for
a ritual celebrating the birth just a few days earlier of a new baby boy. Relatives from
other villages had assembled, and the small household was in some turmoil—to which
the arrival of my own family had certainly contributed. I was squatting uselessly
near the open-air cooking hearth on the roof, where the household's senior female,
Raji the paternal grandmother, was attending to the preparation of lapsi (a cracked
wheat porridge sweetened with unrefined brown sugar). Abruptly she thrust the large
spoon into my hand and ordered me to keep stirring the vigorously boiling pot, while
she rushed downstairs to organize some other aspect of the busy day. Briefly alone,
I stirred diligently with an amazed sense of responsibility and gratification. I knew
this sweet dish entrusted to my inexperienced hands would be offered to the ances-
tral spirits. It must, therefore, be the case that Raji did not think of me as a polluted
and incompetent barbarian. Although I had always touched her feet and received her
blessing when arriving and departing, I never felt her true acceptance and my genu-
ine incorporation, until this moment. With this personal recollection of cooking as
kinship, we arrive in the North Indian village from which I draw my ethnographic
sustenance.
Sketches from Rajasthan
One main message of food, everywhere, is solidarity . Eating together
means sharing and participating. . . . The other main message is separation .
Food marks social class, ethnicity, and so on.
(Anderson 2005, 125)
. . . food, in its temporal, spatial, corporeal, sensual, affective, discursive,
and moral transactions with all kinds of others evokes a sense of place.
(Janeja 2010, 2)
The examples that follow emerge from three decades of intermittent and varied research
in rural north India where I have never specifically conducted fieldwork on food.
I selected these examples in order to show some signal (and signalizing) uses of, and ideas