Food and Identities

Food preferences are heavily informed by the various values, belief systems, and practices that individuals hold closely to themselves. The food that they choose to consume very much speaks about who they are, where they are from, which community, ethnicity, and nationality they belong to, which religious practices they follow and many more. In this sense, food is a potent site where individual and collective identities find their expression. It is also a site where these identities are formulated, asserted, contested, negotiated and reformulated. An interesting instance of this complex interplay between food and identities specifically in terms of the imagination of national identity can be observed in the contemporary notion of ‘cuisines’.