Reclaiming the Margins: Food Memoirs as Historiographical Interventions of Fractured Histories and Changing Landscapes

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_2How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Food memoirs; memory and migration; narrative resistance; subjugation and identity; urban transformation; cultural historiography

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways that food memoirs, written frequently at the margins of official historical narrative, provide a powerful site of narrative resistance. By recalling through meal memory, kitchens, and family routines, these works subtly evoke lives characterized by subordination, conflict, displacement due to numerous factors, and metropolitan transformation. Whereas such memoirs can seem to recount domestic or culinary traditions, they tend to express wider histories of dislocation in unfolding narratives of war, migration, social isolation, and the transience of belonging. This research sets out to learn about how these memoirs function as alternative archives. They are political and personal, fragmented in their presentation but powerful in their impact, particularly in situations where official documents refuse to maintain the entire human cost of historical change. Informed by postcolonial theory, life-writing scholarship, and cultural memory theory, drawing on some memoirs that have been structured by experiences of social marginalization, forced displacement, and cultural erasure, this paper pursues a close and comparative reading approach. Instead of banking on sensational statements, such as recipes handed down, kitchens recalled, or ingredients substituting for one another, these accounts rely on intimate gestures to invoke cultural loss and survival. The kitchen in these paintings is not just domestic space but is a place of survival, remembrance, and subtle resistance. Cooking becomes a historiographical act where experience is inscribed as a rich chronicle of what official history tends to ignore. They imply that food memoirs not only keep alive individual recollections but also communal histories at risk. These accounts reconstruct fragmented identities, follow silences wrought by war, and testify to the stress induced in contemporary urban settings on traditional practices. Through this, they push the limits of what is considered historical knowledge. This paper is arguing for the wider scholarly acceptance of such works, not as supporting cultural texts but as essential to the rebuilding of lost or silenced lives. In a world more shaped by movement, loss, and fragmentation, such memoirs provide both memory and method for reconceiving history.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Aishwarya Mehta
AU  - Anurag Chauhan
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Reclaiming the Margins: Food Memoirs as Historiographical Interventions of Fractured Histories and Changing Landscapes
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 7
EP  - 26
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_2
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_2
ID  - Mehta2026
ER  -