Saving Spoon as a Beacon in Preethi Nair’s 100 Shades of White

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_30How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Beacon; cuisine; culture; resilience; furtherance

Abstract

Women have been battling for so many things in their lives. The journey of their lives constituting vibrant roles as daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers has numerous challenges to be met. The way they deal with these is highly commendable. They make use of all their assets—be it background, culture, values and upbringing. When it comes to culture, how can cuisine be left behind? It is an integral part of the culture that is associated with the womenfolk. When they rely on the cuisine it ensures their furtherance, giving them strength to move ahead. Their lives keep moving. This aspect like all the other aspects of life, are replicated in literature. How can literature be inseparable from life? We have literary gems who have penned touching treatises related to the repast. Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, Andaleeb Wajid’s More Than Just Biryani, Khalid Jawed’s (translated by Baran Farooqi) – The Paradise of Food in India and Amit Majmudar’s The Abundance Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’ The Mistress of Spices Meera Syal’s Anita and Me and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Vikas Khanna’s the Imaginary Rain (outside the nation) are some of the notable novels. This paper would analyze how does Preethi Nair present the ‘saving spoon’—the ‘food’ not only as a cultural signifier but also as a rescuer to her family. Her novel 100 Shades of White shows how the pickles, a cuisine, saved her bacon.

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  - Shashi Srivastava
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Saving Spoon as a Beacon in Preethi Nair’s 100 Shades of White
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 333
EP  - 340
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_30
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_30
ID  - Srivastava2026
ER  -