Devouring Adventure, Embodying Adventure: A Gastrocritical Reading of Irish Immigrant Fiction

Description

Uprooting oneself to start a new life in a far-away place is the ultimate adventure. It is an embodied adventure as we adapt ourselves to live, move, eat in new socio-ecologies. Fischler (1988) explained how, by literally incorporating food, we also incorporate ourselves into the community in whose food and foodways we partake. Those foodways might be strange to us, and ours strange to them. Strange foodways may feed alienation, disgust (Rozin, 1999) and even take on a moral dimension (Rozin, 1999). This motif of refusing, abhorring and embracing strange foodways, of devouring and embodying the adventure, is recurring in literature, prominently in such works as Joanne Harris’ Chocolat (1999), Richard Morais’ The Hundred-Foot Journey (2008) or Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast” (1958).
The early 2000s saw the publication of three novels that illuminate the adventure of immigration into Ireland with an emphasis on foodways. The novels were written by two Asian women and feature touches of autobiographical experience. Cauvery Madhavan moved to Ireland from India in 1987 with her husband, a surgeon. Her first book Paddy Indian (2001) chronicles the arrival of a young Indian doctor in Dublin in the late 80s. Marsha Mehran’s peregrinations in exile from her native Iran took her to Argentina, the United States, Australia, as well as Ireland in the early 2000s. She told the story of three sisters from Iran in a Mayo village in Pomegranate Soup (2005) and the sequel Rosewater and Soda Bread (2008), which include recipes for Persian but also Irish dishes.
In this paper, I will investigate how the food and foodways represented in these three novels trace the adventure of incorporating, and being incorporated by, a new community.

Period	25 May 2023
Event title	Conference of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies: New Beginnings
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International