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Illegal Tastes and Suspicious Aromas: Negotiating Migrant Selves Through Practices of Everyday Food
Abstract
Migrant cultures of consumption mostly exist as anomalies within the neoliberal food system of America, which functions through the superfluity of mass-produced, branded food and through the systemic obscurity of migrant microcultural flavors. The play of presences and absences of specific tastes has sociocultural implications in embodying the migrant as “minority.” Taking up specific instances of gustatory transactions between South Asians and Americans, this essay will examine the gastro-politics of migrant South Asian identity in America, and the issues of discrimination and racism that are revealed in such transactions.