Smells and Bells

  Cooking and Community:  Looking at Taste as a Communal Experience By Olivia Modica When I personally think of food and taste I think of the community beyond it. There are so many ways this can apply to life from the communal experience of eating at a restaurant to the community driven experience of eating with family or friends on a holiday. We look to not only what we are eating but who we are choosing to eat with. The experience of food and tasting can be impacted both by what we choose to eat with. For me personally, there are even foods I find I’ll only eat around certain people because they are who are important to me and I tend to associate those foods with them. For example, I associate my college friends with Domino’s because it tends to be something we all pitch in for together when we’re up late.  Communal eating and cooking can be seen in many other cultures, however the one we talked about the most was West African traditions, especially revolving around Ori...

  The thing I loved most about Elizabeth Perez’s book, Religion In the Kitchen , was how she talked about cooking – and especially cooking in the home – can connect us. My mom is an amazing baker, and I remember some of my joyous moments were spent in the kitchen with us. She taught me all the best ways to cook and in all the best ways. I learned how to be organized from being organized in the kitchen, how to care about if you’re doing too much or too little, and, most recently, how to trust your gut.  I’d say that gift-giving is my love language, but my artistic family always says that there is no greater gift than the one you make yourself. Food, I feel, is such a fulfilling gift to give my friends and family. I will prepare for weeks just to make something nice for people. I love cooking to the best of my ability too. I care about presentation, having fresh ingredients, and making something tasty but also good for your body and soul.   Although my family is not re...

  Taste is an interesting sense for me because I don’t feel like I have a strong connection to it. I am notoriously a picky eater. Although I’m not the pickiest, even in my family, I feel like my pickiness is still noticeable. As I’ve grown up I feel like I’ve grown to appreciate more foods and tastes, but my favorite of my acquired tastes is seltzer. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a bit of a problem when it comes to my love of seltzer. Every time a college break rolls around my family likes to joke that the only reason I’m going home is so that I can restock my seltzer cupboards on their dime, and they’re not wrong. However if you met me five years ago, I would have spit seltzer out and refused to drink it vehemently.  About 10 years ago my mom decided to cut caffeine, and by extension soda, out of her life. She realized that Diet Coke was doing far more damage than good to her so she decided that it would be for the best to leave it behind. However, as any carbo...

Throughout my life, I’ve had a complicated relationship with food and eating. I’ve had a myriad of stomach problems that I’ve dealt with that have made eating challenging, so there were times in my life where eating was more of a chore than anything enjoyable. I would often be in search of the most bland, innocuous meal I could find in order to not upset my stomach, so the process of preparing a meal wasn’t enjoyable either. I’ve been honestly sort of dreading writing a piece about taste because of this. I definitely don’t hate food, and my various stomach ailments have since improved, but some of my attitudes have remained over the time. The process of eating and preparing food is still unfortunately more of a chore than it is enjoyable, but it is definitely less so. I do find the prospect of cooking really fun and interesting, and I’m hoping that my perspective can change in the future and I can have more of a healthy and enjoyable relationship with food. The experiences of sharing f...

     My uncles like to say that to be a Chaffiotte means that cooking is in the blood. They trace it back to our ancestor Antoine who, in 1911, immigrated from France to work as a butcher in New York City. He spent the first few years alone in this new country, working in hotels and butcher shops to save up so his wife, Elise, and young sons could cross over and join him. In his diary, he wrote that the time apart was an impossibly lonely experience, made only worse by the vast differences in language and culture.      Food meant something very different in the United States than it did back home in Autun. Americans valued quantity over quality. Comfort over the joy of experimentation. Recipes were strictly followed to avoid the risk of not presenting the promised experience. It seemed that only the bourgeois class could enjoy “fine dining” and have the opportunity to savor the true value of a meal.            So, like a...

 In Kitchen, food, and Family by Elizabeth Perez, she includes some field notes about a guy giving a woman he loves oxtails after she requests them of him. After he says I love you to her.  Whenever I bake my Mom always asks me why I would put in so much work for something that I could buy at the store. I like it doing the work is always my answer. But that's not the whole truth, it's also about who I'm baking for. Whenever I bake it's always for family and friends. The other reason I enjoy baking is because it is my way of telling people I  love and appreciate them being in my life. I don't think I could ever run a bakery because I would have to bake for strangers and rude people and I know I couldn't do that.

    In Religion in the Kitchen , Elizabeth Pérez discusses the practices and rituals of the Lucumí people, particularly their use of speaking and cooking in devotion to their gods (called orishas). In this Afro-Caribbean religion, each orisha has their own particular tastes and preferences when it comes to food offerings made by devotees. Use of the senses in these rituals is crucial; smell, touch, and sound specifically are significant in the process of preparing food. Pérez argues that the acts of feeding and speaking to the orishas makes them real. She draws upon her many years of “observant participation” in a Lucumí community to illustrate her points. Pérez discusses these rituals as “micropractices,” that is, “routine and intimate sequences of operations that can be broken down into more minute units of activity” (9). Essentially, these micropractices are small activities that aren’t always seen as religious or important because of their seemingly small scale. Image...

  In class so far we have discussed the different religious connections that can be made through the senses in it's believers, but what about gods?  In Elizabeth Pérez's book Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions  she states that Caribbean gods do have senses, and that they love to experience symbols and gestures. Pérez states that their love of food dictates the ceremonial calendars of religious individuals and families and all of the labor and ritual that is involved. It is a very common thing for people among faiths from around the world to offer food to their gods, but I feel that as Westerners we rarely think about deities or God to experience the senses like we do. Pérez's book opened my eyes to a way of interpreting and understanding gods or God that I have never thought or known of. Although I am unreligious myself I realize that my assumption was that most people thought gods to be otherworldly beings that had no i...

       I find it quite interesting the ways in which humans can use physical items to represent non-physical ideas or beliefs. Perez describes the ways that people of the Afro-Caribbean religion Lucumi use food that they themselves prepared to appeal to and strengthen their connection to their deities, the Orishas, and the spiritual realm. Some claim that when the offerings are taken back they weigh less than they had before being given out to the Orisha, although in most cases it cannot be physically noted in any way that these offerings are being interacted with and appreciated (unless someone is possessed and eats the food as the deity in the body of one of the followers). Despite this, the practice is still incredibly important and relevant to their usual rituals.  Lucumi man performing a religious ritual https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9109      Seeing and eating is said to overlap metaphorically in rela...

 While the vast majority of the most intricate rituals described by Perez in the text were the cooking done for the Orisha, a variety of things were practiced by the Lucumi that she spent time with also practiced a form of ancestor worship as part of their religion, which involved offering a part of the food that they cooked to each of the ancestors present, a process with it's own unique and intricate ritual practices and taboos. While this is a very formal way of food being used to connect with the deceased, it's definitely not the only example of it that springs to mind when I think on the concept.  Personally, the first thing that I think of when it comes to food and to the dead, together, is a friend of the families who passed away when I was in high school. She wasn't someone I was particularly close to, the mother of my mom's best friend who I saw maybe once or twice a year when she came to Massachusetts to visit her daughter and Grandchildren. She was close enou...

Image Courtesy: https://ashepamicuba.com/en/que-son-los-orishas/ Elizabeth Peréz’s Religion in the Kitchen opened my eyes to a culture I was unfamiliar with, and I was amazed by what I learned. I knew very little about Black Atlantic religions, and I felt that this book, with it’s rich descriptions of the kitchen as a place of religious practice, the preparation and use for the food, and the roles and micropractices of everyone involved, was an excellent and thorough introduction to Lucumí culture (as thorough as can be without actually going to Chicago and breathing it all in). At times I was surprised by the intensity, attention to detail, social hierarchies and traditions that were associated with the food prepared for the orishas and other members of Ilé Laroye. I think this is because I was not raised in a particularly religious environment, and as a child I rarely ever thanked God or a high power for a meal. In my house, food was mainly just cooked for necessity, and only fo...

Not even getting into matters of taste, I was quickly and rapidly fascinated by the Ilé  Laroye. Maybe I’m so used to the idea of inherited, compulsory religion common in white, and especially Southern white, families. My father was a Christian, specifically a Baptist (I believe? Or, at the very least, the church I remember us going to is Baptist, according to Google), and I assume his parents were also the same, and so I was also expected to fall within that faith. I never took to it, of course, something which I’m sure my father has not informed the rest of my family of given they never mentioned it and I definitely feel they would have. Then again, that isn’t the only thing in my life they would disapprove of, so I guess that might be the least harmful thing for them to bother me over. In any case, that’s the religious experience I was used to, with children being forced to go along with their parents’ beliefs and many were just unquestioning of their Christianity because it was...

     The most shocking part of Pérez's account of cooking for the deities in the Yoruba religion for me was the ironies involved, especially in the constituents' positive attitudes towards servitude. As this community has experienced the abuse of slavery in its history and undoubtedly still feels the effects of this injustice today, this positive attitude confused me. In fact, laborers ensured that their "masters" could eat, turning the most bland and boring ingredients into something actually palatable, yet their masters have completely whitewashed them and depicted them as lacking culture. Talk about the irony in that!       When Pérez details the rites of passage that initiates had to take, doing the dirty work of gutting animals, it becomes apparent that this custom – almost like the act of hazing – is actually viewed in a positive light in the ilé. Completing these undesirable trials is recognized as an act of becoming part of the larger comm...

In “Kitchen, Food, and Family”, chapter two of Elizabeth Perez’s, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, she talks about the emphasis on feeding the gods in Black Atlantic traditions and that practitioners “use food as a medium of exchange with their deities” (61). Reading this made me think of a similar practice we do in my family, but instead of feeding the gods, we feed our ancestors. My family’s participation in the religion that we’ve been following has diminished over the years, but my mom continues to be an active practitioner. There is an altar (butsudan) in the room upstairs of my house for our ancestors. Most, if not all the families in the church we belong to have an ancestor altar, and the responsibility of each family is to maintain cleanliness of the altar and make daily food offerings, as well as pray to their ancestor spirits. My mom will take small portions of the dinner that we have prepared for the family to eat tha...