I Am What I Eat: Anne

I have now finished my first series for Borough Market and started a new one, Box Clever. It feels like the right time to share the rest of the I Am What I Eat series. For my second post, I interviewed Anne Gumuschian, trader at La Marche du Quartier. Anne grew up in France, the daughter of a French-Italian mother and Armenian father. I talked to her about the foods that she grew up with, identity and migration. This is how the post began...

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I am what I eat: Borough Market Blog

In September I started a project for Borough Market, interviewing traders from different backgrounds about the foods that are important to them, the foods that make them feel nostalgic, that remind them of home. It has been a wonderful experience. I have met some really interesting people from diverse cultural backgrounds. They all had different stories to tell, but one thing that unites them is their passion for food and their joy in sharing it with others. 

As the series is coming to a close, I thought I would share the posts here too. In my first post I aimed to give a little context to the series by looking briefly at the concept of national cuisine and identity and then considering what that might mean to the individual. 

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Constructing Cuisine

Sorry I have been so quiet on this page. On the food front, I have only been thinking about one thing recently: my dissertation. I wrote a short article recently outlining my study, which I share here. Forget picnics, beaches and BBQs, this is what I'll be doing this summer...

The aim of my study is to investigate the context(s) in which having a national cuisine becomes significant. I will be looking at when, why and for whom it becomes important to talk about a national cuisine in Britain and Australia.

Like most aspects of culture that are the focus of anthropological studies, cuisines are never static, but constantly being made and remade. Nevertheless, it seems that at a particular moment, or moments, having a national cuisine becomes an important part of the ‘cultural capital’ of a nation. My research so far suggests that in Australia and Britain this becomes especially important in the 1980s and gains momentum in the 1990s. This is not to suggest that either country is lacking a rich culinary history, but rather that “the globally held view that every nation must have its own cuisine” (Cusack, 2000: 208) is actually quite a recent phenomenon.

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Food and identity: other factors

When I first started reading about food and identity I used to gloss over the parts which highlighted the role played by factors such as globalisation and commercialisation. I wasn’t interested in this. I liked reading about the sentimental stuff. But the more I have read, the harder it has been to ignore and now that I am going to be writing my dissertation on the subject I can’t afford to overlook it.

Funnily enough, when I was writing about my own food memories in my last post I started writing about my childhood obsession with English junk food and realised that, subconsciously, I had been influenced by these other factors. I loved stocking up on English junk food on childhood visits to the UK from Australia. I was keen on the ‘Olde' English hard-boiled sweets that you couldn’t get in Oz, but I was also interested in the different brands and flavours of crisps and sweets available. I thought it novel that the colours of crisp packets indicated different flavours in the UK. When I was back in Australia last Christmas, I found some old journals from my trips to England. I had actually stuck the empty crisp and chocolate wrappers in them, along with ticket stubs, postcards and other ‘memories’.

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Interview with Shaun Richards: Food and National Identity

Meet Shaun Richards, my oldest friend. We first met when we were less than a year old in the UK when his family came to stay with mine in Cambridge. I have no memories of this, of course, but I do remember living with Shaun's family in their beautiful home on Sydney's northern beaches when I first moved to Australia. 

My family ended up moving to Balmain, about an hour's drive away, so I didn't see Shaun that often, but we developed a great friendship and I looked forward, in particular, to our big family Christmases. Food was a significant part of these days for me and I wondered whether Shaun had similar memories of them.

The theme of this interview follows on from the first podcast in this series, focusing again on food, memory and identity. This short video introduces Shaun and some of the themes in the interview.

I explore with Shaun whether he thinks there is such a thing as Australian cuisine and if there are any links between his national identity as an Australian and his foodways. It turns out that for Shaun being an Australian is no longer a big part of his identity. So what is? Listen to the podcast to find out.