La Mesa Larga: At the Table With Jane (Poster 3)

• In Event: Nomadic Visual Inquiries: Explorations in Visual Methodologies Across Disciplines and Paradigms

Abstract

Purposes
The purpose of this study was to learn, through a family archive (Gingrich-Phibrook, 2007 Sleeter, 2008) of cookbooks, tableware and linens (Wilson, 2014) about my deceased mother-in-law, Jane, and then to find opportunities to complicate, contrast or counter the recipes from her cookbooks with those from another cooking knowledge. This project explores cookbooks, cooking, kitchen epistemologies, embodiment, and family archives. The hermeneutic is a critical one, seeking to offer counter-recipes that complicate the assumptions found in the artifacts examined, especially by introducing a new language, culture and food of her Spanish-speaking family. During the week of performance/experience that we gathered around “la mesa larga”/the long table, we created opportunities to talk about differences between Uruguayan and U.S. kitchen epistemologies, transmission of recipes, values, ideas about health, cost of food, flavor profiles as well as changing tastes over time from Jane’s cookbooks (she died in 1986) to recipes of today.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of this project is critical, assuming as axiomatic that many of the ideas instilled by these cookbooks in generations of women were damaging: ideas about nature, health, sex, gender, race and class. However, this is a “desire-based” (Tuck, 2010) portrait. Knowledge as conquest (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 224-225) is impossible in the case of death, it is an opportunity to practice a not-knowing that can be “a good thing” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 239).
Methods
The work is an autoethnography (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2005) using archival materials and documenting the cooking process through photography and the creation of a website. It was also a performance of embodied work: cooking, plating, eating and photographing, inspired by Wilson (2014) and Gingrich-Philbrook (2005, 2007).
Results
One significance of this project rests on its application for language and literacy education. Cooking, eating and conversation about food and culture has long been an important part of the language learning classroom. Herman (2007), argues that a focus on “food, fiestas and fun” (Herman, 2007, p. 126) invents an imaginary world, designed for entertainment of language learners, disconnected from social, political, class and historical grounding. This project adds a human dimension to language and literacy about food: connecting place and family to food creation and recipe reading and interpretation, introducing critical methodologies and the use of counter-stories into the language-learning classroom. Othering and commoditizing communities through food (Khorana, 2020) bears exploration in the World Language classroom, where fetishing celebrations, ingredients and methods of food preparations is a reductive way of engaging with a culture.
Scholarly Significance
This project provides a framework for respectfully centering on food while critically engaging with culture around food. This is especially useful when discussing family can be fraught with emotion: establishing a horizon of “not-knowing”, and a conversation between recipes is a desire-based rather than damage-centric way to explore language and culture.

Author

• Elizabeth Dubberly, University of Georgia