Introduction to Sticky Memories: The Emotional Landscape of Food Special Issue

This special issue, Sticky Memories: The Emotional Landscape of Food , explores the profound impact of culinary experiences on our emotional and cultural landscapes. It examines how food, beyond its material form, becomes a powerful symbol in our personal and communal narratives. The issue engages with Sara Ahmed’s (2004) concept of ‘stickiness’ in food memories, where culinary experiences not only linger but also shape identity, resist replication, and reflect complex sociopolitical realities. The narratives demonstrate food’s role in memory-making, highlighting the intricate intersections of taste, emotion and cultural heritage.

In a bustling Bangkok market, you might spoon up your first taste of Tom Kha Gai.The coconut milk's sweetness intermingles with the sharper, more defiant notes of galangal and lemongrass.This spoonful wouldn't just be a soup; it could become an invitation.Years before, you might have stood on a vintage checkered floor in your aunt's Brooklyn kitchen, the room saturated with the aroma of beef stew; potatoes, carrots and hunks of beef circle in a bubbling broth, capturing an edible manifestation of comfort and home, and perhaps even love shared through culinary legacy.In another life, you could be perched in a cozy café just off Rue de Rivoli in Paris, savouring a quiche so poetic, it could only be French.Nutmeg and thyme meld as you break through layers of cream and egg.This wouldn't be just lunch; it may just become an act of rebellion.Then picture yourself in a South African township, the aroma of Bunny Chow wafting from a local vendor.This fast-food delicacy, a hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with curry, speaks of resilience, of a community's ability to create joy from meagre means.Or you might find yourself in Istanbul, tearing a piece of lahmacun at a busy marketplace.This Turkish flatbread, topped with minced meat and spices, isn't just street food.It might carry the multi-layered complexity of a city that straddles two continents, embodying its rich, sometimes turbulent, history.And some of you may recall being in Australia, a child with sandy feet and salt-kissed hair, biting into a Chiko Roll at a sunburnt beachside kiosk.There would be nothing gourmet about this deep-fried concoction of vegetables and spices, but it might carry the taste of freedom and endless summers.Each bite synchronises with laughter and the cadence of the ocean's waves.
How do the foods we consume extend beyond the plate to leave an emotional imprint?What makes certain culinary experiences 'stick' while others are easily digested and forgotten?Can the act of eating be a radical form of expression, a site for negotiating complex identities and sociopolitical realities?The narratives compiled in Sticky Memories invite us to reimagine food as more than mere sustenance, highlighting its complex role in our emotional and cultural imaginaries.They elevate the act of eating from a biological ritual to a performative event suffused with meaning and contextual tensions.Echoing Sara Ahmed's notion of 'stickiness' (2014: 8) these stories grapple with how emotions and experiences adhere to us, blurring the lines between the individual and the collective, the genuine and the constructed, the private and the public.This emotional 'stickiness' is not merely about its affective pull; it's a reflection of how the ritual of eating is invested with social, cultural and even political meanings.Here, food operates not only as a mechanism for memory but also as a site where identities are forged and reimagined.
By exposing the various layers of significance embedded in our interactions with food, these narratives operate at the intersection of personal and communal histories.Thus, the eating experience is transformed into a transgressive space for inscribing and revising our cultural memories.It challenges us to consider food not merely in its material form but as a complex nexus where meanings, practices and broader sociocultural dimensions intertwine.In doing so, they not only underscore food's role in constructing and maintaining social relations but also reveal its potential as a space for enacting a kind of gastronomic politics-a politics that challenges us to consider what additional, often invisible or overlooked 'ingredients'-be they buried histories or latent memories-we are consuming, accepting, or perhaps even resisting.
Hence, we attempt in this special issue to explore the varied textures of landscapes of 'stickiness' in how, when and why we eat particular foods (or, in fact sometimes, reject these).The purpose then is to tease out these complex and unusual intersections of meaning-meanings imbued with sensory experiences, with a gamut of emotions, with fragments of poignant recall that 'stick' deep in gastronomic memory, with the productive tensions of cultural inheritance and its contradictions.Together these moments underline the shaping force of food as cultural practice and its significance for the everyday work of identity-making.The articles that follow address this project in diverse ways.In fact, we have encouraged contributors to be imaginative in their approaches, to engage with fragments of lived experience, drawing from these, collectively, a kaleidoscope of meanings for the analysis of cultural life.So the sites for reflection range across a multitude of peoples and cultures-from London-based Bengali women and their food maps to the rich, sensory detail of a Hakka household in Malaysia; across different times-memories and stories of a wartime Romanian grandmother, of childhood travel from Mexico to the US in search of 'home' to its present re-enactment in community festivals; across public institutions of remembrance, such as museums, to the domestic intimacy of a stroke-stricken father; across iconic examples of food and their reverberations in personal and community life-a flaky pastry, a seemingly limitless chicken, billowing egg white beaten with the blade of a knife.These are rich pickings indeed.
In selecting the following accounts, we have chosen Ahmed's work and her motif of 'stickiness' to structure our menu of disparate ingredients.However, reference also should be made to the nuanced and substantial body of writing that has explored the landscapes of food, particularly its sensory content and structural significance.To mention only a few of these: David Sutton (2001, 102), for example, reminds us of food's critical agency: 'Food does not simply symbolize social bonds and divisions; it participates in their creation and re-creation.'Meanwhile, Kelvin Low reflects on the significance of embodied flavours and aromas, claiming that culinary texts, such as cookbooks 'reflect on both private familial memories and collective narratives that in conjunction shed light on identity politics ' (2016, 78).In this regard, both of these writers pay homage to the sensory analyses of Nadia Seremetakis and her now-classic account of nostalgia for a disappearing peach in which she concludes 'a politics of sensory creation and perception [is] a politics of everyday life ' (1996, 14).In other words, food tastes and smells, while ingested and visceral, are hardly innocent or 'natural.' These scholarly offerings are suggested in the spirit of further reading if your appetite has been whetted by the contents of this special issue.Meanwhile, we encourage readers to savour its immediate offerings, to traverse their sensory landscapes, to reflect on further intersections and, if you hunger for more, to read on.The rest of this introduction serves as a degustation-an enticing menu of the 'little bites' to come.
In Mapping Pockets of Survival: Café Society in Post-War Cable Street, Elaine Swan, Shazna Hussain, Sajna Miah, Julie Yip traverse the rich, complex landscape of Shadwell's food history, highlighting the significance of migrant cafés as pivotal sites of racialized resistance, community cohesion and survival.Post-war Cable Street's café society, extensively characterized by migrant entrepreneurship, stood as a counternarrative to the dominant historical discourses, often neglecting the contributions of non-white and women community members.Through the lens of 'sticky emotions' as conceptualized by Sara Ahmed, the study reveals how these spaces are saturated with affective residues that encompass themes of diversity, resilience and defiance against the backdrop of racial and colonial legacies.The walking tour, an integral part of the research, serves not just as a means of historical recount but as a profound act of counter-mapping, challenging the exoticist commodification of 'ethnic' food found in contemporary food tourism.This undertaking emphasises the need to acknowledge and incorporate the affective, subjective socio-cultural dimensions of food, extending beyond the traditional focus on food systems, towards an understanding of culinary infrastructure that embodies both material technologies and immaterial knowledge networks.
Irina D. Mihalache's reflective piece One Could not have Survived Communism without a Grandmother: Eating Stinging Nettles in 1980s Romania contends with her grandmother's cookbook as a portal into the complex and often paradoxical memories of growing up in 1980s Romania, a period marked by the 'golden decade' of Communism.The narrative, woven around the preparation of sautéed stinging nettles, a staple from her grandmother's kitchen, evokes an array of sensory experiences and emotional nuances.It contrasts the oppressive reality of food scarcity and rationing under the Communist regime with the rich, nourishing and delicious meals that defined the author's childhood.The reflection navigates through the intricate layers of memory, pleasure and survival, questioning the ethics of finding joy in times of repression and the impossibility of recreating certain tastes outside historical and emotional contexts.This contemplative exploration not only challenges conventional post-Communist narratives but also highlights the enduring significance of 'sticky' memories, which resist replication but persist in their profound impact on our understanding of histories and cultures.Jacqui Newling's Memory in Motion: Creating Sticky Memories in Museums, offers an immersive discourse on 'sticky memories' through the lens of sensory, performative, experiences within a museum setting, particularly targeting the domestic and emotional landscapes of food.Grounded in an understanding of museums as 'sites of memory,' it underscores the affective relations between food, memory and cultural heritage.This multidimensional approach reveals historical acts like 'whipping egg whites into snow' not as mere antiquated practices, but as embodied re-enactments that evoke emotional stickiness, ingrained social value, and a discursive interplay between past, present and future realities.In situating these activities within a web of larger sociocultural conversations about domestic labour, gender roles and the industrialization of food, she showcases the complexities of using a tangible medium-food-to unravel the intangible and continually evolving contours of individual and collective memory.This experiential narrative not only challenges the casual museum-goer's approach to visiting museums but also contributes to the dialogues on how affective encounters with food can add layers of meaning and value to our collective cultural heritage.
In Sweet Grief, Sian Supski offers an emotional journey through the landscape of a family coping with illness and isolation.The narrative employs the medically termed act of swallowing, or 'dysphagia,' as a metonymy to explore how our relationships with food change in moments of crisis.Supski uses the act of swallowing to introduce us to the raw emotional realities that came with her father's stroke, against the backdrop of Western Australia's strict COVID-19 regulations.It exemplifies the 'sticky emotions' Sara Ahmed theorises, as it navigates the temporalities of grief and caregiving during a pandemic that, ironically, exacerbates the stickiness of physical and emotional borders.The act of swallowing not only represents a return to physical health but becomes a loaded symbol for emotional and psychological well-being.In this context, the ritual of eating millefeuille acts as a sensory touchstone, a recurring 'sticky' memory that accrues layered significances-each flake of pastry and dollop of cream symbolising complex emotions like grief, love and resilience.As the narrative aligns the rituals of food with the fraught politics of border-crossingboth bodily and territorial-it challenges us to contemplate how the act of eating becomes a transgressive space where borders are questioned and 'sticky' emotions are negotiated.
In his reflective work Sopa de Frijoles, Milpa and Memory: A Memoir, Juan Carlos Jimenez interrogates the milpa as a locus of Central American cultural identity and historical resilience.Anchored in his Salvadoran roots, Jimenez articulates how this symbiotic agricultural practice of cultivating maize, beans and squashes transcends mere subsistence, embedding itself in the cultural DNA of a people.The memoir functions as both a repository and a testament to the enduring legacy of these ancestral foodways, particularly in the context of the diasporic experience.It charts a narrative that is not only personal but communal, positioning the milpa as a vital artery through which cultural continuity and collective memory pulse.Jimenez's account underscores the integral role of agrarian traditions in the nourishment of community bonds and the fortification of identity against the erosive forces of history and globalisation.
In A Sandakan Childhood: Recalling Hakka Food Memories, Cecilia Leong-Salobir uses culinary traditions to explore cultural identity within the Malaysian Hakka diaspora.Her narrative blends the sensory experiences of traditional dishes with the dynamics of memory, revealing how food acts as an anchor for a community without a geographical homeland.Meals resonate with family bonds, adaptability, and the intersection of local and colonial influences.Leong-Salobir presents food as a repository of balance, health and heritage, encapsulating the nuanced interplay between cultural continuity and transformation in the everyday lives of the Hakka in Sandaka.
Our Migrant Meal: Toward an Immigrant Haggadah presents a captivating blend of tradition and contemporary narratives.This collection comprises two distinct pieces: the collaborative work Our Migrant Meal by Adolfo Guzman-Lopez and Sara Harris Ben-Ari and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez's solo piece, Toward an Immigrant Haggadah.In Our Migrant Meal, Guzman-Lopez and Ben-Ari offer a creative reinterpretation of the traditional Jewish Passover seder.This piece vividly captures the essence of food as a medium for conveying memory, identity and transition within the diverse communities of Los Angeles.The seder plate transforms from a symbol of religious ritual into a focal point for discussing broader themes such as migration, struggle and unity.Here, food transcends its role as mere sustenance to become a powerful narrative device for communal storytelling and expressing gratitude.Toward an Immigrant Haggadah, penned solely by Guzman-Lopez, provides a fresh and poignant view of the Haggadah-the Jewish text recited annually during Passover.Traditionally a performative narrative of the Jewish people's liberation from enslavement in Egypt, the Haggadah is reimagined as an 'immigrant seder.'This innovative intervention, part autobiography and part collective memory, skilfully interweaves elements of Mexican culture with the conventional elements of the Jewish Seder.In this narrative, food becomes a cartography of the migrant experience, with dishes like nopal salads and unleavened bread serving as living markers of diasporic hardships and triumphs.Together, these pieces serve as powerful reminders of the significance of memory and history in shaping our collective identity.They underscore the importance of the ritual of retelling stories as a means of commemoration and education for future generations.
In the evocative piece My Grandmother's House: A Journey Through Culinary Memory in Kuching, Jacqui Kong offers a sensory and cultural exploration of 'stickiness' set against the backdrop of her hometown, Kuching, Sarawak.Through a rich narrative that traverses familial homes and culinary heritage sites, Kong explores the multisensorial experiences of revisiting her roots, emphasizing the everyday and mundane as pivotal elements in sustaining Kuching's rich culinary landscape.Her narrative is particularly poignant in the context of Kuching's recent accolade as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, effectively framing the city as a vibrant intersection of past, present and future.By juxtaposing the simplicity of her ancestral home with the burgeoning gourmet scene of the city, she deconstructs the conventional binaries of chef versus hawker, advocating for an inclusive perspective of gastronomy that transcends high-end cuisine.Through vivid descriptions of local dishes and the communal spirit of traditional eateries, Kong captures the essence of Kuching's hawker culture as the lifeblood of the city.
The Smile of Misery by Loulou AL-Akl Khoury provides an unsettling yet poignant look at how food becomes a lens through which the societal and economic unravelling of Lebanon is experienced.Set within the context of Lebanon's current socioeconomic crisis, the piece conceptualises the 'stickiness' of memories and emotions by showing how one's favourite foods, once symbols of joy or comfort, can turn into reminders of misery and unattainable luxury in the face of hardship.Set against a backdrop of scarcity and desperation, food here is not just sustenance, but also an emotional and cultural battleground.This narrative forces us to reckon with the emotional weight food can carry, magnified by the context of a nation in crisis.It effectively challenges the preconceptions about food as merely nourishing or delightful, showing its capacity to evoke a complex mix of nostalgia, despair and longing.
Serving as a poignant recollection of youth and a textured journey through linguistic and cultural terrains, Susana Chávez-Silverman's Paisaje pegajoso/Sticky Sororidad Crónica illuminates the hazy borders between the familiar and the strange, between friendship and class divisions.Set in Zapopan, Jalisco, where childhood experiences are soaked in the rich aromas of cajeta and entangled in intricate cultural debates over cajeta and dulce de leche, this bilingual narrative offers more than just nostalgia.It's a thoughtful exploration of the unspoken rules that govern family, friendship and community-rules that are as complex and 'sticky' as the memories they create.In one particularly compelling section, the story centres around Irma's bewildering experience at a family lunch outing, vividly illustrating the nuanced socioeconomic and cultural barriers that can manifest in even the simplest acts, like sharing a meal.It's a stark reminder that life's mysteries-especially those formed in childhood-often remain just that: mysteries.These unresolved questions continue to shape us, compelling us to question and wonder, long after we've navigated the muddled pathways from childhood to adulthood.The story thereby serves as a powerful lens through which to examine the 'sticky' nature of emotional and sensory memories, as well as the ever-fluid borders that delineate our complex, multifaceted identities.It leaves us with a haunting yet beautiful reminder: that the world we navigated as children, full of both wonder and confusion, is never quite as distant as it seems.
The autobiographical piece The Human Dredger by Billy de Luca serves as an intriguing palimpsest of food, culture and the passage of time.With vivid scenes from Melbourne and Amalfi, the text negotiates the terrain of cultural memory and sensory experience-specifically, the olfactory-through the vehicle of gastronomy.It offers an intimate culinary voyage, linking childhood aversions to adult cravings, thereby underscoring the palate as a site of both growth and remembrance.Notably, the work probes the complex relations of familial heritage and social expectation within the framework of Italian culture, illustrating how food serves as both constitution and narrative.The text interrogates the layered metaphor of 'taste' to unravel broader themes of cultural assimilation, ageing, and the textured imperfections of memory.The dinner table, not merely an object, transforms into a heavy, gravitational sphere-imposing yet inescapable-around which these memory constellations revolve.Thus, the piece affirms that our sensory experiences are sticky, accumulating layer upon layer of cultural, emotional and historical meaning.It argues for the foundational role of food and olfaction in shaping not just our past, but our understanding of culture and the self.
in postcolonial global cities, such as London, and Singapore, with tracing sensory landscapes and the power of memory at the heart of this work.Her current research involves using ethnographic approaches in outdoor markets and gentrified small businesses in Marseille, France.This research is shaped by Marseille's positioning, like Singapore's, as a 'crossroads' site of 'mixed' populations and complex migrations.
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez has been a reporter in Los Angeles since 2000 for the National Public Radio affiliate in that city.His poetry is published in several anthologies, the most recent: Tlacuilx: Tongues in Quarantine.He has also performed his poetry with the Taco Shop Poets in various U.S. cities as well as in Mexico City.
Sara Harris (Ben-Ari) is a Los Angeles-based assemblage + audio artist + activist + performance poet + educator with over two decades of public radio-reporting on immigration + urban landscapes + environmental justice.Co-founder of RadioSonideros sound collective and of local non-profit1866 (www.solanocanyon.org).Host of Hear in the City; Radio Realities from the Urban Landscape (www.soundcloud.com/hearinthecity), Co-director of The Fragmentations Only Mean (documentary, 2021) with Jesse Lerner.
Shazna Hussain is a Community Researcher for WEN.She is a British Bangladeshi born in Tower Hamlets and continues to live in Tower Hamlets.She has seen many changes in the borough and loves the diversity and the hustle and bustle of the vibrant markets.The project she is working with is called 'Foodlives,' she enjoys learning about the food industry and capturing people's views about certain food products and then projecting them!Juan Carlos Jimenez (he/him) is a PhD Student at the University of Toronto's Department of Geography and Planning.His thesis touches upon rural youth livelihoods, youth migration, community organizing, and historic memory of the civil war in El Salvador.Juan Carlos also conducts research on climate vulnerabilities and adaptation projects in El Salvador and Nicaragua and has worked with the Salvadorian Diaspora in Canada as a community-based researcher.He considers himself a 'son of the diaspora,' born to Salvadorian migrants to Canada.
Jacqui Kong is an interdisciplinary scholar who works in the intersections between Food Studies, Cultural Studies, Media & Communication Studies, Film and Television Studies, and Postcolonial and Diasporic Studies.She is currently Senior Lecturer at the School of Food Studies and Gastronomy, Taylor's University, Malaysia.Her publications include forthcoming papers in top-tier Food Studies and Media Studies academic journals, along with a published book chapter in a Routledge Handbook series, Food in Asia.She has also presented papers in multiple international conferences in Toronto, Italy, Hawaii, and Kuala Lumpur (conferences organised by international bodies and associations in Food Studies, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Pacific and Modern Language Association).Jacqui is currently a board member of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS).
Cecilia Leong-Salobir is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.She is a food historian and researches on colonial food history and food history of Asia and Australia.Her monographs are Urban Food Culture in Asia Pacific: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the 20th Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge 2011).She also edited the Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (2019).Her current project is on the global history of Hakka food.Cecilia is a founding member of the editorial board for the journal Global Food History; member of the editorial board for Food, Culture and Society and member of the Bloomsbury Food Library Editorial Advisory Board.She is also board member for the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and also serves on the ASFS committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Nicholas Manganas is a Senior Lecturer in Studies and Global Societies at the University of Technology Sydney.He is the author of Las dos Españas: Crisis and Terror in Contemporary Spain (2016).His current project, Crisis Cultures, investigates the role of crisis narratives in eliciting creative and communal responses, positioning these narratives at the intersection of historical events and contemporary reactions.
Sajna Miah is a Community food Researcher for Wen and is part of the Food Lives team.Food Lives is a part of a 5 year research programme which is funded by the UKRI and is led by Reading University FoodSEqual.Food Lives in Tower Hamlets is run by Wen and University of Sussex.Sajna Miah was born and raised in Tower Hamlets and has over 25 years of experience of working with different Community backgrounds.Her passion is to find out about different cuisines and culture around the world.Sajna's personal quote: 'Food brings people together.'Irina D. Mihalache, a Romanian-Canadian scholar, writes and researches on the lands of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit.She is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Museum Studies at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; and affiliate member of the Culinaria Research Center (UTSC).Her research covers histories of volunteer women in art museums, intersections between food and museums, the material culture of food, and practices of museum interpretation professionals.Mihalache applies community-centred approaches to her research and teaching and works alongside the Toronto Ward Museum to support storytelling driven by migrants to Toronto.
Jacqui Newling is a Sydney-based historian, gastronomer and museum curator.She is passionate public historian who interrogates and interprets place and social culture with a hungry mind.Jacqui is author of the award-winning book Eat Your History: Stories and Recipes from Australian Kitchens and has published widely on various aspects of Australian food culture and identity in settler-colonial contexts.She is currently an Honorary Associate in History at The University of Sydney.Jacqui acknowledges the privilege to live and work on Wangal and Gadigal Country, and that this land has never been ceded by Australia's First Nations people.Elaine Swan is a Reader in Feminist Food Studies at the University of Sussex and lives in Tower Hamlets, London.She is Co-PI on a UKRI project focused on transforming UK food systems called FoodSEqual and very much enjoys collaborating.with Shazna, Sajna and Julie on a subproject based in Tower Hamlets called Food Lives.Her research interests are in anti-racist feminist studies of food, critical diversity studies and critical whiteness studies and therapy culture.

Sian
Julie Yip leads food projects at WEN (Women's Environment Network) and works on the Food Lives team.She studied visual communication at the Royal College of Art, London before training in teaching and horticulture.Julie has worked as a co-ordinator of a refugee supper community project, a gardener greening urban spaces for better mental health and as a food growing educator working with schools.
Supski is Research Fellow in Sociology at Monash University and is an Adjunct Research Fellow, Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University.Sian is a cultural sociologist who works as a journeywoman researcher, with an interest in everyday life, life writing and gender.She has written two books, A Proper Foundation: A history of the Lotteries Commission of Western Australia, and It was another skin: The kitchen in 1950s Western Australia.A co-edited book with Peter Beilharz, The Work of History-Writing for Stuart Macintyre was published in 2022.She is an Editor of the journal, Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology.In 2015 Sian was a Visiting Scholar at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch, South Africa.Since 2016 she has been affiliated with Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC.