Tasting Tales: Food and Place Attachment in Selected Poems in Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems

Food is more than just a physical need and basic necessity for individuals.Food goes beyond creating a memorable experience of a place or destination; making gastronomy as a powerful cultural symbol that embodies memory, identity, and emotional connection to a place, and significantly influences tourism attractions.While food has long been studied in tourism and cultural contexts, its representation in literature, particularly in literary texts like poetry, offers a unique perspective into how individuals experience and articulate their attachment to place as it stimulates emotions and feelings, helping to convey a strong message and establish a connection to the place where the food is being represented.Thus, this paper explores how selected Malaysian poems from Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (2017) use food imagery to evoke place attachment, memory, and cultural identity.In doing so, the study emphasizes how food serves as a narrative device that goes beyond the physical palate to evoke deeper emotional and symbolic meaning.While the selected poems are set in Kuala Lumpur, the experiences and memories associated with food and the meaning they represent vary, especially among individuals and over time, representing the Malaysia's multicultural society.Consequently, this literary analysis offers valuable insights for scholars of literature, cultural geography, and heritage studies, and reinforces the importance of local poetry in the preservation of cultural heritage and identity.