Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures

Spanning literature, film, television, photography, and performance art, Intimate Eating asks how the culinary can foster spaces of human intimacy, particularly nonnormative intimacies. This is not a new question, but Mannur creatively assembles a new eclectic archive from the United States, United Kingdom, and India to produce a volume for readers in ethnic, food, media, and cultural studies.In her introduction Mannur models unconventional intimacy by discussing her own divorce (a foreboding sign—the ex-partner did not share her joy in food) as well as the isolation of finishing a book during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though her stated focus is how South Asian and Arab bodies become visible through acts of culinary intimacy at moments of heightened national xenophobia, this thread is lost at various points—I found myself wanting more argumentative scaffolding and stronger connective tissue between the chapters. Additionally, it is not required that South Asian and Arab people be examined together—it is a valid choice, but Mannur could have offered further theoretical explication.Intimate Eating begins by examining the “queer”ness of single eaters—people who eat outside of a heteronormative coupled or family context—and rejects ideas of them as odd or failed subjects. Chapter 1 muses upon one of my favorite films, The Lunchbox (2013), about two lonely people who find connection in mistaken food deliveries. Mumbai's dabbawalla system involves more than five thousand deliverymen who retrieve 175,000 lunches from home or restaurant kitchens to deliver to workers. Mistakes are purportedly one in a million, but through either error or magic, lunches from neglected housewife Ila make their way to accountant Saajan, a widower confronting aging and retirement. The error continues daily, and through notes passed between them in the dabba, Ila feels appreciated again while Saajan's emotional life is reawakened. Though theirs is the central intimacy, Mannur could have interrogated Shaikh, Saajan's younger coworker who's both deferential and desperate to slip into the latter's position. Cutting vegetables on his lap while riding the bus home, Shaikh is an interestingly classed figure doing the gendered work of cooking for his female partner.Though eating with others is framed as the ideal or goal in foodscapes, the reality is that many people eat alone, and enjoy doing so. Chapter 2 discusses Sri Lankan American novelist Mary Anne Mohanraj's Bodies in Motion, where a marginalized single queer woman cooking abundant meals for herself seems almost masturbatory; a series of photos of women eating alone by Miho Aikawa; and Edward Hopper's paintings of solo diners to imagine eating by oneself as an incredibly intimate act.Chapter 3 uses three memoirs—Eat, Pray Love, Julie & Julia, and Ginger and Ganesh—to show how white women consume, take nourishment from, and seek refuge or self-knowledge in Others’ food. Respective authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Julie Powell, and Nani Power desire intimacy with foreign strangers, foreign countries, and the internet/blogosphere. In particular, Mannur dwells on Julie & Julia author Powell, who denigrates her minority-majority borough and dreads her job as a 9/11 resource hotline operator. Mannur interprets Powell's escapist orientation to a polestar of culinary whiteness, Julia Child, as a clear “refusal of the complexity of multiracial Queens after 9/11” (p. 82).Chapter 4 centers on two community food projects: the Pittsburgh takeout restaurant Conflict Kitchen and the Chicago food truck Enemy Kitchen. While Conflict Kitchen served cuisine from nations with which the United States had tension (North Korea, Cuba, even Indigenous First Nations), Enemy Kitchen performatively employed Iraq War veterans to serve Baghdad recipes from a camouflage-green truck. Mannur argues that “hospitality and hostility are interlinked” and that the projects created unexpected intimate eating publics (p. 119), but a missing key element here is any mention of reception or consumer response. It is entirely unclear whether the projects succeeded at provoking diners to think about how contradictory Americans’ enthusiasm for foreign food is amid persisting xenophobia.The Great British Bakeoff is the book's final “intimate public,” where illusions of multi-cultural coziness run contrary to the reality of a xenophobic post-Brexit United Kingdom. South Asian bakers in the show were lauded for their “exotic” spins (rose, cardamom, and pistachio) on British dessert “classics,” yet the show never admits that a cup of tea, sugar, spice, or flour required colonial intimacies and violences between India, China, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom.As she concludes, Mannur recalls the culinary intimacies created by the pandemic lockdowns, when people ate or cooked online with each other. What she fails to add is that many people who work in food were not able to enjoy this synchronicity and community; instead, their bodies were put on the line to harvest, cook, serve, and deliver food to others. While Intimate Eating is not history per se, it possesses a historical sensibility with its very modern archive. Its case studies will surely intrigue interdisciplinary scholars and provoke interesting discussions with students.