Life alongside food: Food practices and affective memories amongst immigrant chefs

Food has great symbolic power in human life, especially for those involved in migratory movements. In contexts of displacement, food performs a bonding role between individuals and their memories, produces a sense of belonging through affective connections between people and places, and operates as a tool for identity negotiation. For professional cooks who immigrate to work in international restaurants, symbolic aspects are not excluded from their daily practices. Besides building relationships with food through professional training and expertise, chefs are people who have chosen to share their lives alongside ingredients and recipes. As such, their practice is informed by various symbolic and cultural aspects that precede the experience inside the professional environment, such as affective memories of homemade cooking and skills learned in the domestic setting. Seeking to explore the symbolic dimensions of culinary practices within narratives of displacement, this paper discusses the results of an ethnographic research developed in 2019 with immigrant chefs in an Argentinian restaurant located in Vitória, Brazil. Guided by Tim Ingold’s notion of life as a trajectory of movement and the Spinozian concept of affect, this paper investigates the role of memories in cooking practices, the influence of domestic practices in professional environments, the food categories chefs create based on their experiences, and the role of affects in professional cooking settings.