In this and the following two chapters themes from the Literature Review will be considered and developed in conjunction with the information acquired during my fieldwork and interviews. This chapter discusses the potential of food to act as a bridge for immigrants in this country by providing them with links to both their old life and their new one. Firstly, food is considered as a medium to connect immigrants, in various ways, with family and friends remaining at home, and secondly, as a practical and tangible cultural object by which immigrants can initiate and maintain social connections with other New Zealanders. The following chapter examines how these same ‘exotic’ foods also provide opportunities for New Zealanders to connect with other places, and then Chapter Five explores how New Zealanders are combining these relatively new foods to our shores with New Zealand foodstuffs and subsequently making the exotic ours.
As immigrants cross geographical borders to become members of a new society, they simultaneously cross emotional and behavioural boundaries. Their lives, roles and identities change dramatically as immigration represents a significantly transformative process (Espín 2006:241). As culture and history greatly influence an individual’s sense of self and life story the abrupt disruption of immigration engenders a rescripting of one’s narrative, because the immigrant ceases to experience life in a familiar manner as social and psychological events invade and change their life plan (Espín 2006:246). The requirement to adopt a new language, for instance, signifies a profound impact on the immigrant’s self identity for a
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number of reasons. For example, despite an immigrant’s ability to converse in the host society’s language, they are frequently placed in a less privileged position within that community’s power relations because they talk with a foreign accent (Espín 2006:247).
From a positive perspective though, contemporary immigrants are no longer entirely separated from their former lives. Through the communication opportunities available to them by virtue of modern technology, today’s immigrants are now able to remain in closer and more frequent contact with friends and family in the homeland, whether by jet travel, telephone, Internet, or another medium. In brief, they are now in a position to live multiple lives at once. This enhanced linkage with their old home represents an important and necessary pathway for today’s immigrants to establish emotional and economic well-being in their new lives (Pedraza 2006:47).
In regard to the trans-global communication advantages enjoyed by today’s immigrants, a number of my immigrant interviewees, for instance, Celine, Rosa, Lara, Vema and Leo, referred to the pleasure they anticipate concerning their regular visits home to France, Argentina, Thailand, Indonesia and Venezuela respectively. Whilst the majority exhibited a level of flexibility concerning the foods they miss, one of the most popular comments made regarding such visits was that while they were at home they would eat the foods that they were unable to obtain and miss in New Zealand. Celine professed: “I just eat as much as I can of them when I go home!” One of the French foods that she misses is foie
gras, which I suggested she might find in a specialty shop; however she informed me that in such places the cost is prohibitive as the imported varieties are “very expensive brands, it’s very exclusive”. I have to agree, as after speaking with Celine I visited one such shop on Auckland’s North Shore and took note of the extremely high price of a very small container of foie gras.
78 Figure 9: Exotic foods, such as olives, sun-dried tomatoes and capers
in a Queenstown specialty shop (November 2008)
A further advantage for immigrants now with regard to today’s frequent and rapid jet- travel is that friends and family are able to travel to New Zealand to visit those in the diaspora. My immigrant interviewees told me how these welcome guests often arrived bearing edible gifts from home. Mia explained that when:
My mother-in-law came to visit us [from Iraq] there wasn’t much okra back ten years. She brought dried okra with her and when she came to the airport we didn’t know, and she’s not that good in English and she didn’t say that she had food. The [Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries’ detector] dog just went chasing for the smell of the okra and then we knew.... I remember there were different spices she brought cos it was grounded so it’s OK, it’s not like a seed.
Fortunately for all concerned, the okra and the spices were allowed into the country as they did not contravene our strict bio-security regulations, and brought a great deal of pleasure to Mia and her family by providing them with a taste of Iraq.
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Antonio and Elsa related how a similar consignment was brought to them from Chile by Elsa’s parents during their visit here. Antonio explained that they both crave a particular Chilean liqueur that cannot be purchased here:
The only thing that from time to time say, I would love to have, it’s not probably food, but it’s an appetiser and it’s a very popular appetiser so it’s heavily linked to food.... When Elsa’s parents came here the one thing they brought was two bottles and then we had to manage with that.
Not only was their joint craving temporarily satisfied, but I also discovered that they shared the liqueur by introducing it to their new “Kiwi friends...and even Eastern European [friends]...the only very sophisticated thing that we’ve done here,” Antonio said. Such was their love of the liqueur, plus what it symbolised with regard to their cultural pride, that they wished to share it cross-culturally, because food is the easiest bridge across ethnic boundaries (Van den Berghe (1984:393). Hence, the Chilean liqueur acted to reinforce their newly formed international friendships.
According to Diner, the difference at the beginning of the 21st century is not so much the diverse countries of origin of today’s immigrants, but that the advances in transportation and technology have made it infinitely easier to send people, information and ingredients from place to place than ever before. Thus, immigrants are reunited not only with family members from home, but also with foodstuffs frequently unavailable in their new home and generally greatly missed (Diner 2002:227). When an immigrant consumes foodstuffs from home they conduct a process of integrating their past with their present to recall the old way of life (Fernandez 1982:9). Mia related how when she first arrived in New Zealand she needed to eat her familiar Arabic food:
When I came here couldn’t change immediately to other culture’s food so I cooked similar what I know and what I got from my Grandma and Mother
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recipes. Even, I used to rang my Mum to ask her about few recipes that I’m not sure about, so I make sure it’s the proper tasting.
In the midst of an interesting account about Hinduism, food, charity and sacred cows in India, Veeba said she would like to tell me about her pregnancy. She assured me that the New Zealand midwives she had were very good, but she rejected their dietary advice because they ate totally different diets from hers. She found herself in a dilemma because she craved oranges, but also suffered from acidity, hence: “I had to call my sister, she’s a doctor, ‘if I have nausea what should I eat?’ She told me to have mint chutney for nausea”. For an immigrant in a strange country, without an extended kin group for support, this form of immediate connection with a loved one remaining behind represents a pathway to emotional and psychological well-being. This type of support was even more salient for Veeba as her pregnancy was unplanned and she was experiencing conflicting emotions. These continued affective, emotional links constitute a type of transnationalism as the immigrant is conducting lives in multiple countries (Pedraza 2006:47). By phoning her sister, Veeba received double comfort from home: she affirmed her connection with her sister and with the appropriate food for her condition. Likewise, Mia was able to connect immediately with family at home to seek guidance about her traditional food preparation.
Preparation of Traditional Foods in Modern Times
According to Counihan, “Certain foods can become emblematic...symbols of the past that are no longer regularly consumed because [they are] too difficult to prepare or no longer palatable or customary” (2004:26). Atkins and Bowler claim that various immigrants, especially those of the second and third generations, often consider the preparation of their traditional dishes to be too time-consuming to create on a daily basis, despite the importance
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of such foods to their ethnic identity (2001:273). A number of my immigrant interviewees, for example, Angelina, Mia, Antonio, Elsa, Leo and Lara, described their traditional foods as involving a great deal of time to prepare, and most of them do not make such food on a regular basis. For the majority, such food represents special occasions, for example, national days, weddings, anniversaries, or religious festivals. Occasions such as these represent times which make an individual’s ethnicity explicit, and consequently provide a chance to connect with and perform their own cultural identity. Because, food is symbolic of ethnic identity, so eating the food of one’s ethnicity represents embodying one’s identity on that special day. This reconnects the immigrant with an imagined community at home, the members of which will be eating the same traditional foods and celebrating the same festivity. Hence, the common consumption of these celebratory foods by the immigrants here and their loved ones elsewhere fashions an imaginary bridge between geographically separated friends and family. Antonio explained that since arriving in New Zealand they have not really cooked what they consider to be authentic Chilean food because of the difficulties and time involved: “There’s skills that you need, and there’s I wouldn’t say the materials, but sort of the ingredients, but to be able to make a good empanada it’s quite hard...lots of practise”. Elsa added that they were, in fact, extremely involved and that special knowledge was required. When I enquired whether their mothers prepared this type of food, they stated that neither mother was ‘into’ Chilean cuisine, though Antonio’s grandmother, who had been raised in a rural area, prepared such food. He also recalled how she would begin the preparation of a traditional Sunday lunch on the prior Saturday with the help of Maria, a “very old maid”, who had been in her employ for many years.
Similar sentiments relating to the time-consuming and labour-intensive preparation of many traditional dishes were echoed by Mia with regard to her Arabic cuisine:
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I don’t cook [complex dishes]. I cook the simplest recipes. I don’t cook like my grandmother used to spend hours and hours in her kitchen preparing one meal and all the children and grandchildren comes to her house and celebrate, but for me it’s hard to prepare all that.... I remember when my mother-in-law came [to visit New Zealand] and she did heaps of the yummy stuff we used to love cos she didn’t have anything just cooking. She likes to spend hours in the kitchen to prepare the similar food.
Mia continued by explaining that she is employed in the paid workforce and also has two children, so little time exists for such culinary pursuits.
I noticed a pattern emerging vis-à-vis the amount of time and energy required to produce many traditional foods originating from my immigrants’ homelands, and how in a number of instances it was perpetuated by the women of the older generation. Their traditional labour-intensive cooking was normal for them at home and they continued it when they relocated here. Mia’s mother-in-law, for instance, eventually joined them in New Zealand and continues her love of traditional food preparation: “She does all whatever we used to cook back home. She still cooks it in her proper way”. The acceptance by older immigrant women of the role of maintaining traditional cooking for the family is reiterated by Reid in Lift the Lid of the Cumin Jar, in which refugee and immigrant women to New Zealand from various nations talk about their lives and food. One of the immigrants that she spoke with explained how her elderly mother, who now lives here, cooks certain Assyrian dishes which are complex and require time and energy to produce. This particular woman cooks substantial amounts of food and then distributes it to family members (Reid 1999:52). Thus, through the medium of older women’s food preparation work, family relationships are reinforced (through the distribution and sharing processes) and the connections between ethnicity and key ‘ethnic foods’ are reproduced. This food production translates to social reproduction.
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It would appear, though, that such traditional dishes, requiring much time, knowledge, and physical effort, may, in particular circumstances, be on the wane today in their lands of origin. Antonio, Elsa and Lara described how time-saving measures regarding food- preparation are proving extremely popular with contemporary cooks in Chile and Thailand. Elsa and Antonio said that the Maggi range of pre-prepared foods, which are produced by the multinational company Nestlé, are ubiquitous in Chile. Elsa insisted: “We wouldn’t be able to survive without Nestlé! I remember once when our local supermarket had an argument with Nestlé and there was nothing in the supermarket after that”. Antonio added: “We rely a lot nowadays, because of course modern times, and how much time do you have at home to cook and all these things. I would say that the regular urban family in Chile would rely a lot on these kinds of preparations of foods”.
Lara pointed out that if people wish to cook a curry today in Thailand they use a commercially prepared paste and added: “I’m thinking back in my house in Thailand long time ago, because now I’m fifty, when I was kid everything you can do like from scratch...because at the old time we not rush”. So a lack of time for the leisurely preparation of a meal is by no means peculiar to the Western world. For my participants, the pace of life is not necessarily faster in New Zealand, it is also increasing in their countries of origin. It seems that as this increased tempo continues, people of various ethnicities adopt survival mechanisms, such as short cuts to meal-making, irrespective of where they live. Yet, these replacements may be to the detriment of their cultural heritage, because the reduced allocation of time to food preparation activities seems to decrease the importance of traditional food preparation as an expression of one’s cultural identity.
The introduction of modern ready-made preparations for inclusion in customary Tuscan food is referred to by Counihan in regard to her participants in Around the Tuscan
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as a powerful means to maintain memories, and to enact social class and cultural identity. Accordingly, the increasing substitution of their food with commercially processed, time- saving alternatives indicates a transformation of their link with their history, their traditional social life and their memories (Counihan 2004:27). The preservation of customary food habits, which Atkins and Bowler claim are usually maintained by first generation immigrants in their new homeland (2001:273), may be diminishing. The first generation immigrant nowadays often juggles family commitments, paid employment responsibilities and so forth, possibly resulting in a modified cultural performance regarding their food. I am left to ponder whether a number of dishes that fall into the category discussed here will, in a short period of time, become merely symbolic memories of the cultures that have nurtured them through generations, or will they be resurrected, perhaps as a modified, quicker to prepare version, by another generation when it realises the incalculable value of their ethnic foodways to their heritage?
Various scholars (Veart 2008, Valentine 1999, Reid 1999, Appadurai 1988) have noted how traditional recipes were passed by word of mouth from mother to daughter through generations of women, and how cooking was not formally taught, but rather learned by girls by watching and practising. This method remains in existence to varying degrees amongst different cultures, for example, in Lift the L id of t he C umin J ar, food writer Lois Daish, explains that for many of the recipes featured in the book, this is the first time that they have been published. They are not only examples of women’s knowledge acquired through working alongside other women, but also represent part of each contributor’s cultural identity and symbolise “a precious cargo brought to a new home in New Zealand from diverse nations” (Daish 1999:5).
Antonio and Elsa told me a fascinating story about Maria, the elderly maid mentioned above, and this customary relaying of women’s knowledge. They both explained that she is
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barely literate and is now the repository of her family’s cooking heritage as the recipes, having been passed down through generations of her family from mother to daughter, are now stored in her head. At the realisation that this valuable history would be lost when she died, Antonio and his brother decided to make a video-recording of her at work. Antonio described how in order to record all of Maria’s processes, he and his brother would arrive at his Grandmother’s house at six o’clock in the morning as Maria was beginning her work: “You could see the very complex things like asking, ‘Maria what are you doing now?’ ‘I am putting some salt’. ‘How much salt?’ ‘This’. And she shows the tip of her finger. Absolutely procedural knowledge”. We all agreed on the completion of this story that this was quite an anthropological undertaking by Antonio and his brother.
Lara also described how during her childhood in Thailand she used to go to the kitchen to help the kitchen staff, and she too learned to cook as they had, not from cookbooks, but by observation and practice: “Sometimes I’m helping them in the kitchen because just cutting,