Food as Storytelling
I’ve said it many times. I will say it many more times. But as these views of mine are new and fresh to substack, I will say them one more time: storytelling is so much more than words.
As a specialist in mythology and myth studies, I’m often surrounded by words. Old texts are transcribed by who knows who, who knows when. I’ve spent many many years of my life leaning over a desk, studying words and analysing words, teaching through words about words. At the heart of the actual thing, the alive thing that is myth, there is so much more than words. When we actually do myth, myth is performed. It’s active. It’s movement. Its music. Its dancing.
And it’s food.
Today, I want to just explore, generally, the topic of food and storytelling. Now, this is something which can (and does) have books on the subject - I’m not doing that here. Here, I want to explore just the core idea of the topic, a quick overview of my thoughts and ideas on the subject, and my own personal narratives around food.
Food and food consumption is a type of storytelling. It’s a way of communicating a lot of different types of narratives all at once. I recently moved to an area of Salisbury which made it a lot easier to access our local Polish shop. The consequence is that I’ve been eating a lot more pierogi than usual.
Pierogi are home to me. Growing up, pierogi were the marker of my family. At Christmas, we made homemade pierogi, eating them fried with caramelised onions and sour cream. We started in the afternoon, me and my three sisters gathered around kitchen counters, rolling dough, cutting shapes, filling the little dumplings. We made enough to feed an army. My mother’s family are Polish immigrants, and she brought her own background to us, showing us where she came from with what we ate.
And we ate it at other points, too. Prepackaged pierogi were fried up for just a Wednesday meal. I was used to going to school and mentioning them, and no one knowing what a pierogi even was. It may have been embarrassing when I was younger, but as I grew I learned how deliciously beautiful these connections were. Even my father, after the divorce - who wasn’t Polish at all - still made pierogi with us - because the taste of pierogi with sour cream had become the taste of our family.
Food tells stories in how it tastes. Now, as a new immigrant in a new country away from my family, I feel unable often to show my husband the life I used to have. I’m not able to show him my old schools or have him meet my old friends. He can’t see where I grew up or where I played on my bike as a kid. He’s not around my family enough to truly get regular stories and understandings of the Vivian I was before I met him.
But he can taste it. There’s something so wonderful about picking up that pack of pierogi at the Polish shop and frying them up with onions. We eat them with sour cream and there’s a small moment of being able to share with him who I was before. I’ve even convinced him to make homemade pierogi with me for Christmas, so he can get the full experience.
Food’s stories in taste can come from a lot of different forms. The recipes which vary from household to household tell the stories of their own history, the way they used what they had, and it became embedded in the way they eat.
Pierogi have a lot of variety. They can be just boiled, or fried. They can be eaten with sour cream, or just butter, or a squeeze of lemon. They have a variety of fillings - potato and cottage cheese, sauerkraut, mushrooms, and I guess some people do meat. My family’s pierogi are going to taste different to a different family’s. Mine tells the story of a particular area of Poland, but also the adjustments made by immigrants. But what is even more beautiful is the differences in flavour developed more recently, by a single mother of three girls, making adjustments to share pieces in new and difficult times.
Food also tells stories in the choices we make to eat at a particular point of time. Christmas is the taste of pierogi, not ham or turkey or nut roast. It’s not roast potatoes or brussel sprouts. It’s fried dough, filled with cheesy potatoes or sauerkraut. It’s the sweet addition of fried onions. It’s the creamy addition of sour cream. It’s hard to taste those pierogi and not remember the hunt for the Christmas pierogi, or the marking of numbers eaten by notches of sour cream on the rim of a plate.
I’m actually writing this up while I sit at my desk, sipping on a taro boba tea I picked up on a much needed walk. I have created for myself a type of Pavlovian writing response, where something tasting sweet instigates the ability to type a bit better. I have a lovely habit of eating cake and drinking coffee at a cafe while I write.
To take us away from pierogi, I also have a love of sweet things. I have a cake rule for writing: when I get a rejection, I’m allowed some cake. It encourages me to submit to things, because even the failure can be nice. I’ve shared this moment with other writing friends - and now the sharing of cake has become a shared experience of rejection and the communal pick up after.
Food can be a social thing. It tells the stories of family and friends. It ties me to the social engagements and ties of my family, even when I’m an ocean away. It ties me to my new friends, the new life I’ve carved for myself through the exchanging of cake.
Our food is our social worlds, our cultural contexts. It tells the story of access to ingredients, stories of time spent with others, stories of geography and those geographic changes. It tells stories of economies - their ups and downs. It tells stories of love, of tears shed over another rejection. But it also tells stories of a life so far from where we are now that it feels like a different person. And when we take that bite of crispy dough, it comes rushing back to us, reminding us of who we are, and whose stories still haunt us like ghosts and aftertastes.