Portraits in London: Food and Identity in a Visual Anthropology Project
In my visual anthropology class, our final assignment was to write a production report and make a film (or another visual document). I chose to focus my research on one of my flatmates. He was from India, and since coming to university in London, he had taken up cooking. He had never cooked before in his life, and now he was trying to recreate some of his favourite dishes from back home. He cooked every day, and I was so impressed that instead of starting with simple dishes, he dove straight into Indian cuisine, which has far more steps than typical college student fare like tomato sauce pasta or a sandwich.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to my production report:
"Food is deeply ingrained in our identity. We experience it as part of our existence as soon as we are born, as it is one of the main elements needed to sustain life. This connection of food to our sense of self is rooted in the type of food or cuisine that is popular in the culture in which we were brought up. This experience stays with an individual for a prolonged period, even if other things change, such as accent. As I will discuss below, migrants in new localities keep attempting to maintain the connection because, in addition to nourishment, 'the concept of food is used to express numerous facets of personal, national and global identity.' (Bradley 2016, p1)"
You can read the whole paper here:
The photographs above are some of the stills I took for the film. We shot at several locations around our university, and it was a wonderful experience. Stay tuned, because I'm going to share the film too!
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