Taste: The Consumption of Imaginary Boundaries within our Heritage Sites
How can the use of culinary ephemera help marginalized communities challenge traditional practices of archival collection?
This research guide aims to explore how marginalized communities can utilize compiled online resources as lessons and tools for organizing their own archival collections and workshops. The research guide focuses on centring diasporic Black, Indigenous, and racialized individuals who have been displaced throughout history by reflecting on non-traditional categories of archival practices such as oral storytelling, embodied learning, and cooking. The use of food as a means to assert identity, helps marginalized communities to imagine contested places and encourages them to take up space through their senses.
Inspiration is excavated from personal, online spaces (not limited to) such as Sufra Archive أرشيف سفرة and Feast Afrique. The independent curators, Salma Serry and Ozoz Sokoh collected culinary ephemera dedicated to the Southwest Asians and North Africans, and diasporic Africans, respectively. The curators further embody the notion of “nothing about us without us,” as they intimately identify with the history in which they are archiving.
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Chapter 1: The Archives
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Where and How to Collect your Primary Sources
I would like to preface that many of us come from various positionalities. So, the beginning of building a culinary collection or workshop looks different for everyone.
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What is a counter-archive?
This module will teach you where to seek archival culinary ephemera— or otherwise, how you can further develop your own collection through opening up to collaboration through participatory donations or submissions through family, friends, peers, and even strangers!
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What can Black Studies teach us about the Archives?
Black studies informs us on the ways that the archives can be a site of trauma, misrepresentation, and a place that perpetuated systemic, colonial ideas. Throughout history— not only was there a “lack” of Black Archivists and scholarship, but traditional boundaries in heritage places did not formally acknowledge Black thought that had already existed.
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Feast Afrique
The curator of Feast Afrique, Ozoz Sokoh describes the culinary project as a dedication to West African cuisine and cultural heritage. Sokoh’s belief that food is more than just eating is strongly evident in her curation of the Feast Afrique website— each category: Read, Watch, Listen, Eat, Explore, and Experience provides new interdisciplinary modes of learning about food history.
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The Sufra Archive أرشيف سفرة
Curator of the Sufra Archive أرشيف سفرة, Salma Serry, describes the digital repository as a space dedicated to Southwest Asians and North Africans (SWANA)’s food history, consisting of more than 2500 items.
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The University of Toronto's Culinary Collections
University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus (UTSC) holds various collections such as the Harley J. Spiller Menus Collection within their archives, as well as the Culinary Cookbooks Collection within their library. Lesser known archival collections at the UTSC are the Robert Bon Lee Menu and Brazilian Menu fonds. Away from UTSC, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, which is located on the St. George campus holds a Culinary Ephemera Collection.
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Chapter 2: Making Our Identities (Un)Digestible
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How to Create your Community Cookbook Collection and/or Workshop
Each community cookbook is bound to be different. However, they all have a structural process in creation. In this module, you will be met with questions regarding your audience, learning objectives, and resources to ensure that your community cookbooks are accessible to all.
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Community Cookbooks at the NYPL Simmons LibGuide
Developed by Clara Scholtz, the NYPL Simmons LibGuide is meant to provide resources from its library, relevant to culinary ephemera and narratives. Various links are directed to NYPL books related to collective recipes within different categories ranging from ‘recent and current cookbooks’ or ‘community cookbooks in the news.’
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Northern Illinois University’s “You Are What You Eat: Cookbooks as Ingredients to Shape Identity and Community” LibGuide
This library guide contrasts from the NYPL Simmons Library Guide, as it mainly focuses on its own library resources, culinary ephemera, and regional community cookbooks, especially since this library guide’s purpose is to direct the reader to the resources that were once on display at the Northern Illinois University’s “You Are What You Eat” exhibition (2018).
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Chapter 3: A Call to Food Sovereignty
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Now what do we do with these community cookbooks?
Keep in mind when planning your community cookbook — Who does this community cookbook collection or workshop benefit? When seeking community participation in counter-archiving, we must understand that it is important to form a reciprocal relationship where we are also giving back to the people who have helped us in the development of our project.
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The History of Food Blockades against Palestine
According to the Sufra Archive أرشيف سفرة, “since 2007, Israel had imposed a siege on Gaza— restricting the movement of goods, people and aid. The blockade on food transfer acts to impoverish, collectively punish, and humiliate the people in Gaza. Today, more than 90% of Gaza’s population are below poverty line, +75% are severely food insecure, 95% suffering from a lack of a healthy diverse diet and +75% rely on humanitarian aid for food.”
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What the Jemima Code tells us about Black Food History
Fields of Survival, Foods of Memory by Judith Carney contains passages that reflect on the absence of recognized African cultural heritage due to the erasure of identities under American segregation and enslavement. American society viewed Black communities as a monolith. However, archival documents and regional recipes provide greater nuance to the histories of Black enslaved cooks.
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What you’ll learn
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Food is a multi-sensory tool, as it can be used to examine and draw ideas surrounding social and economic dimensions of taste distinctions. Various layers of this explorations can be found in propaganda, menus, advertisements, and photographs.
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Absence-based inference is needed when examining culinary ephemera, as many Black, Indigenous, and racialized resources on food have been told by oral storytelling or otherwise erased.
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Our archival collections can help us compile knowledge about our food systems, as they teach us about cultural and historical contexts. However, connecting with our communities can help us elaborate on these explorations as we learn more about cooking different cuisines, foodways, and (available/unavailable) ingredients.
Meet your author
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Meet your author ♡
Lenora Huỳnh (hear my name)
Master of Information, Archives and Records Management, Food Studies Collaborative Specialization
Pronouns — ENG: She/Her • VN: Cô/Chị/Em
Lenora’s Huỳnh’s primary research interest revolves around Food as Archival Memory, (Trauma), and Record Keeping. Within her positionality as a daughter of Vietnamese boat people, she has learned that many migrant and refugee families rely on food to tell their stories of love, labour, and survival. Expanding beyond archival photographs as memorabilia, Lenora attempts to find new ways for marginalized communities to imagine and explore their histories through culinary ephemera, collective participation as counter-archives, and by using libraries as third spaces.
Important FAQ
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When creating an online culinary archive, will I need to purchase a domain?
No. Many individual curators and researchers challenge the traditional digital archive by using a free social media platform, such as Instagram. View The Sufra Archive module to learn more about how Salma Serry uses Instagram to curate and the benefits to using an alternative platform. -
Should I be concerned about copyright when collecting materials from various libraries and archives?
This answer relies on the archival or library institution’s policies regarding reproduction and dissemination. This is further dependent on the specific research material’s copyright, Creative Commons Attribution or condition— especially rare books and manuscripts.
Please view the Canadian copyright law that can be found at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website. -
Will I need funding for my collection or workshop project(s)?
While this library guide does not go into the depths of funding— it is definitely advised to seek ways in developing a reciprocal relationship with participants.
Help regarding financial incentives (ie. honorariums) for those who are participating in your collection or workshop may be found through further, personal research on organizations that have worked with food and/or archival materials.