Curated by our in-house food nerd, Arushi Sood.
June is celebrated as Pride Month all around the globe. It commemorates and celebrates the struggles and joys of queer people, our lives, our histories, and our experiences. June marks the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, an event that catalysed and catapulted LGBTQIA2S+ rights. This month is always bittersweet for me; I see how far we have come and how far we still have to go. Queerness has impacted me in ways that I am still discovering, and one of the key areas I have recently become involved in is the intersection of food and queerness. At first glance, the two words might seem unrelated, existing in a void, but when you look closely, you see vibrant and colourful lines connecting them.
When we recount our cultural histories, whether familial or societal, food is an ever-present aspect. It is political and both reframes and is reframed by our daily experiences. Queer food is joy; it is community, it is identity, and, more importantly, it paves the way to question our normative politics of production and consumption. It structures and reframes heteronormative and patriarchal traditions of food. Through this list, I hope you get a chance to delve deeper into the world of queer food, to understand all its possibilities.
When I cook in my kitchen, I inherently subvert the gender expectations imposed on me as a woman. Because when I cook in my kitchen as a queer woman, I move away from the idea of a woman who cooks for her family and eats the cold leftovers. It is through cooking that I have deeply nourished my hunger and my desire for food. I cook for myself, I cook for my friends, and I cook with unbridled joy and hunger.
So, this Pride Month, as we celebrate and commemorate queer lives, I hope that this curation of reads on queer food gives you another perspective on the things that nourish us.
This insightful and brilliant article by Saachi D’Souza looks into the traditions of queer cooking in India. Bringing in tangents of how queer histories, identities and communal ties are maintained by food, producing and consuming it.
This series by Food and Wine, curated by Mark-Frances Heck, looks into the various discourses and ideas surrounding queer food. The curation has it all, from discussions around what is queer food to building inclusive kitchens to using okra as a symbol for paving access to healthy food for Black Trans People.
What is queer food, exactly? While the definitions of it are as wide and varied as the community it represents, David Mehnert puts down the nine principles of what makes food queer.
“There is no such thing as queer food– but once you start looking, it’s everywhere” -Kyle Fitzpatrick
Julia C. Ehrhardt analyses the role of food in Chicana Lesbian Writings and how food becomes a way to deconstruct and destabilise heteronormative constructions of gender.
Oishika Roy, in this article, collates the various perspectives of food and queerness/ queer people, gathering and weaving discourse in and about eating, queerness and desire.
John Birdsall, in their substack, breaks down the lists of queer cookbooks published, going into the politics, ideas and effects.
This Chapter, by Anil Pradhan and Andronicus Aden, raises discussions and questions about queer food cultures in India.
Food & Queerness: Curated by our in-house food nerd, Arushi Sood.
Arushi when not preparing to step into academia likes to tinker with words. Arushi is all about the discourse, the wider the discourse the better it is. Her interests lie in the intersections of feminist, queer, food, ecological and memory studies. She is always chronically online and a great fan of all things horror. And as she continues her work she hopes to be involved in and provoke more conversations to bridge the gap between academia and the wider public.
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