Behind the Scenes

Sitting on the couch, I tried using the game controller to move Venba’s hand so she could put shredded coconut in the puttu (steamed coconut and rice dish) mold. Aside from missing the mold entirely, a clear reflection of my lack of gaming skills, what struck me was the Tamil immigrant story I was being enticed to participate in. It was a story that was familiar yet foreign to me despite being a fellow Tamilian. The screen showed Venba standing in her Canadian kitchen, coaxing her young son to take an interest in puttu instead of pizza. Born into a Tamilian family, I too had asked my mother countless times for mac and cheese instead of rice and rasam (spicy tamarind broth). Despite sharing that Tamilian culinary culture with Venba, I had never heard of puttu before playing this video game. Playing this video game, arguably not a traditional academic activity, was interestingly the most ethnographically engaging for me. It made me reckon with the power that multimedia engagement has to incite questions about food identity, the presumed common “immigrant experience,” and cultural relatability. Keeping this in mind, I decided to work on a project rather than a thesis for my MA degree in Anthropology.

Multimedia and experimental ethnographic projects in and of themselves can be seen as spaces of inquiry and academic knowledge production. While the initial research design, ethnographic fieldwork, and thematic analysis model themselves in a similar fashion to a traditional written thesis, a digital project presents the findings in a different way. I have found that mediums such as graphics, video, creative writing, performance, games, and others that rely on multisensory output do a good job of widening the ethnographic reach and grounding themes of identity and transnationalism in relatable and approachable forms that have the potential to breach the divide between academia and a wider public. It is not my intention to circumvent academic rigor and methodological research. Instead, this digital project serves as a creative exercise for me to ask myself, “How else can I share what I have learned with a wider audience?” 

A traditional thesis allows for an organized and thematically coherent final piece of research, where the process of data collection is clear, and the interpretation of data is clearly verbalized through ethnographic narrative, theorization, and the author’s analysis. Additionally, the literary sources and references take center stage as a way to lend credibility to the words. In this sense, a thesis lends itself primarily as a future resource for students within this field to better understand a topic and investigate parallel resources. A multimedia web-based project, on the other hand, presents itself as a more universally accessible–both in terms of being able to enter the website and digest the information–interface where one need not be familiar with the conventions of thesis (or even academic) writing. I am essentially drawing on public familiarity with digital layouts to share anthropological ideas and interactions that can be less familiar. 

Ethnographic research often, if not always, engages all the researcher’s senses, whether it be listening to interview participants, observing a home kitchen for its sounds and smells, tasting samples at the farmers market, or looking at the layout of a grocery store. Through this process, we also use different digital mediums to capture information, whether it be using the recording app on your phone, taking pictures, sending yourself voice notes, texting your participants, browsing social media, or digitizing sketches of your field site. Since the senses naturally comprehend outside information in different ways, it only follows that as anthropologists, we try our best to translate that disconnected, ephemeral, physical experience into a comprehensive, permanent, shareable experience. I argue that multimedia forms, when supplemented with writing, can make ethnographic fieldwork more tangible for an audience while also making it more accessible.

I took a mixed-methods approach to this project by combining informal interviews with participant observation to primarily collect qualitative ethnographic data. Cultural anthropologists are increasingly advocating for mixed-methods approaches that emerge from the research questions and allow one to present diverse qualitative ideas. (Russell Bernard and Gravlee 2014). A mixed-method approach is most suitable for my narrative-based research project because it captures multiple aspects of lived experience and places the participant at the center. Informal interviews and participant observation form the foundations of ethnographic research. As Cerwonka and Malkki have demonstrated, they allow the ethnographer to create a two-way relationship between observer and participant or interviewer and interviewee (2008). I have been interested in a similar research process where I can both learn about South Indian immigrant identity creation and give back to the community, which is why I have chosen these methods. 

I began by contacting South Indian Californian immigrants that I already knew who self-identify as vegetarians, and then organized in-person interviews and participant observation. I asked my known contacts to introduce me to other South Indian immigrants who self-identify as vegetarians. Through this snowball sampling, I interviewed and observed nine people. In cases where my participant was unable to meet in person, I conducted a video or phone interview. I wrote up an interview question template that I used for each participant as a starting point. Each interview naturally shifted into conversation points that were meaningful for each participant. Similarly, I created and used an observation checklist to guide my observation notes and photography during fieldwork. 

Demographic criteria for being a participant: 

1. Identifies with a specific diet, ideally having been or become a vegetarian:

   1. Grew up vegetarian and chose to no longer follow the diet

   2. Chose to follow a vegetarian diet

   3. Grew up vegetarian and chose to continue with the diet

2. A South Indian (ethnically from the Southern Indian States) who immigrated to California as an adult, a South Indian born in the US who moved to India and back, or a child of South Indian immigrants

I began by giving and explaining my research consent form to each participant virtually before setting up a date for the interview and observation. For the in-person interviews and participant observation, I expressed my thanks and offered to help cook a meal on a separate occasion. I offered to help my host clean up after the meal on observation and interview days.

During the participant observation and informal interviews, I recorded the audio on my phone using an audio recording app suitable for picking up both voices. I created pseudonyms for each participant. I used my phone to take pictures of activities and objects that stood out to me as related to food and identity. After I finished the fieldwork, I wrote down my observations and thoughts that same evening or the next morning as time permitted. I manually transcribed my audio recordings of the interviews.

Information and research about immigrant identity, food identity, and vegetarianism is spread across disciplines: Religious studies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and their views of vegetarianism); Sociology (how migration works, diasporic cultures and attitudes towards vegetarianism in the West); Psychology (Western motivations for vegetarianism); History (the origins and background of vegetarianism in India and the West); Nutritional science (the positives and negatives of a vegetarian diet and related societal perceptions); Political science (the political aspects of being a vegetarian in India) and anthropology (food ethnographies, identity construction, and diasporic studies). I have mined out five themes from this multidisciplinary information that will provide contextual backing for my research project.

1 Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism is interpreted in different ways across the world. Similarly, the foods one can and cannot eat vary depending on the cultural interpretation of vegetarianism. Regarding the dictionary and scientific definitions, Vegetarianism is an umbrella term for diets that do not consume meat. Under this term, there is the Lacto-ovo vegetarian diet (includes eggs and dairy), Lacto-vegetarian diet (includes dairy but not eggs), ovo-vegetarianism diet (includes eggs but not dairy), and vegan diet (does not include eggs, dairy, or honey) (Newton 2019). 

Motivations for vegetarianism have been studied in depth in Western contexts in psychology and sociology (Ruby 2012; Dietz et al. 1995). Vegetarian motivations, in general, are based on environmental, ethical/moral, health, community acceptance, spiritual, and religious reasons (Boyle 2011; Dietz et al. 1995; Klein 2008; Roth 2005; Shaker and Matteson 2013). For example, adults who decided to become vegetarian in the US professed environmental and health reasons for the diet change but confessed that it created family and community tension. When choosing vegetarianism as an adult, interview participants expressed that they would sometimes “cheat” or leave their diet behind in social settings that made them uncomfortable. (Jabs, Sobal, and Devine 2000). In the UK, vegetarianism began as part of a food reform movement that evolved from a combined concern for human health and the environment. In specific vegan communities, people see dietary choices related to confidence-building, self-love, and spirituality. Veganism has been the center of many debates, and there is still no consensus on its merits from an environmental and health perspective (Newton 2019). The focus of my project, however, is to look at individual cultural identity rather than large-scale politics. For this reason, my background research on vegan and vegetarian movements is limited. In terms of scholarship trends on vegetarianism, Klein claims that there is a dichotomy in most approaches to studying vegetarians in Asia versus Western countries: the former involuntarily accepts the diet under religious and political forces, and the latter voluntarily accepts the diet as part of a counter-culture (Klein 2008).

Vegetarian motivations in the Indian subcontinent are seen as increasingly based on Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and other spiritualities that draw on ideas of non-violence (Sen 2014). Some people choose to be vegetarian because they were born and brought up under a religion that prescribes to this type of diet. Others resonate with the idea of non-violence and how it is presented in religious teachings. Vegetarianism in India is tangled up in religious as well as political discourse, and some Indians choose to follow a vegetarian diet due to political involvement in animal rights or environmental movements (Yang 1980). Many religious (Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist) festivals or holidays are about vegetarian feasts and treats (Sen 2014), and eating those vegetarian foods becomes part and parcel of being accepted into the community (Jabs, Sobal, and Devine 2000). Indians may be motivated to be vegetarian to integrate into their family or local community. The sentiment that meat is unappealing or “disgusting” is also a strong motivation factor for Indian vegetarians to remain vegetarian (Campbell, Prosser, and Whitmarsh 2022).

2 South Asian Immigrant Identity

South Asian Immigrant identity is multiplex, diverse, time and context-specific, and constantly changing. People develop affective reactions to India as an idea and “Indianness” as a form of cultural expression. To some immigrants, “Indianness” and cultural continuity are carried by the women of the family. To pander to American culture as a female Indian immigrant would then be considered a betrayal of “Indianness.” Other Indian immigrants seeking to evade the social and political pressure in the country of India see “Indianness” as something burdensome or bittersweet: a culture that is part of their ethnicity but not their ideologies.  (Mankekar 2015). “Unsettlement” and “affect” are two common thematic lenses to study Indian immigrant identity, and scholars like Mankekar see these themes playing out in Indian grocery stores, IT workplaces, and through media such as Bollywood (2015). These spaces and the circulation of Indian media reinforce Indian identity, but they play out differently for each individual. For example, some immigrants enjoy using Indian grocery stores to buy familiar ingredients and socialize with other community members. In contrast, others find the judgemental gaze in grocery stores unsettling (Mankekar 2015).

South Asian identity in the US has been explored extensively through media. TV shows such as “Never Have I Ever,” “Miss Marvel,” “The Mindy Project,” and “Spin” depict Indian immigrants on screen in a way that celebrates the first-generation South Asian American woman (Rajiva 2021). Media content like this tends to focus on the cultural conflict between Immigrant parents and first-generation children as they navigate a liminal space. In the television show “The Mindy Project,” the Indian American main character is depicted making difficult decisions between meeting her Indian parents' marriage and career expectations and living the American life that she is accustomed to (Kaling 2012). Conversely, Indian cinema that depicts the Indian immigrant experience sees the West as a location where traditional culture is at risk of being lost, and a return to the homeland is the only way to truly preserve “Indianness” (Mankekar 2015).

Food and South Asian identity is a topic that anthropologists like Krishnendu Ray specialize in. Common themes in such scholarship are authenticity, cultural preservation, insider versus outsider, and recreation. In the case of Bengali Immigrants in the US, authentic Bengali food is defined in contrast to American food. This process of deciding what is authentic Bengali food and what isn’t is an active process that each immigrant maneuvers at a different pace. Home cooking is generally seen as Bengali, while American fast food provides the contrasting other (Ray 2004). Overall, Indian identity construction in the US is not a process of mixing set Indian and American cultures. People sometimes draw on rigid culturally based identities, and at other times, they see themselves as fluid (Maira 1999). 

3 Migration and Diasporas

Diasporas, by definition, are newly formed communities of immigrants who left their ancestral homes to settle in a new area (Merriam-Webster 2019). Often, diasporic communities retain certain cultural aspects of their home country while adopting new cultural practices and identities (Amrith 2013; Cearns 2022; Ray and Srinivas 2012). For my project, I chose to focus specifically on research that considers the effects of migrating on the community. Since I focus on food and identity, I have also spent more time looking into the interactions between diaspora and food. 

Ponniah suggests that relocation or migration results in an attempt to recreate the previous location in a material and social way (Ponniah 2020). Diasporic communities are also constantly changing with new waves of immigrants in different time periods. This can often lead to internal conflicts about collective diasporic identity. Little Havana, in Cuba, is one such example. Cuban immigrants who created the Little Havana diaspora in the 1960s and 1970s came to Florida with a specific understanding of “Cubanness” or Cubanidad in mind. Cubanidad was culturally a reaction to the Cuban revolution and resulted from the immigrants’ historical context. However, newer waves of Cuban immigrants to Miami brought a different Cubanidad, influenced by their historical context (Cearns 2022). 

Immigrants often find themselves in difficult socio-economic settings where they face hostility and racism (Amrith 2013). New diasporic communities that have colonized pasts tend to have minimal agency, especially when migrating to the colonizer’s country. Early Indian immigrants in the UK were under economic and societal pressures that forced them to adapt their traditional culinary practices (Ray and Srinivas 2012). In the fifties and sixties, Indian food was considered unclean and “smelly.” In the seventies and eighties, English youth who sought to rebel against their parent’s culinary traditions began dining at Indian restaurants to experience novel flavors at low prices. “Curry houses” developed a stereotypical image among white youth in England: a cheap and shabby place where one could get exotic food. While there were Indian restaurants that marketed themselves to Indian immigrants and tried to preserve their traditional cooking methods, these locations did not receive widespread public interest. Being pushed in one direction by economic demands, Indian cuisine in England became synonymous with “trashy.” Newer Indian immigrants and celebrity chefs took issue with the essentialization of Indian cuisine in England, claiming that it obscured India's diversity and regional variation. They advocated for a more “authentic” Indian cuisine in restaurants and home kitchens (Ray and Srinivas 2012). In a nutshell, early Indian immigrants found a way to economically sustain themselves by serving “curry” in a hostile and racial environment. At the same time, newer Indians lamented the misrepresentation and orientalization of their cuisine and identity.

The Indian immigrant picture in the UK is contextualized by a very specific colonial history. The Indian economy and natural resources were left in a precarious position after the British officially left in 1947, and many Indians found it difficult to get jobs to support their families. In addition, due to commonwealth ties, there were more legal opportunities for Indians to seek work in the UK. For this reason, Immigration from India to the UK is heavily colored by the colonial past, where racialized experiences and imperialistic longing still remain (Williams 2013; Ray and Srinivas 2012). 

The history of Indian immigrants in the US is of a different nature. The influx of Indians to North America likely started with men from the Punjab region moving to the US and Canada to work as laborers in farming or in the timber industry in the mid-19th century. These Punjabi men left India due to the economic struggles in the hopes of making money for their families in North America. Many Punjabi men even settled down in California and married Mexican women to circumvent the laws against interracial marriage (“Punjabi-Mexican Families” 2017; LaBrack and Leonard 1984). Economic reasons have continued to be the impetus for Indians immigrating to the US, most importantly, lucrative IT and Medical opportunities. Other reasons to migrate include an expectation for a better quality of education and socio-political freedom (Lessinger and Foner 1996). While immigration to the UK and the US is influenced by economic pressures, the former comes with the added colonial baggage.

4 Food and Identity in Media

Another area where food and identity have been looked at in and beyond academia is in written and visual media. Cookbooks, recipes, and food-based media circulate and fortify food-related identities through language use and image sharing (Karrebæk, Riley, and Cavanaugh 2018). Recipe books like “Indian-ish” (Krishna 2019), graphic novels like “Cook Korean” (Ha 2016), and video games like “Venba” (Abhi 2023) are prime examples of food-based language and visuals circulating outside of traditional academia. 

The recipe book “Indian-ish,” in its title and recipe contents, normalizes the concept of fusion food that first-generation Indian immigrants grow up eating in the US. Indian immigrants often create fusion foods in their kitchens to cater to their children’s new tastes and use the available ingredients. This includes recipes like roti pizza and tomato rice with cheddar (Krishna 2019). 

Ha’s graphic novel serves as both an introduction to Korean food culture and a compilation of Korean recipes. It uses the visual medium to tell a quasi-ethnographic story about first-generation Korean Americans and their relationship to Korean identity via food. The graphic novel also uses language to connect English and Korean dish names and, in turn, expand the audience that can consume ideas about Korean American identity (Ha 2016). 

The video game “Venba,” created by an Indian immigrant in Canada, revolves around the story of a South Indian couple living in Canada and their struggles with raising a first-generation child. The game requires the player to be a first-generation child and then read and recreate traditional Indian dishes. The story is set up such that the struggles of relating to Indian culture are played out through food. The parents in the game try to get their child to like traditional Indian food, and the child tries to navigate what it means to eat Indian food as a Canadian Indian.

These three examples of food identity expressed through media testify how my research needs to extend beyond academic journals and books. They call for more engagement with how food has been and can be depicted in media and what underlying identities the reader, player, or subject relates to. They also showcase how food identity can be negotiated through unedible materials, such as video games, cooking shows, or food magazines. 

5 Food Rules 

In food anthropology, food rules are studied in various contexts, including tradition, taboos, ideas of safety, and religion (Mintz and Du Bois 2002; Karrebæk, Riley, and Cavanaugh 2018; Nath 2010; Whitehead 2000). Douglas highlights that food habits and rules are socially and morally mediated (2014, 11). There are also certain unsaid food rules that govern daily life and are unique to each household. For example, having a drink before a meal may be permissible but eating something before the meal may not be. Similarly, having a dish that is sweet and sour rather than savory may not count as a proper meal in some households (Douglas 2018). Anthropologists have looked at food rules in relation to who is allowed to cook and serve the food; for example, in the Brahmin community, temple food is meant to be prepared by a trained Brahmin cook (Karrebæk, Riley, and Cavanaugh 2018).  Food taboos have been understood to emerge from food identity creation and ideas of disgust. They are also identified as emerging from a combination of ecological/biological and socio-cultural drivers (Whitehead 2000). Food safety has formed the basis of multiple rules. For example, buying local produce and eating homemade food in Fukushima, Japan, emerged as a way for residents to feel safe about radiation poisoning (Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2015). 

Religion forms the bulk of anthropological research on food rules, especially in the context of vegetarianism in India. In Judaism, rules are built around specific categories of permissible food and the manner of storing and preparing dishes, which are Kosher (Newton 2019). Food rules in Hindu and Buddhist religious communities are derived from ideas of maintaining “good health and effective worship” (Nath 2010). In Hinduism, specifically, food rules are connected to ideas of purity, and the political and social tension between caste and food rules is a hot topic. Some scholars are of the opinion that vegetarianism in India is primarily rooted in casteism, and the Brahmin vegetarian diet is preserved through caste rules (Goody, Kanjilal, and Matta 2024). Ethnographic and interview-based studies on vegetarianism, especially in Western contexts, focus more on health and dietary restrictions (Shaker and Matteson 2013). The vegetarian diet is seen as a set of rules that people try their best to follow but may have to forfeit in certain social situations (Jabs, Sobal, and Devine 2000).