Cafe Selina: Laura Kim, Leah Ham, Nikki Bregman, Sophia Su
Introduction
As Cornell students, how many of us take the time to think about the staff serving us food or cleaning our dormitory bathrooms every day? Those of us who are student employees may have the opportunity to interact with local Ithacans as our managers or colleagues, but how much do we know about their experiences and priorities? In our Instagram posts, we strived to convey a Cornell Dining employee’s thoughts about her occupation and her relationship with Cornell as well as the greater Ithaca community. The essence of our project is not to capture the entirety of one person but to serve as a conduit for her story, to highlight the complex and intersectional insights that underrepresented voices may offer.
Oral History
For our posts, we wanted to show the strong connection between oral histories and food. We spoke a lot in class about the archive, and different forms of the archive. It is our belief that oral history is a type of archive. Although it’s not physical, it holds stories from a variety of perspectives across multiple generations. It’s also much more common than we think. When you go to a family reunion, for instance, and you’re hearing that same story from your parent’s childhood for the hundredth time, that’s an example of an oral history. Oral history is a crucial method of passing down information that would have otherwise escaped the written archive, especially for traditionally marginalized groups.
For our oral history portion, we interviewed a dining hall worker that one of our group members has known for two semesters. There are no set rules or guidelines for oral histories, and since many can get very personal, we decided that it would be better to speak to someone who we are familiar with. We felt that it may be impersonal and rude to dig deep into the family history or the personal lives of someone that we have never met before. It would almost feel as if we were using them for the sole purpose of finishing a project. It was very important to us that our interviewee felt respected. To ensure this, we paid a lot of attention to the questions that we would be asking. We asked open ended questions that focused on our interviewee’s workplace experiences, such as the amount of control they have at work, as well as their personal experiences. We aimed to portray our interviewee as a whole human being, rather than a dining hall worker hidden in the background.
Recipe
One of our interview questions was if there was a recipe or ingredient that reminded her of home. She replied that banana bread was her favorite food of her household. Her grandmother used to make it for her, and now her husband has continued the tradition, substituting almond flour instead of the classic wheat flour for dietary reasons. Just talking with our interviewee we could tell that to her, feelings of love and interconnectedness were associated with this food. It was nice to get a snippet of the positive memories in this dining hall worker’s personal life. We knew immediately that the recipe for our cookbook chapter would be banana bread.
First, we decided that we would use the same flour that our interviewee used, as a sort of nod to her story as well as to give some of our audience a chance to try something new with a classic dessert. The chocolate syrup and cacao nibs we put in at the end were also a nod to her using chocolate chips in her banana bread. We also wanted to add our own unique spin to the recipe. After talking about those emotions of being with family at home that brought a smile to our faces during the interview, we came up with an idea. We would slice the almond flour banana bread after baking it and make French toast with the slices. Breakfast food has a very cozy feel, and we thought giving the recipe a breakfast spin would be a great way to physically represent those positive feelings. Writing out the recipe was challenging when it came to qualitative instructions. We asked ourselves questions like, “What is the clearest way to tell someone reading this recipe when the French toast is done cooking? Should it be by time or look?” The final product was beautiful and the direction we went for the recipe definitely paid off.
Research
Given that our chosen recipe features banana bread, we decided to trace the genealogy of the banana bread itself as well as its key ingredient — the banana. Bananas feature prominently in various readings for our Afro-Asia class: in The Pagoda by Patricia Powell, which takes place in tropical Jamaica, a Gros Michel banana is one of many gifts presented to the protagonist by locals (p. 135). In The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, banana leaves aptly tie the Vietnamese protagonist to his mother in a tradition of oral and culinary history: “…banana leaves, raw sticky rice, overripe bananas that no one else would buy, and my mother’s stories were the subjects of my everyday life,” (p. 80) the protagonist says. From the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, bananas are so widespread in Afro-Asian cuisines that its significance in discourse about Afro-Asia cannot be ignored.
Our research on the banana revealed that this familiar fruit is an infamous product of agriculture globalization and simplification. All bananas cultivated today, the majority in Central America (“Brief History of Bananas”), are genetically identical (Dunn). This practice of planting genetically identical bananas was promoted by the United Fruit Company in Guatemala on the Gros Michel strain of banana, which was wiped out by a parasite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to a lack of genetic diversity (Dunn). Instead of diversifying the banana crop in response to the situation, United Fruit commissioned the development of the Cavendish banana, which is resistant to the pathogen that had eliminated the Gros Michel (Dunn). Identical copies of the Cavendish, now dominating globally today, were planted en-masse much in the same way as its predecessor, with no guarantee of invincibility to future diseases (Dunn). The story of the banana unveils how a fruit that carries cultural significance across so many regions, beloved by people of African and Asian descent alike, is literally the same wherever it appears throughout the world. Nevertheless, this universal symbol is also extremely fragile, susceptible to extinction due to its inherent sameness. We believe the banana speaks to the global commonalities that connect nodes of Afro-Asia—the fragility of these connections suggest that we must celebrate diversity in addition to sameness.
The history of the banana bread shows that banana consumption has moved beyond tropical regions of Central America and Afro-Asian polities. The first banana bread is assumed to have been created in Greece, around 23-79 A.D. (Food Articles). Banana bread as we know it exploded in popularity with the increased availability of baking soda and the pressure of food shortages during the Great Depression (Bananamirte). Our interviewee even mentioned food shortages during her interview, and Covid-19’s impact on food shortages parallels the Great Depression mentioned in the history of the banana bread. Banana bread has humble beginnings, but its usefulness has kept it relevant throughout the years.
Design
After we talked to our dining hall worker, collected our research, and wrote our recipe, it was time to put it all together in the Instagram post. Our branding was Cafe Selina — Selina being taken from the first letters of our names and cafe referencing both the food element and specifically that we interviewed a manager at a cafe.
We wanted to exemplify the vibes of a cafe from the beginning — the sense of being warm and comfortable and at ease. We initially wanted a color scheme of a pale yellow to emphasize warmth and the hue of a buttery, flakey baked good. Once we settled on the banana bread, however, that yellow became bolder and stronger, incorporating both the warm feeling and the yellow of a banana. Our yellow was actually picked from a picture of a banana using the color picker tool. We paired that with a warm brown inspired by a cup of coffee from a cafe.
We created cohesive branding throughout our posts — we knew that our posts would be in the feed with all the other’s groups, and wanted to make sure you could easily pick out our group of 5 posts and say “oh yeah, those go together.” We’re really proud and believe we accomplished that, with the cohesive colors and template with “Cafe Selina” running around the edge. We chose to go with 1:1 square posts so that you can see the whole image from the grid. The picture instagram posts were created in Adobe Photoshop, using the Porter and Louis George Café fonts. The video posts were made using Audiogram with custom graphics created in Photoshop and uploaded to the site. We cut images out of their background and applied a layer style to create a stroke (a border) on the outside. When it came to the audio, accessibility was really important to us which is why we made sure we had captions, even though it was a lot of work to make sure the words were timed correctly.
We had to think about the best way to represent our interviewee given that she asked us not to video her or use her face. Even the way we described her was purposeful — we tried to be specific enough to give her the privacy she said was important while still giving viewers context. Images were really important because we didn’t want it to feel like we were forcing people to read a block of text. So we formed the text around the images, giving visual interest and breaking up the text.
Conclusion
Our research, content, and design choices are dedicated to conveying our interpretations of the meaningful interview we had the privilege of conducting with a Cornell Dining employee. We hope our presentation communicates how the themes of oral history and critical fabulation we discussed in our Afro-Asia class are relevant to the way we construe the existences of those around us, especially those we are tempted to overlook. Unfortunately, the word “overlooked” characterizes the narrative of Afro-Asia in a Western hegemonic context. Not only are individual stories of Africa and Asia often underrecognized, but the historical associations between Africa and Asia are even more neglected. By bringing attention to the importance of oral tradition for a member of an often unacknowledged group (staff members) at Cornell, we encourage the same approach for undermined Afro-Asian stories on a global scale.
Works Cited
“A Brief History of Bananas.” Pacific Lutheran University, https://community.plu.edu/~bananas/brief-history/
BananaMirte. “History Of Banana Bread • The Banana Bread Experiment.” The Banana Bread Experiment, Easy Banana Bread Recipes, 10 Apr. 2018, easybananabreadrecipes.com/history-banana-bread/.
Dunn, Rob. “Humans Made the Banana Perfect—But Soon, It’ll Be Gone.” Wired, 14 Mar 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/03/humans-made-banana-perfect-soon-itll-gone/
“Food Articles, News & Features Section.” Banana Bread – History & Facts about Banana Bread, www.foodreference.com/html/artbananabrd.html.
Powell, Patricia. The Pagoda. Harcourt, 1998.
Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt: A Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003.