ALLSPICE
ARSC 3310
Goffe
12/20/2020
ALLSPICE: Food Heritage
In Venus In Two Acts, Sadiya Hartman (2008) critically examines the role that the archive plays in crafting the narrative of history. As Hartman (2008) argues, there is an epistemological violence enacted by the archive itself. Historians enact a constant re-infliction of terror and horror on those solely rendered as objects within the constituent narratives of the archive. To that end, Hartman draws on the figure of something close to (but not quite) fiction—critical fabulation—to allow herself to redress this violence in some small part.
There is a depersonalization inherent within the act of archiving itself. This can be seen at Cornell in the Human Sexuality Collection. The collection maintains (in one part) an archive of love letters and diaries. Their work can be seen both as crucial, in collecting and maintaining a history that has been historically censored and stamped out, yet it is also inherently impersonal and distant. There is an unsettling quality to the act of consuming a historical artifact that was not meant for consumption—especially something as dear and private as a love letter secretly exchanged.
In crafting our own cookbook, collages, and oral histories, we sought to understand and challenge the depersonalization of work within an archive. Family recipes, histories, and collages can and do archival work, preserving and conveying the stories of those important to us. Yet these forms of archive also exist distant from, as Hartman (2008) reminds us, the consumptive and violent processes found in the underground bunkers of Ivy League libraries. Drawing from the work of Parama Roy (2010) on gastropoetics, we sought to use food as a sensorial central focus for these personal archives to allow us to convey stories that are intimate and dear and vastly important in their own right. Graphically, our posts feature high contrast oranges, pinks, and blues, tech imagery, glitchy aesthetics, bold natural elements, and repetition to underscore this message, seeking to convey the importance of examining the oral history and our foodways to re-imagine the archive.
Family photos, albums, and collages are some of the most intimate pieces of history that people treasure in efforts to retain the memories of themselves and their ancestors. Oral histories allow us to cite and and pay respect to the hidden voices of history and memory, while also providing the space to reimagine storytelling. To examine the role of oral histories in recipe sharing, our project pulls from the artistic tradition of Albert Chong to visually venerate and recognize our individual family histories. Through this method, we acknowledge our personal contributions to the archive—in the passing down of stories, identities and recipes—and make a nod to the stories of labor that created this particular archive.
Following the style of still-life images from contemporary artist Albert Chong, we digitally enshrine our families—their histories, their images, and ultimately their recipes. Albert Chong, an artist of Chinese-Jamaican ancestry, works with the mediums of photography, installation and sculpture on narratives of identity, family and spirituality. His primary photographic work features still-life images, in which he fabulates meaning by arranging organic materials, inanimate objects and family photos. The organic and inorganic materials interact for photographic documentation, as a physical iteration of the continuity of the past, present and future. He explains, “the construction of the still life image assumes a primacy akin to an act of a sacred ritual. The objects become more than just props for the artists, but objects of power for the Shaman. The still life becomes in effect a shrine, an altar, an offering” (Chong, n.d.). Our family collages pose as visual shrines to stories of life and labor in our families and through them we acknowledge our own lineage and traditions. Though photographs are not verbal, as the term “oral history” suggests, they do speak to the role of capturing and preserving historical moments in ways that give recognition to the lives of people on the peripheries of historical narratives.
Kayla B’s experience working for Cornell dining is an example of the vitality and importance of food service workers and their personal oral histories. In this part of the assignment, our main goal was to accurately demonstrate the reality of working for dining. We tried our best to not fall into the trap of respectability by glamorizing or oversimplifying Kayla’s sentiments towards her workplace. We did not want to stroke the ego of Cornell by trying to communicate only the positive aspects of the work experience. Nonetheless, our motive was to understand the culture and drive that goes behind every meal students enjoy each night, contributing and acting on our food heritages. Additionally, we wanted to bring this assignment into our current global landscape by discussing how COVID-19 has created challenges or advantages to working at Cornell Dining.
Firstly, we needed to get a food service worker and we did not know any full time Cornell dining employees who were not students as well. We believe this is important to highlight, as the student/worker dynamic at Cornell University can be very polarizing. Looking at the current socioeconomic demographic of Cornell’s student population, 37% of the students are white and 11% are international. Half of the students at Cornell have a yearly family income of more than $100,001 while only 9% have an income of less than $30,000. These statistics contextualize the background students who occupy the dining halls have, whether they eat and serve. It is logical to say that students who make more than $100,000 a year don’t learn to cook out of necessity but probably as a leisure activity or not at all. Thus, students are disillusioned to the effort, time and skill put into each menu. Additionally, food is a major expense for the minority of students on campus who have no choice to eat in the dining halls whether they truly enjoy them or not, because it’s the only resource they have, while students with more resources can opt to eat take out.
Moreover, we wanted to find the right person to help relay these messages and a member of our group, Jonathan Mercedes, knew Kayla since his freshman year. As a student manager, he knew she would have a lot of insight on that. Next, we had to carefully craft the questions we wanted to ask Kayla. The questions we settled on included: Who are you and how did you end up working for Cornell dining? How is working at Cornell dining now vs pre-covid? What is the most difficult part of your job and what is the most enjoyable part of your job? What kind of benefits do you receive from working for Cornell dining? Do you feel appreciation for your work? How is the menu decided? Do you feel like the cooks’ identity informs their decisions on what to cook? If there is one thing you could change about Cornell dining what would it be and why or why not?
Although we were not able to include the entire interview within our posts, one of the largest takeaways from our interview was the social gap between full time employees and students. Other than the brief moments that we have with chefs or staff at check in or the meal pick up line, many students fail to develop a personable relationship with the workers. A majority of students do not even know the name of the head chef in the house that they live in—the people who dictate your meals, diets, health, and dining experience at Cornell become strangers. Part of it is simply a lack of time to build this relationship, but the other part stems from the bureaucratic nature of Cornell. Each portion of the school is privatized, and there is not much interconnectivity between the student affairs sector and Cornell dining. Through this oral history, we hoped to underscore this gap, and hopefully made space for a discussion to be had about fostering future connections.
Lastly, we opted to include a discussion on service workers in our current socio-political landscape, extrapolating Kayla’s oral history of her time in Cornell dining, onto the collective oral history of service workers being written, told, and archived right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the plight of service workers as they continue to perform underpaid and underappreciated work on the frontlines. Including this discussion it as its own separate post felt essential, stemming from the long dialogues we’ve had in class about whether “hero” is the right term for frontline workers. In fact, the Heroes project thanking members of the Cornell Tech staff was the animus for this post; thinking about how to adequately archive the people keeping society afloat right now felt integral to the work that ALLSPICE set out to do.
With this post, we moved our in-class discussion into a public space to share this ongoing dialogue with our larger circles, pointing to the innocuous nature of calling essential workers heroes. The current efforts to archive and thank service workers often lionize these employees, implying selfless sacrifice and an element of choice, reflected in the language we employ to do this work. Inspecting language has been a huge part of our journey this semester, beginning with Prof. Goffe’s Get Free podcast conversation about decolonizing and demilitarizing our vocabulary. The pandemic has ushered a new evolution of vocabulary to describe our precarious situation, creating and evolving vocabulary we already have. Terms like “essential workers,” “frontline workers,” “hazard pay,” “hero pay,” “Personal Protective Equipment,” and “risk” have always existed individually, but have entered our shared vernacular with a new meaning.
The evolving nature of our pandemic language begs a deeper analysis of its roots and consequences. Titled, “A Word Better Than Hero,” this slide was meant to push readers to question these accepted practices and their implications. First, we included a visual representation of the makeup of frontline workers to illuminate the lines of work service workers are returning to. We felt this is pertinent information to share and give context to the people who are umbrellaed under our new terms. Additionally, we also sought to center how additional pay has come in and out of the fold for frontline workers as a means of adequate thanks and compensation. While tributes are welcomed as a way to show appreciation for the risk frontline workers assume, these workers need monetary compensation and proper protection. Does calling frontline workers essential and thanking them go far enough, or does it eschew and undermine responsibility to protect frontline workers with seemingly innocuous vocabulary? Ultimately, (although not all frontline work is food related), our final post aimed to encapsulate how our agricultural, healthcare, and governmental employees contribute to our collective food heritage, underscoring our larger discussion of oral history and archival work.
Bibliography
Chong, A. (n.d.). Monochromatic still lifes. Albert Chong. Retrieved December 21, 2020, from https://www.albertchong.com/monochromatic-still-life
Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1
Mannur, A. (2015). Alimentary tracts: Appetites, aversions and the postcolonial by parama roy. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2015.0002
Roy, P. (2010). Alimentary tracts: Appetites, aversions, and the postcolonial. Duke University Press.
Who are essential workers?: A comprehensive look at their wages, demographics, and unionization rates. (n.d.). Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved December 21, 2020, from https://www.epi.org/blog/who-are-essential-workers-a-comprehensive-look-at-their-wages-demographics-and-unionization-rates/