Jhumpa Lahiri Culture

Food can partially shape a person's cultural identity. Geeta Kothari explores the cultural nuances between American and Indian food in the essay, “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” She expresses this through the symbolism of food, growing up and living between two different cultures. Kothari begins her story as a nine-year-old child curiously wanting to eat the same foods as American children: tuna salad sandwiches and hot dogs. She does not have the guidance from her mother regarding American food and culture. Kothari’s mom curbs the curiosity by reluctantly letting her daughter indulge in a can of tuna fish. Kothari describes the open can of tuna fish as “pink and shiny, like an internal organ” and she wondered if it was botulism (947). The way

When adapting to a new culture, many find it hard to assimilate into their new world while still holding on to their past life. Finding yourself in a new place with a new language and unfamiliar faces is challenging for immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant herself, sheds some light on the Indian culture in her book, Interpreter of Maladies. She conveys many challenges that immigrants face when moving away from their homeland in a myriad of short stories. These short stories introduce similar themes of immigration and adaptation through different experiences. Two of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Mrs. Sens”, do a great job in showing similar challenges of cultural differences in two different ways. They introduce characters

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

In Jessica Harris’s “The Culinary Season of my Childhood” she peels away at the layers of how food and a food based atmosphere affected her life in a positive way. Food to her represented an extension of culture along with gatherings of family which built the basis for her cultural identity throughout her life. Harris shares various anecdotes that exemplify how certain memories regarding food as well as the varied characteristics of her cultures’ cuisine left a lasting imprint on how she began to view food and continued to proceeding forward. she stats “My family, like many others long separated from the south, raised me in ways that continued their eating traditions, so now I can head south and sop biscuits in gravy, suck chewy bits of fat from a pigs foot spattered with hot sauce, and yes’m and no’m with the best of ‘em,.” (Pg. 109 Para). Similarly, since I am Jamaican, food remains something that holds high importance in my life due to how my family prepared, flavored, and built a food-based atmosphere. They extended the same traditions from their country of origin within the new society they were thrusted into. The impact of food and how it has factors to comfort, heal, and bring people together holds high relevance in how my self-identity was shaped regarding food.

But lack of cultural understanding by her parents was not just found in Cofer’s family. It is also seen in Kothari’s family. Kothari, like Cofer, was a second-generation immigrant, except her parents were from India, not Puerto Rico. When Kothari was a child, she wanted to have American food like the rest of her peers. So when she asks her mother to bring home tuna, she does not understand why it is so different from the tuna everyone has on their sandwich. What Kothari’s mother did not know, and what

Immigrants’ refusal to appreciate a fused culture promotes division. Mukherjee questions the idea of immigrants losing their culture for American ideals: “Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture,” to that Mukherjee asks, “Is it so terrible that our children are discovering or are inventing homelands for themselves?” (Mukherjee, 1997, para. 28). Many immigrants experience anger when their children no longer hold the ideals of their home country. This tension produced within the household hinders the unity within a resident country’s culture and encourages division within families. Using herself as an example, Mukherjee provides another instance of anger directed at her from her own subculture: “They direct their rage at me because, by becoming a U.S.

I decided to read Geeta Kothari’s story “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?”. The title itself caught my attention because there are a lot of speculations regarding what we are based on the foods we consume. The story was interesting to read, Kothari brought a lot of details about the different Indian foods her family eats and how different it is from American food. Throughout the story she describes the daily cultural struggles she lives. Kothari is trying to reveal the struggle between the Indian and American culture, and the differences are huge. In one culture, meat can’t even be bared to be smelled and in the other, meat is basically all is eaten daily. Kothari explains that she has antipathy toward Indian food and neither cannot

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories and each of them examines the issues when assimilation happens between American and Indian cultures. A symbol that is presented in every story within this book is traditional Indian food and their nuances. The presence of food symbols metaphorizes different interactions between the protagonists of Lahiri’s stories, such as love, community, and culture. And the effects, meaning, and implications of food is the most prevalent in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” and “A Temporary Matter”.

This book depicts the national and cultural status of the immigrant mother, who is able to preserve the traditions of her Indian heritage that connect her to her homeland. Ensuring a successful future for her American-born children is coordinated with the privilege of being an American citizen. Ashima yearns for her homeland and her family that she left behind when

India is the second largest populous country in the world with a diverse population and culture. It is one of the oldest civilizations dating back 4,500 years. The population is made up of numerous different ethnicities and religions. The culture was heavily influenced by different civilizations that once occupied India; food is no exception. Indian cuisine is known for its diverse and wide ranging assortment of dishes as well as its extensive variety of herbs and especially spices (Live Science, 2015). The knowledge of this is what inspired my Cultural Experience choice.

The immigrant experience affects families in a unique manner wherein ethnicity, and therefore, identity becomes something continuously negotiated. Jhumpa Lahiri’s contemporary novel, “The Namesake,” beautifully illustrates the complexities of generational culture clashes and the process of self-individualization over the course of this experience. Lahiri challenges the often-one-dimensional approach to ethnic identity by allowing readers an intimate and omnipresent look into the internal struggles of the Gangulis, a first-and-second-generation Bengali family, following their relocation to America. The novel incorporates a heavy presence of reading, and the abundant representation of books and documents throughout it are vital to its

The United States has pride in being a melting pot of different cultures and ideas. With such great cultures comes the best part: food. In any given area in the United States, you can find different cuisines ranging from Italian to Chinese. For this activity, I chose to convince four friends to try Indian food with me. Indian food typically does not appeal to Americans because we perceive the amount of spices used in the cuisine as excessive. However, I believe in expanding tastes and trying new foods just for the sake of it.

Juxtaposed to Mr. Chawla, Kulfi represents a typical Indian woman who is oppressed by existing gender roles and is always looked down on, “’There was always something odd about her,’ they said. ‘You could tell this from the minute she entered Shahkot’”. Despite this oppression, Kulfi still seeks to defy the traditional expectations around her, represented by her desire for non-traditional foods. “To her imagination, meals of such flavor and rarity” , “’Pheasants, peacocks, pomegranates’” .

One’s culture is highly influenced by the past. It creates and explains their tradition while ultimately determining what the future holds. For instance, food plays a crucial role in culture especially for the people of Bombay/Mumbai; which is where the film Lunchbox takes placed. The film focuses on a delivering system that acts as an infrastructure. This system is made up of people delivering home-cooked meals and meals from restaurants at the consumer's job for their lunch. One major reason why the people of Mumbai utilizes this system is to maintain their tradition of having warm home-cooked meals despite them being at work. This displays the importance of family to them. The food symbolizes the feeling of being connected and together despite the distance. These lunchboxes are able to keep the tradition of having a hot home-cooked meal alive. Because of the old tradition, this new concept of delivering lunch boxes

The Namesake introduces people who leave behind their families and the familiar heat of India to build a new life in America- a cold and a bleak land of strangers. Jhumpa Lahiri weaves a story spanning three decades of geographically and culturally displaced Bengali family, comprising the parents Ashoke and Ashima first generation immigrants who had migrated to the U.S.A. from Calcutta in search of greener pastures and their children Gogol and Sonia the second generation immigrants.