Spirits in the Food: A Pedagogy for Cooking and Healing

• Main Author: Dutta, Sumita
• Format: Others
• Published: ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University 2016
• Subjects: Decolonization; Healing; Pedagogy; Food Studies; Auto-ethnography
• Online Access: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/wsi_theses/57; http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&context=wsi_theses

Cooking is mind, body, spirit work. What’s possible when we ‘drop in’ to our bodies when cooking? We begin noticing what we are energetically bringing to the food we make. This creative project practices a pedagogy that works with food to create healing space. Healing, as it is defined here, is not void of discomfort nor is it happiness all the time. Who haunts your domestic space? Who is at your back when you cook? This project finds information and sacred knowledge in the food we cook and eat; it reflects back to us deeply buried truths regarding our traumas, joys, and subjectivity. This pedagogy holds the potential for participants to bring “new meanings” to food, and thereby, be activated as cultural producers cooking up the next chapter in our peoples’ creation stories (Anzaldúa 103). This project is documented as an auto-ethnographic tale from the perspective of the practitioner, using erotic storytelling to keep fire in the pages and a methodology of refusal to “determine the length of the [academy’s] gaze” (Tuck and Ree 640).