I Am What I Eat: Urvesh

I loved interviewing Urvesh Pavais for the Borough Market blog. My first impression was of someone calm, quiet and collected. Perhaps it was his voice, which is mellow and unwavering. This was true even when I got him talking about his favourite subject, but his eyes lit up and he talked thoughtfully and at length about the topic he is most passionate about. In fact, most of my questions for him remained unasked. Just one question was enough to elicit the answer to my next five! 

This made it very difficult to decide what the theme of the post should be. I decided to focus on the visceral nature of food and the memories associated with taste and smell, as it followed on nicely from the previous post. However, it meant missing out a lot of really interesting material on Gujurati history and cuisine, the ambiguous lines between local, regional and national identity and cuisines, food and religion, food and symbolism... the list goes on.

Here is how the post began...

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I Am What I Eat: Anne

I have now finished my first series for Borough Market and started a new one, Box Clever. It feels like the right time to share the rest of the I Am What I Eat series. For my second post, I interviewed Anne Gumuschian, trader at La Marche du Quartier. Anne grew up in France, the daughter of a French-Italian mother and Armenian father. I talked to her about the foods that she grew up with, identity and migration. This is how the post began...

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I am what I eat: Borough Market Blog

In September I started a project for Borough Market, interviewing traders from different backgrounds about the foods that are important to them, the foods that make them feel nostalgic, that remind them of home. It has been a wonderful experience. I have met some really interesting people from diverse cultural backgrounds. They all had different stories to tell, but one thing that unites them is their passion for food and their joy in sharing it with others. 

As the series is coming to a close, I thought I would share the posts here too. In my first post I aimed to give a little context to the series by looking briefly at the concept of national cuisine and identity and then considering what that might mean to the individual. 

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Food and identity: other factors

When I first started reading about food and identity I used to gloss over the parts which highlighted the role played by factors such as globalisation and commercialisation. I wasn’t interested in this. I liked reading about the sentimental stuff. But the more I have read, the harder it has been to ignore and now that I am going to be writing my dissertation on the subject I can’t afford to overlook it.

Funnily enough, when I was writing about my own food memories in my last post I started writing about my childhood obsession with English junk food and realised that, subconsciously, I had been influenced by these other factors. I loved stocking up on English junk food on childhood visits to the UK from Australia. I was keen on the ‘Olde' English hard-boiled sweets that you couldn’t get in Oz, but I was also interested in the different brands and flavours of crisps and sweets available. I thought it novel that the colours of crisp packets indicated different flavours in the UK. When I was back in Australia last Christmas, I found some old journals from my trips to England. I had actually stuck the empty crisp and chocolate wrappers in them, along with ticket stubs, postcards and other ‘memories’.

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Food and identity: the sentimental stuff

For all that wider social and cultural processes, such as globalisation and commercialisation, have a part to play in shaping the links between food and identity (see my last post), for now I want to focus on the part we can all relate to: childhood memories, nostalgia, family connections and traditional values.

The unit we did on food, memory and identity for the MA Anthropology of Food was one of my favourite topics and has become the main focus of my studies. The core readings we did for that unit all touched on migration in one way or another and this is probably why it resonated with me.

I was born in Cambridge, England, but grew up in Sydney, Australia. I have always felt a strong attachment to England, one that my sister, who was born in Australia, does not share. I always felt compelled to come back here. As a kid growing up in Australia, I was proud of my English heritage. In some respects it defined me, or I wanted it to. I was sad when I returned to England and people told me I had an Australian accent.

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