Sara Suleri: Meatless Days
Word Count: 432
From Meatless Days by Sara Suleri
“‘They’re sweetbreads and they’re cooked with kidneys, and they’re very good.’ Natives should always be natives, exactly what they are, and I felt irked to be so probed around the issue of my own nativity” (731).
“I had to go back to where I belonged and - past a thousand different mealtimes - try to reconstruct the parable of the kapura” (732).
“And so as an older mind, I fault myself for not having the wits to recognize what I already knew. I must have always known exactly what kapura are, because the conversation they provoked came accompanied with shocks of familiarity that typically attend a trade of solid information” (735).
Sara Suleri’s narrative is entirely about her and her culture’s relationship with food. Therefore when her knowledge of a popular food is questioned she believes it to be an attack on her nativity. Her culture and her experience within it was often defined by her experience of food, as was her childhood. When she found that she was wrong about what was in a food, she wanted to confirm and to know the origin of the food ingredients themselves. This led her to look back at her childhood to think through this new knowledge.
The first story she came up with was the story of her eating the cauliflower and being punished by being forced to eat kidneys for dinner. Because of that story she realizes that she knew subconsciously that kapura was not made with kidneys because she had experienced the taste and texture of kidneys. She then comments saying, “So I should have kept in mind that, alas, we know the flavor of each part of the anatomy: that much imagination belongs to everyone’s palate” (735). Pakistani food is very different from American food in this way.
However, Pakistanis were used to this type of disappointment. She says, “So long before the kapura made its comeback in my life, we in Pakistan were bedmates with betrayal and learned how to take grim satisfaction from assessing the water table of our outrage” (736). Her past experiences had made her used to this type of betrayal. She names her little brother who, as a baby, experienced food insecurity since there was little for him to eat. Even when they found imported baby food, he ate it with ‘profound mistrust’. They lived with these types of food and nourishment insecurities their whole lives and were therefore often betrayed by the things supposed to keep them healthy, such as the dead crow water which made them sick. Therefore this betrayal was not new to her.
You are spot on talking about her relationship with her culture through her food. I like how you added the disappointment near the end in talking about how it was normal for Pakistanis. I think it was the betrayal which lead her to grow as a person though, and try new things. Especially in the kidney story, and how she would eat them every time she got use to them. The connection between food and lessons in her life are linked very closely. Which is why I think her culture and her questioning her culture, and was a great observation.
ReplyDeleteI find it almost disturbing that she was unaware of the food she was eating. It makes me uneasy that she was lied to about the sweetbread and how it was actually intestines. She begins to question all the food she is then eating throughout the chapter and the looks of all her food. I found that sometimes she got too graphic in describing her food and I could imagine what it might've looked like.
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