SOAS, Center for Food Studies

In December I will give a talk at the Center for Food Studies titled"Spectral Foods: Disrupted Foodways and Memories of Health Otherwise in Samoa."

Abstract: Through an ethnographic analysis of Samoan people’s narratives about vegetables, in this paper I suggest that vegetables haunt peoples stories, evoking a life disrupted by neo/colonialism. I call these spectral foods because they evoke a world disrupted and their consumption is required to ameliorate the conditions brought about by those disruptions. While vegetables have long been a part of Samoan diets, they have only recently been categorized as such as, concurrently becoming the focus of agricultural development and health promotion. Vegetables thus ambiguously sit between essential health object and cash product. Stories about vegetables nostalgically call forward the memory of life without them, as a time when health was possible and cash unnecessary. The effect of knowing a life without vegetables was healthy and knowing that vegetables are required for health, situates health itself as an impossible state of achievement, one only possible in the subjunctive—that is if one can acquire and eat enough vegetables, if one only had enough cash.