You Are What You Eat: Exploring a Chinese-Jamaican Foodway

Abstract

<p>Food is a multi-sensual form of communication that represents culturally-specific ideologies about places of origin. In this Major Research Paper, I honour subjective ways of knowing as a second-generation person of multiple ethnicities by adopting an autoethnographic “cooking as inquiry” method to cook vegetarian versions of my grandma Ella’s Chinese-Jamaican recipes. This research investigates how family recipes transfer a unique cultural identity across generations. My findings illustrated that cooking family recipes can increase spiritual, emotional, and sociological connections to ethnocultural identities. The food I prepared represented the Hakka and Jamaican values of my ancestors: entrepreneurship, resilience, and tight knit community building achieved via oral communication. This study empowered me to share my food memory with future descendants to maintain the Chinese Jamaican diaspora overtime. This paper was awarded the 2021 Associate Dean Scholarly, Research, and Creative Activity Award for Best Master’s Research Paper.</p>