Comfort Food, Acquired Taste, and Fusion Cuisine. A Migrant Journey

Abstract

This essay looks at food through the lens of immigration by analyzing the work of migrant writers in Italy. Comfort food, acquired taste and fusion cuisine are used to illustrate different stages of the migration process. Migrant writers have often used food as a metaphor to describe their longing for their homeland, for an idealized time and place when they felt safe, secure in their identity. Cooking and eating, sharing and learning culinary traditions foster integration and develop acquired tastes in the destination culture. The result is a sense of belonging, but also the formation of a split identity and a partial loss of the original self.  Fusion cuisine, a product of globalization, offers the possibility of two identities coexisting harmoniously within the same person.