Professor Shahani: 'Food Taboos Tell Us So Much About a Culture'

THE LEWISTON TRIBUNE (IDAHO) -- Shahani came to the U.S. in 2000 from Mumbai, India, a city with a rich culinary history born of colonial regimes and migrant communities. Her first Thanksgiving dinner, served in Atlanta, Georgia, was influenced by Southern cooking traditions. Today she lives and eats in San Francisco, where she is a professor at San Francisco State University. “Food taboos tell us so much about a culture — what it counts as food, and what it marks as beyond the threshold of the edible,” Shahani said. “The histories of these foods are as important as the histories of the communities that partake of them,” she added. “Equally interesting is the phenomenon by which seemingly ‘bizarre foods’ are mainstreamed in culinary trends, like the use of offal in the nose-to-tail eating of (celebrity English chef) Fergus Henderson. The challenge of eating beyond the big box store and conquering the threshold of the seemingly inedible is what drives the recent trend for these foods.”