Ethos, Hospitality, and the Pursuit of Rhetorical Healing: How Three Decolonial Cookbooks Reconstitute Cultural Identity through Ancestral Foodways

Abstract

This article participates in contemporary conversations about ethos by extending conceptions of ethos as dwelling places” or ecologies” to ethos as hospitality. Such extension involves attending to how three recent decolonial cookbook authors construct stable textual identities and ethos using rhetorics of healing, constitutive rhetoric, and utopian rhetoric. The cookbooks under analysis–Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry (2014), Decolonize Your Diet by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel (2015), and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (2017)–offer readers knowledge of African American, Mesoamerican, and Native American ancestral foodways and encourage culturally-affiliated readers to embrace these foodways in order to reclaim their communities' physical and spiritual health. The authors demonstrate a complex engagement with ethos as they reconstitute the cultural identity of their primary audiences both literally, through the consumption of food as an act rooted in the body, and figuratively, through the ways food connects us to others.

Keywords:

• Ethos
• Ancestral Foodways
• Cookbooks
• Decolonial Rhetorics
• cultural rhetorics

Notes

1 I wish to thank RR reviewers Erin Frost and Karrieann Soto Vega for their constructive feedback on this manuscript. Their insights and suggestions helped me produce a stronger piece.

2 During my graduate education, I have been lucky to work closely with a number of BIPOC scholars. I am indebted to two former graduate program colleagues and friends, Drs. Linda Garcia Merchant (University of Houston) and Bernice Olivas (Salt Lake Community College), whose invaluable feedback enriched this paper.

3 These cookbooks speak to multiple audiences. While white readers might take something away from these cookbooks due to the rhetorical hospitality of the authors, which provides white readers with the information and tools to learn about the cultural foodways of the respective authors and execute their recipes, in this article I am primarily interested in the effect these cookbooks might have within each writer’s own cultural community.

4 Peña et al. define a “decolonial approach to food studies” as “… the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge, belief, and practice as these are related to food, foodways, and cuisines and the methods they inspire in our agroecosystems” (xvii).

5 By “textual persona,” I refer to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “image” of an author as projected through a text (“The Problem” 109).

6 As of June 2021, Afro-Vegan was ranked #1 on Amazon’s Caribbean & West Indian Cooking & Wine and #2 in African Cooking, Food and Wine lists. It was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and Terry received a James Beard Foundation 2015 Leadership Award. Decolonize Your Diet was ranked #6 on Amazon’s Latin American Cooking, Food & Wine list and received the International Latino Book Award for Best Cookbook. The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen was ranked #4 on Amazon’s Native American Cooking, Food & Wine list and received the 2018 James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook.

7 I follow Calvo and Esquibel’s lead in the terminology used to describe their cookbook’s primary audience. Their frequent comparison of the health of Mexican and Central American Latina/o communities with US-based Latina/o communities (14; 19; 26) suggests that they are primarily addressing Latinx people living in the U.S. They also differentiate themselves from “American Indian and First Nation scholars, activists, and chefs,” and in discussing their work I will maintan this distinction (35). I have chosen to use “Latinx” instead of the “–a/o” suffix used by Calvo and Esquibel to be more inclusive of non-binary people, while recognizing that “Latinx” as a term is also controversial. The authors use the adjective “Mesoamerican” several times to label the cuisine they draw from, as will I.

8 There are, of course, differences among Chicanx and other Latinx rhetorics and this statement is not meant to suggest they are synonymous. For more information on these distinctions, see Lugo-Lugo.

9 Individual or group behavioral modification is certainly impacted by existing structural systems. In the case of dietary change, individuals and groups are limited by the accessibility of heirloom seeds, land on which to plant/forage/hunt, and other disruptions caused by the industrialization of food. I unfortunately do not have the space in this paper to attend to the disruptions discussed by Peña et al. and Mihesuah and Hoover.

10 I refer to Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition of utopia as “… social dreaming—the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live” (3).

11 For more on the subject of food, ritual, and spirituality within Mesoamerican (specifically Aztec) culture, see Morán.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brita M. Thielen

Brita M. Thielen received her PhD in English, with concentrations in Writing History and Theory and Creative Writing, from Case Western Reserve University and is now a Lecturer at CWRU. This article draws from her dissertation research which examines how writers construct textual identity and ethos in food writing texts, particularly in the cookbook, food memoir, and food blog genres. Additional interests include intersections of identity, social privilege, and equity in the writing classroom and creative writing (poetry).