The Hungry Human: A Being Human Festival Hub

The Hungry Human Community Cookbook

Welcome to The Hungry Human Community Cookbook. This is a cookbook with a difference. We aim to collect stories about food from across our diverse community here in Essex. In addition, we are collecting stories about the meals that mean something to all of us. Some stories were collected at Hungry Human workshops in November 2023 as a part of the Being Human Festival Hub.

This cookbook is based on the principle that food is essential to our lives, and that by talking about what we eat, where and how we eat it, and who we eat with, we can start to tell the stories of who we are. It’s our hope that by bringing together stories about food from all the different parts of Essex, we can create one big table, where we can sit and listen to each other’s stories, and share some really important parts of our identities with our neighbours. 

Would you like to share a recipe for our cookbook?

If you'd like to share your recipe and your story, there are a series of writing prompts in the form of a workshop to help you. This workshop is based on my academic work, looking at the American novelist Willa Cather.

Building on the work of writers like Mary Marie Dixon and Sarah Ban Breathnach, (whose lovely piece about Cather’s food can be read online), I’m interested not only in the fact that Cather seems obsessed with what her characters eat, but by the way that she uses talking about cooking in different communities to impact how we, as readers, think about different migrant groups.

Cather wrote about a time in American history when everyone in the stories apart from the (few) Native characters can trace their roots to another country: everyone she’s writing about is a migrant, from one place or another. With that in mind, have a look at these two passages from her novel My Ántonia. The Burden family, who we see in the first passage, are from a British, probably Welsh background (like Cather herself). They’ve been in the United States for a couple of generations. Ántonia and her family in the story are Czech migrants who recently arrived in the USA. 

Read the two passages below:

• The Burden Family Kitchen
• Mrs Shimerda's Bread

In two short paragraphs, we can see that the Burden family are being set up as the “good” migrants: the protagonist’s grandmother, Emmaline Burden, produces plenty out of scarcity, and the food she cooks is rich, and famous for its strong, enticing smells, so as readers, we can imagine the warm scents of her kitchen, and we feel included in this safe, homely space. On the other hand, Cather writes about the way that Mrs Shimerda, Ántonia’s mother, makes her bread, with disgust. The characters are “horrified” by the “sour” bread – quite a contrast to the mouth-watering bacon and puddings in the other house!

As those of you who know how to make bread will have realised, however, Mrs Shimerda isn’t doing anything disgusting at all. She’s using a fermented master dough to make something very like the artisanal sourdough that’s all the rage in high-end cafés today. 

In this novel, the same character, Jim Burden, is telling us about his grandmother’s cooking and Mrs Shimerda’s bread. He creates an insider-outsider dynamic, making us look up to Emmaline Burden, and look down on Ántonia’s mother.

The message that I take from this is that it’s really important that we are all given the chance to tell our own stories, to represent ourselves as the protagonists, and show the value of our different cultures: after all, who knows what hipster eateries will be serving 100 years from now? Willa Cather certainly didn’t!

The workshop

We want to hear the story of a dish that means a lot to you: perhaps it is something you ate on a special occasion, like at your wedding. Perhaps it is something you ate once, and could never find again, or maybe it’s something you used to eat when you lived somewhere else, whether you’ve moved to Essex from another country, or if you’ve travelled to somewhere that’s important to you. Our food memories can help us to talk about our identities, and this project is all about getting to know one another!

The prompts:

1. The most important thing I’ve ever eaten is… There are lots of things that can make a meal important. What was the occasion when you ate this? feel before you ate? Who were you with? Where were you? What was the weather like? How did you How did you feel afterwards?
2. My home tastes like… Where is the place that you call home? Is this something you make a lot? Is it sweet or savoury? Do you do it the same way every time? Can you describe what you do when you are preparing this? Do you listen to music? Is it connected to a particular memory?
3. When I think about food, I think about… Where are you from? Do you cook a lot? you manage the shopping for a household? Have you ever been hungry? What makes food an important part of your life?

Submission information

Please submit stories or recipes of up to 500 words, including your name and which part of Essex you are from, to thehungryhuman@essex.ac.uk. We aim to reply to emails within a week.