Abstract What would it mean to build an archive not of texts or images, but of tastes, sounds, silences, and gestures, the fleeting traces through which memory takes shape? This essay proposes “taste archives” as a method within the public humanities for engaging communities around everyday acts of remembering and belonging. Beginning with chai as a personal anchor of migrant memory, I move outward to imagine a framework for archiving food-related stories and practices. The process unfolds in three movements: (1) gathering oral histories through food-centered conversations; (2) recording recipes, smells, tastes, and the sonic-material rhythms that accompany them; and (3) curating these into accessible, community-based collections, whether in libraries, cultural centers, or digital spaces. Along the way, I reflect on questions of consent, ownership, and the difficulty of translating sensory experience into archival form. “Taste archives,” I suggest, democratize heritage by placing ordinary rituals-meals, drinks, shared preparation at the center of cultural memory. By making the invisible histories of migration and daily life tangible and audible, the public humanities can reimagine the archive itself as something that can be sipped, smelled, and heard: a living practice of remembering together.
Aditi Ekka (Thu,) studied this question.