Food is often read as a medium of cultural memory, nostalgia, discrimination, and identity. While these are formidable in understanding collective memory and diasporic context, scant attention is given to its unifying dimension. Against this backdrop, this article analyzes the structure of the coconut-infused culinary repertoire in the novel The House of Blue Mangoes, by David Davidar, and the cookbook The Essential Kerala Cookbook, by Vijayan Kannampilly, to understand how it forms a unifying culinary model in Keralite cuisines, which are standardized, regulated, and internalized among the members of the society, that mediates discriminatory practices through the shared culinary framework. The novel examines caste-based and dietary discrimination through coconut-infused cuisines that foster harmonious practices among diverse communities, and the cookbook curates coconut-infused recipes of Kerala that extend beyond historically and culturally defined communities. The present study employs structural-semiotic analysis, drawing on the concepts of binary opposition and the sign, signifier, and signified, as developed by Barthes in his analysis of French cuisine, to elucidate the standardizing and internalizing practices that prevail in Kerala’s coconut-infused culinary repertoire. It argues that the homogenization discourse on Indian cuisine, which risks cultural erasure and reinforces societal hierarchies, offers limited explanatory power in analyzing Kerala’s regional cuisine. The study suggests that the everyday practices of regional cuisines are potent in extending the understanding of the dynamics of identity, power, and hierarchies in modern society.
C. et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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