Crunch. Bits of crushed-up peanuts add an element of surprise as I chew. The chunky texture intertwined with the smooth layers of peanut butter creates a satisfying experience. Extra crunchy peanut butter. A treasured delicacy of mine. When the dining hall does not fill my grumbling stomach’s desires, I chow down in my dorm room alone on my favorite snack. A yummy snack? Yes. A snack that works as a form of resistance against the normative intimacies of eating in the public sphere? Well, that is an idea I had not even begun to consider until reading Anita Mannur’s 2022 monograph entitled Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures. 

Mannur, a self-proclaimed “professor, writer, thinker, recovering optimist,” works as an Associate Professor of English at Miami University. Mannur teaches interdisciplinary courses centered on race, class, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, she is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and co-editor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. Mannur received her BA in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Mannur’s background and primary research in food studies as well as her interdisciplinary teaching approach qualify her to examine food in Intimate Eating. 

Mannur’s monograph asks the reader to reevaluate how we think about food. In Intimate Eating, the action of eating takes on many meanings and embodies a unique experience depending on race, class, gender, and sexuality. In the introduction to the book , Mannur opens by asking, “what is an intimate eating public?” (Mannur, 4). To comprehend this question, one must first understand the idea of “publics” (4). Mannur utilizes the term “publics,” which was initially coined by Michael Warner in 2002, to help explain her primary argument of Intimate Eating. Warner’s publics are categorized as “queer creatures”; Mannur further elaborates, describing the publics as “at once familiars, intimate and strange” (4). In the context of Intimate Eating, “publics” are synonymous with marginalized groups. Mannur primarily focuses on cuisines and eating practices associated with South Asian and Arab people. She narrows in on these particular groups because they have a history of police regulation and exclusion from American culture. 

With this context given, the question “what is an intimate eating public?” starts to form. The practice of intimate eating is about the interaction between marginalized groups and food. More specifically, she examines how this interaction works to blur lines between the private, and the public sphere. Mannur claims that intimate eating practices garner “a form of kingship that refuses to be contained by narratives of heteronormativity” (5). Therefore, food acts as a site of resistance to our white heteronormative society. This act of defiance has the possibility of creating radical intimacy. Mannur offers a future argument displaying an alternative future to our present reality. Through the concept of intimate eating in the public sphere, marginalized communities not only resist but “find spaces of belonging amid a world that is structured to obscure and often deny their existence” (21).

The book is broken into two distinct sections: the first focusing on the solo eater, and the second highlighting alienation when eating in a public space. In chapter one, “The Tiffin Box and Gendered Mobility,” Mannur analyzes the 2013 Indian film The Lunchbox. Through a failure in the Mumbai system of dabbawallas, the film follows a romance between two strangers, Ila and Saajan. The dabbawalla system was created when British colonial rule changed the workday so that there was no longer a time for male middle-class workers to go home to eat meals. The dabbawallas deliver lunches to office workers in tiffin boxes that are prepared by wives in the household daily. The author highlights the lack of studies done on dabbawallas regarding gender roles. Scholar Uma Krishnan praises the system for not inconveniencing the women of the household with early mornings devoted to meal preparation. Instead, Mannur counters Krishnan’s arguments by noting how the claim fails to acknowledge the marital privilege at play in this system of dabbawallas. In the dabbawalla system, women are still expected to prepare meals daily for men; the preparation just takes place later in the day, reinforcing stereotypes. The analysis of The Lunchbox reveals how food can work to break down these gender roles. Mannur’s depiction of the two main characters and the failure of the colonial system makes the argument that Ila can, and should, find agency and leave her husband to find a fulfilling life. In The Lunchbox, Saajan and Ila find not only love but also intimacy within a public system catered toward the solo eater. 

In chapter two, Mannur further explores the “solo diner” concept. Mannur uses the lens of scholar Hannah Arendt’s “Ideology and Terror” to explain how loneliness and solitude are entirely different ideas. This distinction guides chapter two, as Mannur claims solitude to be a form of pleasure. The author argues that eating is not solely about the food but is also about the dining experience. The experience of dining is particularly pertinent for women dining alone. Mannur believes that patriarchal anxiety deters women from enjoying solo dining. She cites Clementine Crawford’s essay titled “The Night I Was Mistaken for a Call Girl” to support this argument. In her essay, Crawford recounts an unpleasant solo dining experience where she was harassed and objectified by the male patrons and wait staff. Mannur, too has personal experience with this anxiety. After her divorce, she made it a goal to dine at fine restaurants alone and overcome patriarchal expectations. At first, she found herself subconsciously reaching for a book or her phone out of discomfort and habit, but then she relaxed and enjoyed her public solo meal. These two accounts show that women’s fear of dining alone is not at all irrational.  

After examining how subversive gender roles work in women’s dining experiences, Mannur explores the relationship between eating and race/ethnicity. Chapter Three, “Eat, Dwell, Orient; Food Network and Asian American Cooking Communities,” juxtaposes Julie Powell’s cooking blog on learning all Julia Child’s French recipes and Nani Power’s blog following her attempt to cook Indian food. Mannur discusses how food blogs serve as sites of knowledge to form an intimate eating public. Mannur notes how both of these blogs, which gained widespread popularity, illuminate the problematic ways cuisine is thought about and used to perpetuate racism. Powell lived in Queens, surrounded by diversity, and yet made efforts to remove herself from the Brown and Black spaces in her community. Her blog articulates racist overtones as she is continuously disturbed by her diverse surroundings and puts her white icon Julia Child on a high pedestal. On the other hand, Power lives in rural Virginia, surrounded by whiteness, and has a longing to find the “exotic” (86). However, her blog reduces multiculturalism down to a fetish. Mannur ends the chapter discussing Lawrence Dai’s blog as essential steps towards a future where people of color participate in the conversations about food on the internet and how these narratives challenge the standard ways of discussing intimate eating. 

Chapter four details the history of food trucks and their origin. Food trucks gained popularity to serve working-class Mexican Americans who needed cheap meals to eat on the go while working. Middle and upper-class white Americans gentrified the food truck concept, and now many food trucks serve upscale cuisine in expensive neighborhoods. Mannur goes on to discuss the idea of the “enemy” foods. After 9/11, Afgan Americans and other Muslim Americans were victims of xenophobic bias’, and restaurants serving their cuisine initially suffered financially. However, many restaurant-goers also actively choose to eat food from these restaurants to show solidarity with Afghan immigrants in the US, thus showing how eating is a political tool. 

In the fifth and final chapter of Intimate Eating, Mannur explains “cruel optimism” (140) in relation to the hit show The Great British Bake Off. A comfort show for many during pandemic living, Mannur investigates its popularity and examines the symbolism of the show’s kitchen housed in a white tent. The white tent is a white space that lives in the past but looks like what we want the future to be. The tent is a temporary solution to the world’s inequalities, yet Mannur encourages us to think outside the white tent to ask where certain ingredients come from. She emphasizes the importance of understanding the history of ingredients and foods. A prime example of this is how the show celebrates Indian spices but does not understand their history. Mannur brings up how the iconic British tea cannot exist without acknowledging imperialism and British colonial rule in India, the Caribbean, and China. Mannur urges us to understand this history and go beyond the safety of the white tent to find an alternative future that is more equitable for all people. 

The structure and methodology of Mannur’s monograph provides insight into the complex topic of intimate eating in an engaging way. The book’s structure follows a logical process; it starts with the individual and ends with the greater community. The book uses personal anecdotes intertwined with analysis of films, tv shows, food blogs, photographs, media art installations, scholarly research articles, and novels. This myriad of sources allows the author’s argument to be well researched and therefore comes across as reliable and engrossing—however, the sources at work double as a weakness.

At times, Intimate Eating feels loaded with so many sources and evidence that the book’s message is lost in the details. For example, in chapter two, the main focus is on the solo eater using personal stories and photographs to highlight this theme. However, by the end of the chapter, my mind felt flooded with quotes from a book on failed marriages, Gayatri Gopinath’s theories on queer female subjectivity, an article from The Atlantic called “Creating Public Intimacy: Designing Restaurant Booths and Banquettes,” and a lengthy eight-page conversation around food pornography which was overwhelming. The sheer quantity of sources thrown at the reader slowly muddles the central argument Mannur is working to establish. 

 A self-identifying foodie who is willing to engage with complex terminology and scholarly analysis feels like the targeted audience for Mannur’s monograph. Individuals who read Intimate Eating will develop a greater appreciation for food and be exposed to how food has and is used to perpetuate discrimination toward marginalized groups. However, food can simultaneously be used as a tool of resistance to this discrimination. Food can even be harnessed to create a future where people from all walks of life feel welcomed to eat intimately. Now, when I bite into my extra crunchy peanut butter, I garner a new appreciation for this form of solo eating and find power within myself.

Reference

Mannur, Anita. Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.