April 15, 2024

Tamils celebrate the Tamil New Year, Puthandu, on the 14^th of April. As part of the festivities, Tamils gather with their families and partake in a vegetarian feast. Vegetarian foodways play a significant role in Tamil culture and have featured in academic scholarship. However, Asst. Prof. Indira Arumugam (NUS Sociology and Anthropology) directs the focus to the cultural significance of preserved meat and fish in Tamil Nadu societies instead.

In her article ‘Preserving Flesh and Spanning Families’  (Gastronomica, May 2022), she sheds light on the role of preserved food in preserving kinship in the Tamil Nadu village of Vaduvur where her extended family resides. Asst. Prof. Arumugam’s research and ruminations on the binding power of preserved meat and fish thereby highlight the crucial role they play in connecting kin.

Tapping on personal anecdotes regarding her family’s process of the preparation of meat and fish, Asst. Prof. Arumugam makes the point that preserved food functions as a social connector that binds families together. Through explaining the arduous process by which meat and fish are preserved, she asserts that one can only rely on village kin to share and obtain preserved meats, highlighting the centrality of family ties in the importance of preserved meat in Tamil Nadu culture.

Broadly, she posits that the familial rites surrounding preserved food and its preparation reflect the idiosyncrasies of Tamil intimacy and affection. She highlights that the act of serving and preparing preserved meat and fish is a testament to familial hospitality and a means of welcoming relatives who have long been separated.

In a reflection on the interaction between her ethnic identity rooted in Vaduvur and her Singaporean upbringing, Asst. Prof. Arumugam discusses the role of preserved meat as an identity marker that is capable of making distinct separations between villager and urban citizen.

Preserved foods evoke memory and nostalgia, and their taste serves to bridge the symbolic separation of the urban from the rural, the city from the village, and the relationships between family members that have been wrought by distance and time.

Read ‘Preserving Flesh and Spanning Families’ here: https://online.ucpress.edu/gastronomica/article-abstract/22/2/92/169808/Preserving-Flesh-and-Spanning-Families?redirectedFrom=fulltext