L. Sasha Gora is a cultural historian and writer with a focus on food studies, contemporary art, and the environmental humanities. In 2023, she joined the University of Augsburg where she is the project director of the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group. Her work spotlights the relationship between eating and ecology, restaurants and representation, cuisine and culture, and her first book—Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada—is forthcoming from the Culinaria series at the University of Toronto Press.

A Line on the Tongue: Culinary Encounters and Cultural Boundaries in the North American Arctic

Abstract: How do boundaries materialize? How do they taste and smell? And what role does food play in imaginations of both material and immaterial boundaries, in how they shift shapes and mesh meanings? Considering taste, temperature, and touch, I take these questions as my point of departure to propose a sensory approach with which to contribute new layers of understandings of boundaries, their (im)materialities, and uncertainties.

Eating dissolves boundaries—between food and feed, body and environment—while also constructing cultural, social, and even political borders. Embracing the “uncertain” in the conference’s title, I study what constitutes a culinary boundary and what it means to “cross” it. Drawing from my comparative and transnational research about Indigenous foodways in North America, restaurants as contact zones, and culinary colonial encounters, my paper casts muktuk as a case study. Often accompanied by the word “delicacy,” muktuk—whale skin with its blubber—is simultaneously a culinary staple in the North American Arctic and an example of a polarizing food that colonists largely rejected and settlers continue to shun. Muktuk, thus, introduces themes that illuminate boundaries, their (im)materiality and (in)visibility, and how taste make and unmake them.

Culturally specific tastes erect fences and maintain difference, but they also challenge borders, as tastes spill from one culture to another, from one person to the next. But, what is the difference between a culinary border and a culinary boundary? “A Line on the Tongue” seeks to analyse the creation, crossing, and collapse of culinary boundaries, the interplay between their material (food) and immaterial (taste) implications, how they intersect with (in)visible borders and issues related to race, belonging, and kinship, and what the liminality of culinary boundaries contributes theoretically and methodologically to the writing of international history.