Food and Identity in Modern America, Part 4: Sense of Place

Individuals also form their identity partly from their connection to place. In his chapter entitled “The Sense of Place” from Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Wallace Stegner echoes renowned author and essayist Wendell Berry in saying, “If you don't know where you are … you don't know who you are” (Stegner). Stegner and Berry are two of many authors who affirm the importance of sense of place in the development of a personal identity. Stegner goes so far as to say of his rootless childhood, “Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person” (Stegner). For Stegner and many others, sense of place is central to identity development.

Understanding and engaging in the genesis of one’s food helps an individual to develop this sense of place. Kingsolver asserts that the need for a sense of place can be met in part by understanding and engaging in a local food culture. “A food culture is not something that gets sold to people. It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging” (Kingsolver 17). For Kingsolver, a food culture is a reflection of the place from which it springs. It is a method of accessing, engaging, and developing a relationship with that place. In a very real sense, understanding food as coming from a place helps the individual make that place part of him or herself. In The Earth Knows My Name, interviewee Gerard Bentryn relates a conversation he had with a local while surveying in British Columbia that illustrates this point:

“‘Oh, so you’re out in the woods, and you’re learning about this valley.’ He said, ‘I’ve never left this valley. Everything that I eat comes out of this valley. Everybody that I’m related to, all of my family, is buried in this valley. When I eat, I eat the people and the place. I’m made out of Vancouver Island. But look at what you’re eating.’ I said, Yeah?’ and he said, ‘You’re made out of tin cans. Because that’s what you eat out of.’ … We use the phrase ‘We are what we eat,’ but I also think we are where we eat. That’s the thing people miss. This need to be of a place.” (Klindienst 85)

Bentryn here emphasizes the connection between place, food, and identity. Through developing a food-based relationship with a place, a person can develop an identity that is “rooted” in and shaped by that place.