Go us

By Paola Michel

So, these second blogposts are meant to be about our projects and specific aspects that resonated with us. The project that I worked on with Ellen and Salomėja was about food, and how it relates to identity. We asked people questions along the lines of, “What is your favourite food?”, “Do you have food rituals?”, “Would you say Serbian and Albanian food are very different?” in an attempt to determine whether food is a key element for national identity in Kosovo. 

Many things resonated with me during our trip to Kosovo, but when it comes to the project, two aspects come to mind. The first is that we were so focused on the angle of national identity as a divider, that we forgot about class, or hunger. This is rather ironic in the context of a project about food, and highlights our privilege. The second aspect was the involuntary and unnoticed erasure of women’s voices--in the sense that we did not interview any. It seems we did not think of it, or even realise the omission.

The first element really struck me in an answer that our group got in the very last interview that we conducted. It was our last night in the hostel, at about midnight when the hostel manager Farid agreed to speak to us about his perspective on our topic. We were sitting on futons with Farid in the common area of the hostel while the rest of the group was gathered outside at a table, enjoying the last night in Kosovo. The revelation came when we asked Farid whether he thought Serbian food and Albanian food were different and he answered in a way that seemed completely outside of the question.

And that's when we realised it was our question which was outside of his reality. We asked Farid whether Serbian and Albanian food differed and he told us that all cuisines differ, that they differ from one region to another, between towns, between houses. After our question, his speech slowed down, he said “Let me tell you something,” and proceeded to tell us about his parents who struggled to find food when he was younger. He talked about how people would eat what is called in some places “forest herbs” or “mountain herbs”, but what he called “field herbs”. The names differed, he said, because people ate what they found where they could find it. 

We asked Farid what ingredient he could not imagine his life without and he said “salt”. 

It surprised me a bit, it seemed like an obvious answer, everything is better with salt. But then he followed up by telling us that he could not imagine living without salt because he didn’t always have it, and it is one of the basics with which anything can be made, and made better. No one wonders about the differences between Serbian and Albanian cooking, or about the implications of these differences in food at times where there is barely any food to cook. Farid made me realise that our questions were limited by our understanding of Kosovo. The questions focused on highlighting differences, but we could not find any, or anyone to tell us that these differences even mattered.

The second aspect of our project that struck me is the fact that my group unconsciously excluded women from it. Our team of three women, conducting a project about food with a research proposal putting an emphasis on women’s crucial role, managed to gather an interviewee panel of 100% men. To make it even better, we managed not to notice the absence of women until we were back in Amsterdam. 

Kosovo Women's Network

In our defence, we did meet with more men than women in general during this trip, and we unsuccessfully tried to speak to some women in the north, but the issue is that we did not make an effort to seek women out.

I spent a good part of this semester thinking about intersectionality in the context of a class. In this class, “Race, Class and Gender Intersectionality”, we learnt that in our society some identities are marginalised and others are considered as the default. When asked to picture a human, most people I know would picture a white man. In that class, we learnt that in order to include the people in the margins, a conscious effort must be made, precisely because they are never the ones who come to mind first. I know this, I am supposed to know this. And then when I pictured a random Kosovar person who could tell me about food, I pictured a man. We picked people randomly and somehow random equated to only men, and it worries me--that none of us noticed or even wondered about it. I guarantee you won’t catch me having such a homogenous research sample in the future. This experience might stay with me forever, I fear. 

My conclusion from this blogpost and the insights I gained throughout our trip to Kosovo and project is that sometimes we are so focused that we forget about the most basic things. We forgot to think about the fact that the lack of economic stability and the conflict in Kosovo would likely result in some families not having enough food. As we forgot about people who were starving, we also failed to consider that they might not necessarily feel their national identity to be tied to the food they ate. We also forgot about those who most often cook the food, even though women being the main cooks came up in interviews. I learnt a lot during this trip, and I am proud of the project that we made. But come on. We forgot about hunger and we forgot about women. In a project about food. Go us really, it’s almost funny.