Elif Birbiri
York University
Do we still tell food stories to each other? About what we cook, what we miss, and what we discover in new places? This may sound like a simple question, but I find it difficult to answer. These days, there are so many “tactics” for storytelling: hooks, characters, settings, plots that it almost feels as though stories must be engineered before they are shared. Yet food stories rarely follow such rules. They can emerge at a dinner table, in a kitchen, or even in the supermarket aisle, sparked by taste, smell, or memory. Susan Sontag once said that stories allow us “to travel outside ourselves.”[i] For me, migration to Toronto has turned food into exactly that: a story of memory and adaptation.
I grew up with the delicacies of Levantine cuisine, where the foundation was olive oil, grains, legumes, and spices – especially sumac and chilli flakes. Meals were built around stews, grilled meats, rice, and bulgur wheat. Fresh bread was never absent. Tomatoes, olives, nuts and herbs flavoured almost everything. Citrus fruits grew on the streets, free for the picking. The rhythm of eating was as ordinary as it was intimate. Some dishes, like kibbeh or stuffed vine leaves, were labour-intensive, demanding time, patience, and often many hands. Others were simple: a lentil soup, a tomato salad, bread dipped into olive oil. Together, they formed the sensory landscape of my childhood. Then came the rupture. Migration is never just a physical move; it is also a shift in the textures of everyday life. For me, the shift showed itself most clearly in food.
When I arrived in Toronto, I encountered a city where food is both deeply industrial and stunningly diverse. There are endless fast-food chains, frozen meals, processed snacks, and packaged bread with ingredients I cannot even pronounce. At the same time, there are also countless restaurants and groceries run by migrants, each carrying pieces of their own culinary traditions. My first visits to the supermarket left me overwhelmed. Aisles stretched endlessly, lined with dozens of brands of products I thought of as singular: twenty varieties of orange juice, shelves of instant noodles, endless options for peanut butter, and cereal. Instead of feeling liberated, it made my head swim. I found myself longing for the small, predictable rhythm of local markets back home, where tomatoes were tomatoes and you didn’t have to choose between eight types of lentils. I began to panic about forgetting the taste of home. How exactly did my mother’s food smell when it was fresh from the kitchen? What did it feel like to sit at long tables with my family, food stretching across the center? These meals were once so ordinary that I never thought to memorize them. But in Toronto, their absence turned them into fragile and precious memories.
Those weren’t only my fragile stories, but Toronto is full of migrants who carry their stories through food. One of the first communities I connected with was Italian. I spent time with nonnas, grandmothers who still recalled, in vivid detail, how food tasted “back home” in Italy, even after forty years of migration. Their cooking was never only about feeding families. It was a practice of remembering, of holding onto fragments of a place and time that might otherwise slip away. For them, food was storytelling, keeping their worlds alive across distance and decades. I realized that I was doing the same. Cooking dishes from my childhood and sharing them with my new community became a way to say: this is who I am, this is where I come from. When others asked me about my food, I found myself narrating the histories behind dishes or explaining ingredients that were ordinary to me but novel to them. Storytelling happened in the act of cooking, tasting, and exchanging.
Pasta became one of my favourite examples of this. Everyone cooks some version of it, right? Some with tomato and garlic, some with condensed milk, some with shito sauce. It’s a carbohydrate that travels well, absorbing whatever flavours are poured into it. For me, pasta with yogurt was the most ordinary of meals. A quick, comforting dish that never felt special. Until one day in Toronto, I made it for a friend. When I set the bowl down, she looked at me with shock: “Wait! It is neither cream nor cheese! Stop!” Her reaction startled me. Only then did I realize that something utterly ordinary in one place could appear extraordinary in another. That moment itself became a story about cultural difference, about taste, about how migration transforms not only what we eat but also how others perceive it. Food can surprise, unsettle, or delight, but it always carries a narrative.
In these narratives, our home-cooking often goes unnoticed. Toronto’s food scene is vibrant and well-known, overshadowing other ways of cooking. But what about the foods we cook at home? This quieter side of migrant life is one of the most important ways we navigate our new environments. Grocery shopping for home cooking is full of challenges. The endless options of spices, sauces, and vegetables in Canadian and ethnic supermarkets can feel intimidating. I often hesitate to pick up an unknown ingredient, worried that I won’t cook it properly, or that I won’t like it. Wasting food feels wrong, almost like betraying the care that goes into cooking. Instead, I look for guidance. I want someone to show me how an ingredient is used, when it is eaten, and what stories it carries. For instance, rapini once looked like an insignificant green to me, something I would have walked past. But watching an Italian nonna prepare it transformed it. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a bitter green. It was part of a migration story, a reminder of the landscapes and kitchens she had left behind.
In the end, cooking at home has become my way of storytelling. Each dish carries fragments of my past while opening to the tastes of others. Some meals keep memories alive, like stuffed vine leaves that remind me of family tables in Adana. Others emerge from encounters here, like rapini or plantain.
At the end, food is never just food. It is a sensory archive of social life and political histories. It is also a medium of exchange, a way of telling others who we are and where we come from. In migration, food stories shift; what was once ordinary becomes extraordinary, and what was once invisible becomes the center of attention. So yes, I believe we still tell food stories to each other. They live in recipes, in conversations over shared meals, in the quiet work of chopping, stirring, and tasting at home. And in telling these stories, we don’t just feed ourselves. We carry our histories forward, one dish at a time.
[i] If you would like to watch an inspiring conversation on storytelling, please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=MoHCR8nshe8&t=811s
