Food in Ashima's Life

In the book The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, food is a used as indication of emotional distance. At this general point in the book, Ashoke and Ashima have started their family. They  have a little boy named Gogol, they move out to the suburbs, and then Ashima becomes pregnant again.

As books play an important role in Ashoke’s life, food plays an important role in Ashima’s. A recurring pattern of emptiness follows through the various instances of food in Ashima’s life. There’s irony in this pattern because in general, food is the way that something is fulfilled. Whether that “something” be as simple as hunger, as unfortunate as emotional dissatisfaction, or as abstract as sexual desire according to Thomas Foster (How to Read Literature Like a Professor), food is a satisfier.

On the very first page of the book, food begins its role in Ashima’s life. “...Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen...combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onions in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard seed oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack old for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India,” (1). Here, the food is an attempted satisfier because Ashima is trying to recreate the snack she so often enjoyed in her hometown in India. So it’s an emotional fulfillment on top of being just a pregnancy craving. This relationship with food starts the pattern of Lahiri using food as an indicator of emotional “missing” revolving around Ashima. The food central one’s culture will always serve as a token of that culture, and in Ashima’s case, her entire home country where she grew up. With this street snack, Ashima is missing her home and true sense of belonging.

Another example of the emotional emptiness surrounding food in Ashima’s life is when her son, Gogol, misses his mother during her second pregnancy. Ashima gets nauseous at the smell of food while pregnant with Gogol’s sister, so she can no longer cook or eat with Ashoke and Gogol. With Gogol in focus, Lahiri describes, “though his father remembers to mix up the rice and curry for Gogol beforehand, he doesn’t bother to shape it into individual balls the way his mother does...without his mother at the table he does not feel like eating. He keeps wishing, every evening, that she would emerge from the bedroom and sit between him and his father, filling the air with her sari and cardigan smell,” (55). Gogol’s missing his mother at dinner is particularly interesting because it causes the food to evolve as an indicator. In this quote, the dinner is the center or Gogol’s emotional emptiness because he misses the presence and comfort of his mother and the role that she plays in the family. However, the dinner specifically indicates how Gogol feels in respect to his mother instead of just how Ashima feels. This forces the concept of food in the story to encompass Ashima’s character in the general space of emotional distance and emptiness.