‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT’: CULINARY TRADITIONS AS SOCIOCULTURAL CODE IN THE ART OF COOKING AND THE CAKE

Abstract

The present chapter explores how food is a social and cultural identity marker in Betty Burstall’s play The Art of Cooking and Bekah Brunstetter’s The Cake. The aim is to examine how the female protagonists engage with cultural preservation and evolution through food practices. Core ideas discussed include food rituals holding meaning around lineage, caring for the community, and encoding lived cultural experience over time at both group and individual levels. Both plays illuminate identity conflicts when the characters’ static assumptions of food symbolism meet pressure from shifting generational attitudes and power structures. However, negotiated adaptation of foodways by the resolution suggests the inherent flexibility of cuisine-based identity markers for retaining cultural coherence amidst societal transformation.