This panel explores the intersections between religion, national identity, culinary heritage, and political power through a critical examination of foods such as the South African heritage braai (meat bbq), Korean bab (rice) at the bhabsang (the kitchen table), Indonesian-Malaysian dispute over rendang, a curry that both claim . Authors deploy these foods as part of their day-to-day political, communal and ancestral realities.
This paper examines the bahbsang—the Korean kitchen table—as a sacred cultural site where Korean and Korean American women navigate identity, spirituality, and heritage while resisting diasporic racism and sexism. Grounded in Song Nam Soon’s conceptualization of bahb (rice) as essential to Korean diasporic life, the bahbsang transcends mere nourishment to serve as a critical locus for cultural continuity, resistance, and transformation. Historically contextualizing the bahbsang, the study highlights Korean Christian grandmothers’ negotiation of patriarchal and Confucian norms through culinary practices encapsulated in sonmat, a repository of emotional and embodied wisdom. Extending into contemporary diasporic realities, it explores evolving culinary rituals, including honbap, as forms of personal empowerment and collective resilience. Ultimately, the paper reconceptualizes the bahbsang as a dynamic feminist theological space, framing everyday culinary labor as powerful, sacred acts that affirm women’s authority, agency, and integral roles in shaping cultural and theological discourse.
Culinary heritage disputes, such as the Indonesia-Malaysia rendang controversy, illustrate how cuisine becomes entangled with political economic interests. Dubbed as gastropolitics, such conflicts often involve accusations of theft. Nation-states quarrel over the right to claim the dish as their national cuisine and leverage it to bolster nationalism and augment tourism for economic gain. This presentation critiques the racial capitalist logic underlying gastropolitics, where modern nation-states assert ownership over cultural heritage that oftentimes are older than the nation-states themselves. Against this framework, I propose understanding cuisine through the lens of cultural commons, as conceptualized, among others, by Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess, and Christian Barrere. Cultural commons emphasize communal management, shared stewardship, and dynamic evolution. As an alternative political economy, it moves beyond rigid notions of national ownership. By reframing cuisine as a collectively sustained and evolving heritage, this approach fosters a more inclusive and equitable recognition of culinary traditions, acknowledging the contributions of diverse communities beyond national boundaries.
Not Yet Uhuru: The Colonised South Africa Plate: Meat holds profound cultural significance in South Africa, symbolising community, status, and tradition. The “braai (barbecue) is celebrated as a unifying national ritual” in the post-apartheid era, transcending racial and class divisions as people gather around the grill. In seeking solutions to reduce meat consumption, we must review all aspects of our lives, including our relationship with food. However, this effort requires recognising and acknowledging the role of South Africa’s National Braai Day, which this paper argues is exploited by corporate South Africa to position meat consumption as central to the South African plate. This, in turn, reinforces the narrative of daily meat consumption as a component of the cultural heritage of Black South Africans prior to colonisation.