WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- We are how we eat: Food as a means of creating and
preserving culture. With that play on words, Whitman College senior Katherine Deumling
puts her Thomas J. Watson Fellowship overseas study project into a nutshell.Deumling, a Whitman politics major and native of Portland, Oregon, plans to build her year-long Watson project around a love of food and respect for its cultural, social, religious and political importance.
Deumling, a 1991 graduate of Western Mennonite School in Salem, Oregon, will travel later this year to Italy and Mexico, living with families in small communities and observing cultures in which food plays a central role in day-to-day life.
Her plans include the writing of narratives about daily food rituals, such as the preservation of olives and the making of tortillas, pasta and sausage, and about the various culinary traditions that help define religious and secular celebrations. She also plans to document recipes that have been handed down orally from mother to daughter for generations, and to sketch and paint assorted images for illustrative purposes.
An art minor at Whitman, Deumling hopes to publish a book that captures the cultural and religious practices of food preparation still shaping the world's rural communities.
Deumling, who speaks German and Italian and is studying Spanish this spring, says her year abroad will return a deeper understanding of communities in which producing, preparing and eating food consumes many hours each day, thereby playing a greater role in cultural, social and political life.
"I wish to examine the way in which food is the nexus for maintaining identity and reproducing tradition, focusing on the relationship between mothers and daughters," Deumling said. "The work of preserving tradition often falls disproportionately on the women. Men may change their dress and other habits to conform to a modernizing norm, yet still expect their wives and daughters to observe tradition (culinary and other) at home, especially on holidays."
Comparing herself to a character in the novel Like Water for Chocolate, Deumling notes that she grew up in a family in which cooking, eating and food played a central role.
"Beginning with my childhood in southern Germany, I spent my days in the kitchen or garden with my mother, watching her, asking endless questions, and volunteering my services," she remembers. "Food preparation and meals were regular and lengthy occasions. My mother took great pride in growing and preparing foods symbolic of the occasion.
"I grew up with a sense of the complexity and importance of food, later deepening into an understanding of the cultural and social aspects of food. Food became a form of communication, a gift on many occasions, having deeper meaning than its nutritional value."
"The kitchen was a social, lively and cozy place in my house, and when I was away from home I always ended up in the kitchens of the places I was visiting," she continued. "My fingers would itch to help, create and prepare. . . . I took enormous pride in preparing dishes, decorating and serving them."
Because of her skills and interests, Deumling believes she is well equipped to immerse herself in a study of rural communities where the "culture of eating" still thrives. She chose Italy and Mexico for a number of reasons, including a common Catholic influence that will showcase "different traditions against the background of common religious holidays."
Beginning in Italy, Deumling will take part in the harvest and preservation of a variety of foods, including olives, grapes, eggplants, tomatoes and peppers. Her stops will include a ranch near Santa Severina, a tiny mountain village; Mazzarino, Sicily, known for its sweets and baked goods; and the coastal city of Lavello, where orrechieti, an ear-shaped pasta, is made by hand daily.
Later, in Mexico, Deumling will milk goats and make cheese on a ranch near Pueblo Nuevo; participate in harvest celebrations and the distilling of fruit wine and making of sausage in the province of Michoacan; and stay with a rural family in which the mother makes money by cooking meals for wealthy families in the colonial city of Tlaquepaque.
Four years ago, while living in Calabria, Italy, and attending an au pair language school, Deumling was struck by the "centrality of food in peoples' lives, the pride with which it was offered to me, and the identity it created in the people with whom I had contact."
While living in Oregon and eastern Washington, Deumling has noticed a similar centrality of food within its Hispanic communities. "The struggle to retain a culture in a sometimes hostile environment includes the daily recreation of culinary traditions," she said.
Deumling said the experiences outlined in her Watson proposal will be useful as she continues her studies of how tradition, culture, gender roles and identity change as small, rural communities evolve into suburban, industrial and commercial centers.
"My interests in politics -- specifically issues of gender, race, class, injustice and environmental degradation -- all tie into the role of food," she said. She notes the importance of food as a source of cultural identity by quoting from a Venezuelan journalist's dispatch about a Guatamalan Indian woman:
"We only trust people who eat what we eat, she told me one day
as she tried to explain the relationship between the guerrillas and
the Indian communities. I suddenly realized that she
had begun to trust me."
Deumling is the daughter of Dietrich and Sarah Snyder Deumling of Rickreall, Oregon. From 1979 to 1987, she and her family lived in W. Germany, where her father was born. While at Whitman, she served as native speaker of the German House on campus.