The Mexican journalist and writer Ana Luisa Islas reflects, in an honest and incisive way, on gastronomic decolonization. She does it in her first book Better to smell like the sea. Notes on decolonization of the stomach. The book is an essay that encourages a until now silent conversation about the culinary appropriation, in this case, of Latin America by Europe.
“I have had to decolonize myself to be able to write this book, look at my own wound, how colonialist and colonized there is in me. It has been painful, but also very healing,” explains Islas. The journalist is also a collaborator of media such as ABC, Oilcloth and Tablecloth, Kitchen, Reform or the already disappeared munchies– which addresses through words that journey of people and the ingredients that go under their arms, in their physical, emotional and, above all, identity dimension.
Better to smell the Sea, a book that helps you reflect
Ana Luisa Islas is a migrant, daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of migrants. She says that, although at the beginning of the writing process she did not feel prepared, little by little “the words came out by themselves.” All to tell how the map of the world is also drawn through the conquest of the stomach. Islas comments “I would like that once people have read it, they will start their own decolonization process. Let them ask themselves why, let them share it over dinner, let it generate new questions and, above all, new answers.”
Better to smell the Sea is, in some way, a recipe book that dialogues with memories. And that also builds bridges between a past, a present and a future that we all share, just like death. The work is included in the collection Cabbage Leaves. The collection is a selection of gastronomic essays that explores different perspectives on everything related to the act of eating and gastronomy.
