In 1972, the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about the cultural significance of meals and mealtimes. "Deciphering a meal" demonstrated that food is just as evocative a form of communication as language. As with the words we speak or write, so the food we eat is crucially linked to the way we think about ourselves: food reveals who we are, what we might stand for, and, perhaps most problematically, what we were had not the world divided us. Meals internalize and structure the outside world in a literal way and beyond, and with immigrants this connection is exaggerated. Near or far, our homelands are reinvented and reinscribed by the food we eat. But does food act like a historical text? What is food a record of exactly?