This talk proposes the idea of flavor displacement to describe the experience of losing access to the taste of home and the consequent disruption of domestic practices. Working with 40 in-depth interviews with Venezuelans living just over the border in Cucuta, Colombia, Natasha explores the way this population has processed the collapse of their national food system and subsequent experience of migration. She explains how expressions of pride in Venezuelan food and culture come to symbolize a connection to a way of being that exists outside of the economic challenges, political conflict and societal dissolution interlocutors associate with the current affairs of their homeland.
In spite of their descriptions of a relatively abundant food system, most express a potent disdain for the flavor of food in Colombia. This disdain offers a platform on which interlocutors rehearse an old script of Venezuelan superiority which was forged during their own country’s period of ascendancy and dominance. This paper proposes the idea of “flavor displacement” to describe how Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia articulate and describe the experience of losing access to longed for flavors due to food systems collapse and forced migration. This theory builds on migration scholars who point out that though forced migration and displacement are often used interchangeably, they are distinct phenomena. The displacement theorized in this paper starts before the participants in this study ever left Venezuela and instead began when their home became unrecognizable or unlivable, when the promises of Venezuela’s food system failed to deliver the abundance and wealth the population had been promised and left much of the population unable to access the foods they wanted and needed.