Lola Didi's Grilled Cheese: Food-Making as Care (Labour)

In this discussion, I discuss my embodied experiences of transience as a 1.5-generation Pilipinx-Canadian migrant as spoken through–and by–food. To do so, I draw connections and distinctions between my experiences engaging with cultural food and traditional food knowledge (TFK) in my river-lined hometown in Toronto, and now seaport Vancouver, to realize how physical and symbolic geographies shape my experiences of Pilipinx food. Later, I introduce my Great Aunt "Lola Didi," once a migrant domestic worker for decades, who helped raise me as a bright-eyed new migrant at age six. I reflexively trace my relationship with her as it has been marked by food–beginning with her making of both grilled cheese sandwiches and Pilipinx stews for my nourishment as a child, to my preparation and delivery of meals to her bedroom as a young adult amidst the manifestations of age and arthritis in her body. How did I learn of care through the meals she fed me, and later, how the very commodification of care facilitated her fluency to offer it?