Food, Family and Cultural Identity: Culinary Nostalgia and the Immigrant Experience in Venba

Abstract

Food is among the most important memories immigrants carry with them to their adopted lands. The act of cooking traditional food helps members of immigrant communities to maintain their cultural identities in spaces that are far from the familiar and therefore food becomes a symbolic connection to their roots. This paper is a study of the 2023 video game Venba, developed by Visai games, which is a narrative driven independent game that tells the story of a Tamil immigrant family in Canada. Venba foregrounds the act of cooking as being central to the creation and preservation of cultural identity, through gameplay that blends the preparation of traditional Tamil dishes with storytelling that conveys the emotional journey that the characters undergo through the course of the narrative. By placing food at the centre of the family narrative, Venba engages with some central ideas of the diasporic relationship with food that is often explored in fiction. The purpose of this paper is to examine Venba’s narrative and its gameplay mechanics to see how it engages with the idea of food cultures as important points of connection with the homeland for diasporic communities. Through the story of an immigrant family and their relationships not only with each other but also with food, this paper will also look at the way the game engages with the concept of “culinary nostalgia” found in diasporic literature.