Roots and Returns: An Afropolitan Reading of Food in Francesca Ekwuyasi’s <i>Butter Honey Pig Bread</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Food, food related imagery, and food vocabulary are integral to Francesca Ekwuyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread (2020). Beyond the edible items enumerated in the title, the narrative features numerous scenes of meals, kitchen prep, restaurants, culinary schools, and feasts, not to mention recurring imagery associated with the tastes and smells of food. This essay begins with Afropolitan conceptions of movement and class throughout the African diaspora to illuminate the way that food relates to plot, characterization, theme, and symbolism in Butter Honey Pig Bread . After establishing the premise that food is distinctly multidirectional in Ekwuyasi’s novel, this essay suggests that food operates to complexify the protagonists’ experiences of time and space by blurring the lines between youth and adulthood and between Canada and Nigeria. The main points of this essay offer an exploration of food’s ability to address the tension between the characters in their home through the sites dedicated to food such as the kitchen and the garden. Food divisions in the novel also gesture to the inherent privilege of the Afropolitan and the tensions within Afropolitanism. Food embodies these tensions as much as they defy them, temporally and spatially. In Butter Honey Pig Bread , sites of painful memories such as gardens and slaughterhouses are awaiting the creation of a memory that acts as a balm to the wound the pain creates. Ultimately, food in Butter Honey Pig Bread is a vehicle that simultaneously displaces and returns its passengers—the protagonists—home, wherever and whenever that may be.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".