Reading Homi Bhabha (1994) led me to contemplate the themes of food, loss, and gender as articulated in the narratives of the women and men in my family and how the pressure to assimilate and shed their immigrant identities expressed itself through what they cooked and what they ate and how they viewed their weight and bodies.

In this essay, I propose that historical forces in an immigrant's life can be expressed through the somatic experience of weight and the complex, often hidden, often distorted history of food and cooking. In the case of my own family, and I believe other Italian American immigrants, the liminal space created by them to form a new, yet old, unheimlich identity was through food, their kitchens, and their own bodies.