Engendering Cuisines: Food as a ‘Magico-Realist Agent’ in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Rahul Krishna Gairola University of Washington and Seattle University Once Upon a Time… In her essay “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” Wendy B. Faris notes that in magical realism, “realistic descriptions create a fictional world that resembles the one we live in, in many instances by extensive use of detail. On the one hand, the attention to the sensory detail in this transformation represents a continuation, a renewal of the realistic tradition. But on the other hand . . . the best magical realist fiction entices us with entrancing – magic – details, the magical nature of those details is a clear departure from realism” (169). The process described by Faris spurs an expiation of epistemological notions of reality in Third World literature, often the established tenets of history, as they are challenged and re-written through a narrative retelling recalled by the author. Personal memory, in particular, is often an opponent to Western versions of Third World history. For Salman Rushdie, the independence and evolution of India in Midnight’s Children is recalled by the narrator as a hodgepodge of events caused by magical interventions. On this subject, Elleke Boehmer notes that “drawing on the special effects of magic realism, postcolonial writers in English are