Whether one speaks of novels, short stories, life-writing or personal essays, iconic food scenes in literature are often recollected scenes, not necessarily as “emotion recollected in tranquility” but still, recollected. Among postcolonial and diasporic writings, one can think of such cooking scenes as G.’s mother preparing one last meal of flying fish and cuckoo for her son in George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953), or Romesh Gunesekera’s preparation of a Sri Lankan Christmas turkey by Triton in Reef (1994), or the family dinners shared with Mr Pirzada, as remembered by Lilia in “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine”, until “the Indian man” suddenly stops being “Indian” (Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies), among many others. As regards essays, Ramabai Espinet’s “Indian cuisine” or Kei Miller’s “There are Plantains in Glasgow” are two more cases in point. And if one tackles texts that emerge out of a different type of colonisation, Dalit literature also offers a wide array of such recollected scenes of cooking and eating, whether fiction or life-writing. Such scenes easily stand out in texts like Karukku by Bama (2000), Growing up Untouchable in India by Vasant Moon (2001), Joothan: A Dalit’s Life by Om Prakash Valmiki (2003), Outcaste: A Memoir by Narendra Jadhav (2003), The Weave of my Life by Urmila Pawar (2008), The Prisons we Broke by Baby Kamble (2008), among many others. Even Du Saraswathi in a short story like “Tip” (2009) feels the need to anticipate the recollection in the conclusion. All the texts mentioned above can be read using the angle of class, caste, and social status. They shed light on the despised and unaccounted for, the rejected, the ones who are rendered invisible and untouchable, whether in a context of colonization from the outside or in a context of oppression from the inside. As it brings together texts from different genres and continents, this paper proposes to examine specific scenes to understand what makes the narrative of food recollected particularly meaningful and impactful as a site of resistance. More than subalternity it is the question of empowerment and agency through the narrative of the recollection food that will be at stake.