I wanted to begin this post by expressing how thankful I am for the mutual sharing we’ve done in this class. In perusing past posts, I’ve noticed (and enjoyed) how often commenters thank the discussion leader for sharing. I note this not to submit some strange request for you thanks (ha!), but to point out that no matter how “macro-level” we expect a topic to be, these issues are deeply connected to our individual experiences and often vulnerably so; we’ve seen how the “political” is personal. But, the personal is also political: the choices we make are exercises of our power and privilege that have real implications—however influential they might be. This, I think, is an entryway into discussing solutions through which we’ve begun to take steps. Let’s continue to use that lens!
I wanted to devote this post to a topic that illuminates how tangled that personal-political relationship can be and how our personal choices when it comes to enjoying foods from cultures/traditions that are not our own are laden with power-dynamics and histories. I’ve thought a lot about—and felt incredibly paralyzed by—the imperial, oppressive, or otherwise problematic histories of many foods I like. My experience studying in Thailand, too, has compounded this confusion. Questions circulate about what, when, how, and with whom it is appropriate to consume certain cuisines. If our personal choices really do have meaningful and impactful political implications—like maybe contributing a little bit less to the oppression of marginalized people—what are guidelines for choosing “more justly” when it comes to eating outside of our own traditions or cultures?
I’d invite you to first read Soliel Ho's “Craving the Other: One Woman’s Beef with Cultural Appropriation and Cuisine.” She introduces the topic in a way that accentuates its concurrently political and personal nature. Click those other links she offers at the beginning of the piece if you choose (I’d highly suggest it). They each problematize and complicate “craving the Other” differently. (For instance, one author composed a comic that’s helpful to identifying how cultural appropriation operates in the realm of food).
What were your reactions to this piece? Did it elicit any memories about experiences you’ve had (either as appropriator or appropriated)?
Next, take a look at Phylisa Wisdom and Rachel Kuo's pieces concerning solutions (or partial solutions).
Are these compelling? Lacking? Problematic in their own right? If you can, focus your energy on thinking about solutions to avoiding (remedying?) appropriation (and evaluating those offered by the contributors above).
I personally find this issue challenging, so I appreciate your willingness to help me learn from you all in this discussion!
I think this post brings up a lot of tough questions that I don't exactly know the answer to. It is a really complicated issue. One thing I definitely agree with is the authors' relating eating to the political. To enjoy Mexican cuisine and support Donald Trump is ludicrous. Americans are famous for taking what we like from other cultures and then leaving-even criticizing-what doesn't suit us. I think the important thing when thinking about cultural appropriation with food is to be as informed as possible. There is a restaurant near me called "Oriental Buffet" (obviously this place was troubling before I even walked through the doors). The food takes aspects of a variety of Asian cultures and combines them with an American ideal of food. There are crab meat wontons next to the jello dessert. It is interesting because when I was in France, my host family took me to a similar type of restaurant. There, it was mostly the same except along with fountain soda there was self-serve wine and instead of chicken nuggets which are at the American "oriental buffet" there were frog legs. This may be an extreme example, but thinking about these two places compared really highlights how much foods from different cultures are often appropriated into what we like and taken as a representation of an entire culture. I understand that. What I am still uncertain of is what I should do with this. Should I not eat at certain places? The one author suggests thinking about who is the front of house and back of house staff at restaurants. I get that, but does that mean I should interview my server every time I go out to eat? I don't know. So I'm not sure this comment is of much help but I am curious to see what other solutions people propose.
ReplyDeleteAudra, yes. Excellent. “[T]hese issues are deeply connected to our individual experiences and often vulnerably so.” This line about why we express our gratitude for another’s thoughts is so good (Lol, THANK YOU, KHUN AUDRA), and what a great way to dive into cultural appropriation (as opposed to appreciation, I suppose) in food. This issue is specifically intriguing for me because it is one I have never really considered while living in America. Though I am wistfully trying to incorporate a greater number and variety of plants into it, my diet doesn’t usually include foods outside of bread, cheese, eggs, and processed foods made in the States. My family has always been fond of Chinese buffets and Mexican restaurants, but none of us have ever deluded ourselves into thinking these places provided us with the very same foods every single family in all of China or Mexico was eating – that’s ludicrous. But the first panel of Shing Yin Khor’s comic (that was linked in the introduction of our main article) served as an “ah-ha moment” – I, too, had been troubled by the hunt for, elevation of, and even the very idea of “authentic” cuisine from a foreign nation in American food society. I like this quote a lot: “Authenticity is not just the idealized food of a country, but the intervening years of colonialism, and immigration, and globalization too.” And tis one, too: “We are a people, not a cuisine. Do not deny us our diversity.” I like a lot of these quotes. What I’m saying is that these were great supplementary articles. Brava.
ReplyDeleteWhile I don’t usually confront this issue at home, I did consider it, like you, during my time abroad. Especially when the first response I would get upon telling someone I was going to Thailand was that I had to learn how to cook Thai food and bring back recipes so these acquaintances, friends, and family members of mine could make it for themselves. And then, when actually abroad, it was a big think to talk about and take these Thai cooking classes. Anyway, these pieces have given me so much to ponder over. I’m really excited for our class conversation about them!
Thank you Audra for bringing this up. It is such an interesting and difficult topic to address in terms of solutions. Two points I particularly loved in the article were “4. Loving the Food not the People” and “5. Profiting from Oppression.” I loved how the author addressed this issues and brought the conversation again back to thinking about our food, and an unwillingness to know where it comes from. This post reminded me of Trumps incredible offensive tweet on Cinco De Mayo. I think his actions totally sum up the political desire to cherry pick aspects of other cultures. I think my main thought on this topic is that we as a country need to address the inherit racism and cultural appropriation America has come to accept. I think this topic also perfectly ties into what we have been talking about for the past 8 weeks: where does our food come from?!!? Ultimately we are unwilling to see our profiting from oppression and address this as a large scale issue in our culture.
ReplyDeleteThese articles are making my brain buzz! Thanks Audra!
ReplyDeleteThe past year or so, I have realized a few things about what it means to be a first generation U.S. American. One of them being that my experience is different from my parents. Children of immigrants are thrown into a school system where the ultimate goal for them is assimilation. Depending on location what assimilation looks like may vary. I spoke last week about my experience in the cafeteria growing up and I felt like I could relate to a lot of the experiences of the author, Soliel Hol. But still I am torn. My people’s food is considered to be more similar or connected to the typical “US” food than certain foods like Vietnamese so I have to acknowledge my privilege when thinking about her argument. I think Hol uses her experiences as a child and experienced the contradiction of people not thinking her food was “cool” or tasty until later in life, to explain cultural appropriation in general. But what is missing in this piece is the voice of her parents. I am trying to say that for parents owning these restaurants is a form of survival, and it isn’t up to them to make sure we aren’t erasing or “divorcing a food from its place”. What is a realistic next step for food appropriation? I am not sure. But, children of immigrants carry a certain assimilation burden when navigating through the U.S. that sometimes feels like a very different burden than our parent’s. I wish the author incorporated more about her parents experience with food however I did find it compelling.
I appreciated the article about Mexican food as well. My first two years at college I worked in East Lansing at a Mexican Cuisine restaurant called El Azteco. The contradictions were all around me during my time there. The only Mexican people working at the restaurant were the dishwashers and cooks, who made much less money than the servers and bartenders. Twenty years ago this restaurant was known to be one of the most “authentic” places around, now I watch as costumers’ leave unsatisfied and tell me that it’s not the same anymore. It’s too “Americanized”. First, American can apply to all of Latin America so that comment often made me angry. But what I am trying to get at is that Mexican restaurants feed people who are against immigration reform. I watched many of these people sit down eat a meal and drive away, wishing they had a more authentic experience, in their vehicles that had bumper stickers supporting political candidates that were against any time of immigration reform. The author detailed specific experiences in Southern California but we see it happening all over the U.S. as well.
These articles are wonderful and thought provoking Audra. I particularly enjoyed Rachel Kuo's piece on solutions which broke down how one can appropriate other cultures by eating food deemed “ethnic.” The idea of the “authentic” food experience as being separated from reality is something that stuck out to me. I thought it was such an important point. What makes a food authentic? Who is placing the food in that category and is the food being valued more and respected more (as well as those who make it) because it is labeled as such? I agreed with Kuo that the “authentic label” is dangerous. I see it as a tool used by the oppressor to aide in the exotification of another culture and control the development of another culture. As Kuo stated in the article belief in an authentic food experience “freezes a culture in a particular place in time.” It thus makes it more readily consumable, stripping away its contradictions, its diversity, and instead making it appear stagnant and at times stuck in the past. It also divorces the food and culture from a broader historical context (such as colonialism) that illuminates how the way we eat is informed and defined by cultural interactions good and bad, oppressive and liberating. The search for “authentic” food is a search for a colonial white myth that places western US culture as forward thinking, diverse, and development and others as singular and unchanging. I have more to say on this and I am looking forward to class conversation.
ReplyDeleteAh I love reading all these comments! My inner anthropology nerd is buzzing right now. I think food is such an interesting space where conversations about culture and "authenticity" can arise and we can attempt to unpack what those terms even mean in the first place. The issues brought up in these articles rings very familiar for someone who has had to take a long hard look (particularly in the ANSO senior seminar) at the history of a discipline steeped in Colonialism and consumption of cultures that have been deemed "other" in the name of academic research. I appreciated so many of Soleil Ho's points in the first article. I found the line about how consuming the dishes of "other" cultures making white folks feel more exciting or cosmopolitan totally spot on. I think instances of cultural appropriation often arise when white folks (we can trouble the category of whiteness too) crave a cultural identity when we feel we don't have one. As a European mutt myself, I get that. The closest thing my family has to a "culture" is an Irish blessing said during the holidays and few potato dishes that are rumored to have been passed down from my maternal grandfather's family during the great potato famine. So we steal and take and appropriate just like our ancestors did for centuries. The unfortunate ramification of this is that we end up essentializing components of cultures and relegating the actual human beings who belong to these cultures to our Western imaginings of "ancient times" and "old world" exoticism; all things that are not far from everyday racism. What to do in light of all of this is also a tricky subject to navigate. I don't think totally abstaining from eating the dishes we love is the answer and I definitely think food can also be a great space for sharing and learning when people enter that space not as a consumer/consumed but as a fellow human being. I don't have any easy solutions but I am looking forward to talking with everyone tomorrow and wading in all this beautiful messiness together.
ReplyDeleteThanks for such engaging articles and questions, Audra! I also find this topic challenging.
ReplyDeleteOften, when I notice that something I'm doing (for instance, a food choice I'm making) is rooted in appropriation or exploitation, my first sort of gut response is to want to just quietly stop doing it... to disengage from the activity and not have to deal with the potential harm I'm doing by engaging with cultural products like cuisine that are different from my own ("my own" being that which I feel I can culturally claim). But what I've found is that trying to just totally disengage isn't helpful at all. What's actually needed is- well, a lot of different things- but to pull out a few of them: more research on the part of individual consumers, research/engagement around issues of fair food (not just related to farmworkers, but restaurant workers too), and more openness to conversations about one's own potentially appropriative engagement with food, are all places to start.
The issues surrounding "authenticity" interest me too, and make me think back to studying abroad in Oaxaca. The food-related recommendations I got sent me to an interesting combination of either upscale restaurants that had English translations of their menus and catered to American tourists, or street vendors, who sold grilled elotes- corn on the cob with mayo, lime juice, and spices. Something quite striking to me was that, while the restaurants allowed us to enjoy "authentic" Oaxacan food in a closed-off, upper class, touristy space, street food was "authentic" in a different way. I think eating street food was seen as particularly "adventurous" because it was perceived as somewhat dangerous, unclean, dirty... (Lots of thinly-veiled classism going on here).
The availability of street food for us as foreign students/tourists didn't simply offer a new food experience, but also offered a particular kind of culturally appropriative excitement: eating street food that was inexpensive, ordering just in Spanish, and from people who I imagine we interacted with almost exclusively in that space (street vendors generally being of a lower socioeconomic class than teachers, host families, etc.)... we could eat this food and feel we were participating in some sort of Oaxacan authenticity that was even more real than that at the restaurants. Yet this access came from our ability to travel (i.e. our U.S. passports), our educational (and most of our class and racial) backgrounds. I find it fascinating that that feeling of deserved/unquestioned access to "authenticity"- that feeling of temporarily being a part of Oaxacan food culture- was predicated on being able to, at the end of a few months, leave it behind – or even while we were there, to access the food without really engaging with the community of people who prepared it and sold it to us... To be fair, I don't know quite what that would look like, either.
I don't think that we should've decided to abstain from eating elotes or other street food because of the complexities there- and there's really no way to *not* participate in complicated/#problematic cultural exchange (esp once you're on study abroad already haha)- but there are more and less respectful ways to eat food from cultures that are not our own. The articles do a good job of pointing those things out.
Tl; dr: It's super complicated... sorry my comment is so long... these are very interesting topics!
First thing first: I love a good stick of moo bing (fried pork on a stick). I have made it the most exotic version of bacon I can imagine, and I have a wonderful, idealized version of it in my mind. And furthermore: right now, we’ve just mentioned margaritas. Can I enjoy margaritas? I think so. Can I make margaritas? I hope so. Can I, as a white woman, sell margaritas? Based on some of the input from these articles (all of which I really enjoyed), I’m not sure if I can.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is the capitalist upbringing talking, but I think we run into a lot of trouble when we start dictating how people can or cannot make money. Obviously, there are major problems with today’s restaurant system, both when considering ‘ethnic’ food and ‘American’ food. In order for a restaurant owned by immigrants to be considered ‘authentic’, it must be cheap, fast, and greasiness is preferred. I hope that the language of ‘elevating’ food from their culture of origin can be minimized. While we shouldn’t classify the people of other countries as ‘exotic’, ‘simple’, or even ‘hospitable’, I don’t think that should act as a total bar against white people cooking food inspired by other cultures. Should this food be privileged irrationally? No. Should we decrease the stigma around foods that are foreign to us? Of course! Seeing foods as ‘icky’ is inherently offensive, which speaks to a major theme of this course: food is personal.
I especially loved the comic referenced in your first article. The artist highlights the problems associated with any notions of ‘authenticity’; my basic grasp on orientalism teaches me that neither colonizer nor the oppressed is unchanged by the power dynamic. Cultures were stolen, and cultures were forced upon others. Though I’m still conflicted about some of the power dynamics associated with the food industry, I think the last sentence sums it up well: just eat it.
Thanks for these thoughtful and thought-provoking articles. This is an issue I want to spend time thinking more deeply about. In some ways my diet has changed quite a bit from the diet that I grew up with. I eat much less meat, less dairy, less bread--more vegetables and--more spices. In my Dutch familial culture, black pepper was considered the extreme of spiciness.
ReplyDeleteI took a semester off from college to bird band in Michigan's UP and during that time I lived in an old post office with other bird banders, including a woman from California who made me my first meal of Indian food. I don't even remember what she made now (it was more than 20 years ago), but I remember the revelation of that food--the flavors were unlike anything I'd ever tasted. I had had no idea that deliciousness of that food existed in the world. The idea of appropriation never entered my mind--I just knew that I wanted to try more different foods to find more deliciousness. I think my desire to try the foods of different cultures stems from that moment of revelation--that there was a world of flavors and textures beyond baked potatoes and black peppercorns. But I don't know if I've fully considered the stories, histories, and implications of food I've enjoyed that's had its roots in other cultures. I think that asking those basic questions is perhaps a way for me to begin to confront appropriation in my own diet.
I'm also reminded of a conversation I had with a seed saver at the Great Lakes Intertribal Food Summit. We were talking about heirloom crop varieties and she expressed her dismay at seeing so many different types of "heirloom" seed being advertised in catalogs without any reference to WHOSE heirlooms they were--what people or peoples had co-created and stewarded those crops into existence. That seems to me to be a similar sort of appropriation.
I love food. I have pretty much always loved it, even at times when I was restricting it. With that, I've also "explored" and loved many different types of food: I'm happy and willing to try new things, and I often like them. When traveling in Europe, I would do research in advance to locate "authentic" restaurants doing farm-to-table cuisine, taking pains to avoid the "tourist trap" restaurants. Here in America, I've done plenty of eating out at various types of restaurants and I think I fit to a T the description of the white friend furtively glancing around to get social cues. I've also actively sought out "hole in the wall" joints and been pleased with myself for locating restaurants that seem "authentic" based on the amount of brown people in the dining room. I have done this unknowingly, without really considering whether I was enjoying another culture or appropriating it.
ReplyDeleteIn this sense, these articles speak to me and invoke a lot of reflection on my own responsibility and level of engagement. Are there ways I can enjoy the things I enjoy without knowingly doing harm or perpetuating oppression of others? I also think that the consideration of the blended experiences of immigrants in this country intersects so fully with politics. Here, we seem to wish to take all of what we like and yet to opt out of engaging the culture, reducing it to something we can monetize and consume. After reading these, I am certainly reconsidering not only my food choices but my conscious attitudes towards food and culture, and toward the many implications of my food choices. I think that approaching these with humility and an understanding that we cannot really understand is a crucial element to accessing different foods and food cultures, and I thank you for the opportunity to reflect!