immigrant & ethnic food cultures, white ppl & appropriation, foodies

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/dining/masters-of-a-cuisine-by-calling-not-roots.html
http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/5367-is-it-fair-for-chefs-to-cook-other-cultures-foods

crossing several live wires here, expecting 1000 new answers by the end of the week

yelp

just gonna paste two otm things before I go to bed:

And so, many cooks quickly determine what seems to be the safest bet: toning down the spice, amping up the sweetness, frying a whole lot more.

A huge part of the reason I opened Baohaus is because everyone thought Momofuku pork buns were the original and it pissed me off. I’d been eating them since I was a kid, I knew they were from Taiwan and no one stuck up for us so I did. If you don’t defend the things that matter to you, no one will.

the nyt article is fairly interesting, the exchange between the two guys is unreadable. there's a whole bunch of shitty things here that are driven by foodie culture and ultimately that's a bigger problem than these chefs.

"Why do Asians like myself care so much about their food culture? It’s all we have to be proud of in this country!"

oh please. tell it to yo-yo ma. tell it to yoko ono. tell it to sonny bono! that guy is wickety wack.

Combining food into tasty things to eat is a human right. So is stealing ideas about what tastes good from other people, who may or may not belong to other cultures. But to complain that others do not combine those foods the way you do, aka the "only correct way", is similar to straights complaining that gay marriage will destroy the institution of marriage. It's bollocks.

yeah, that guy is a dope. people been stealing forever. not just white oppressors. everyone. chinese chefs steal. everyone steals. i don't think you have to respect anything when you cook. cook whatever the hell you want to cook. steal the best and make it better. in your own image. american palates are as dull as dirt - white trad palates - but catering to that has sold a whole lot of egg rolls! its a choice at some point. clock dollars selling mad egg rolls or follow your traditional muse and probably fail.

I recently ate french 'pizza'. It was, as you might expect, altered to reflect french food preferences, and did not resemble traditional Italian pizza very closely at all. NB: it did not contain either squid or squid ink as sometimes happens with japanese 'pizza', nor did it contain canadian bacon and pineapple, as is so popular a choice for american 'pizza'.

i'm not a big fan of greek pizza places. stick to souvlaki! you don't respect the pie!

just kidding. make whatever you want. but i ain't eating it.

if an american dude makes killer pad thai i'm all for it. i've been to some "traditional" "authentic" thai places run by immigrants who used time-honored grandma recipes...that sucked! or were just, you know, nothing to write to thailand about. a good cook is a good cook. hipster american dudes just opened a vietnamese food cart up in brattleboro and i am so there. i've heard good things.

there's a chinese restaurant down the road from me and i kinda hate their chinese food. or what i've gotten from them anyway. bland, not great...you know what's really good at this chinese restaurant? i mean like REALLY good? good enough that my foodie restaurant owner best friend gets it all the time there? their sushi! it's yummy! sweet potato sushi to die for!

I recently ate french 'pizza'. It was, as you might expect, altered to reflect french food preferences, and did not resemble traditional Italian pizza very closely at all.

Did it have a runny fried egg on it? That's a crucial French pizza innovation in my view.

i'm just gonna throw this out there and go to bed but if you're in america and you go around worrying about "food authenticity" you're out of your fucking mind. save some money and travel if you want to eat "authentic" food.

i gotta go to bed cuz now i'm hungry. want sushi...

mmm...east roll. want one.

(Shrimp, egg custard, avocado and fish roe)

i am careful about what i eat b/c i've had ulcers in the recent past and i get an upset stomach very easily. before that started happening, i was more than happy to try super-spicy and hot food (esp. curries) and would still be if such food didn't tie my digestive tract in knots. so if i like watered-down and mild variants of whatever ethnic treat, it's not just b/c i'm a wussy meatloaf-loving American philistine!

I subsist on a diet of ghost peppers and tiger penises

I don't need to speak another language fluently when I eat fluently like that

there are weird "market" factors here too: like there are very few "low end" French food places in the USA afaik (one exception: I've been to a French cafeteria in Columbus, OH). even French-style bakeries in the USA run you $5 a loaf or $3 a croissant, & they're set out as "fancy" places. even "steak frites" seems to mean something fancy! that's just what's expected. similarly, mexican & chinese *mostly* mean low-end dining (yeah yeah Frontera Grill etc but still). indian too.

though I dunno if we're talking "white appropriation" it's a little different b/c immigrant communities in the USA still tend to have "the real shit" (think of Buford Highway joints in the ATL) but they're not so accessible to the "whites" I think we're talking about here.

yeah, that guy is a dope. people been stealing forever. not just white oppressors. everyone. chinese chefs steal. everyone steals. i don't think you have to respect anything when you cook. cook whatever the hell you want to cook. steal the best and make it better. in your own image. american palates are as dull as dirt - white trad palates - but catering to that has sold a whole lot of egg rolls! its a choice at some point. clock dollars selling mad egg rolls or follow your traditional muse and probably fail.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 6, 2012 11:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah after sleeping on it I think it's ultimately about how white ppl are just better at marketing 'authentic versions' of these foods to other white ppl, which just sucks for obvious reasons ya mean

yeah i think if there is an issue, with all this, it's the gulf between someone saying "this is the real shit" & then inattentively not providing a real anything, more than it is a problem with things being reappropriated/refashioned, which can obviously be a cool thing & brought us the fusion cuisine we know and love, cf english mexican food

and just to be clear scott this isn't about just general ethnic food culture in america, but rather how ethnic food culture is marketed at the higher echelons, the concept of 'authenticity' and whatever higher plaudits and monetary benefits that brings in new york. I don't think the answer has to be to go overseas to get 'authentic ethnic food'

and yeah I know everybody is rolling their damn eyes as soon as 'authenticity' is dropped in this conversation but maybe there's a way to reframe the concept and figure out how it's working in the foodie world

i remember there was a lot of controversy when david thompson opened a thai restaurant in bangkok and said that he was bringing the real shit

i think there was even an nyt article about it

hah that reminds me of when I was in beijing and our program coordinator promised to bring us to the 'best roast beijing duck place' in the city and took us to a place in a 5 star hotel where the duck was ... completely similar to every other beijing roast duck place in the city. but I guess this place had gotten 5 stars in lonely planet or something and the waiters would refill your water glass without you asking. and there were individual napkins and actual silverware.

I guess the problem is that when people hear about the 'best [chinese, thai, indian, mexian] place in the city', the authenticity question is implicated? it would be nice that maybe if you were talking about that there was automatically an asterisk that said, in a footnote, the 'best [chinese, thai indian, mexican]-inspired place in the city' so everybody would understand, and wouldn't have to start talking about the little nice old vietnamese lady who makes your banh mi, when you are talking to other people about your banh mi

and there were individual napkins and actual silverware.

Shared napkins at the other places?! "Don't use that corner please."

Oh I meant the napkins you fold and put on your lap and stuff. most places in china don't actually give you any napkins or if they do they're paper thin and come from a box or are actually just toilet rolls

other than mentioning pork buns i can't help but notice the wack dude doesn't mention one of the most famous resellers and reinventors of grandma's peasant food. he also doesn't mention all the people lined up to pay 200+ a head for sushi master cuisine. new york is weird and new york food life is unlike anywhere else in the country but one thing foodies are good at is hyping "traditional" places run by immigrants. that's what i don't get about that guy's argument. for every snobby white hotshot fusion chef in a million dollar restaurant (and this is really the whole thing - the hotshots get big money backing and thus can pay for PR and prime real estate) there are a zillion more humble places to go to where the food is appreciated. even the new york times is pretty good at covering bling bling hotshot places AND the out of the way noodle shop/taco/etc place. they give a lot of ink to those small grandma shops! street food is as beloved as le bernardin in new york. that guy just has an inferiority complex or something.

you might even be able to singlehandedly blame david chang for hipster cuisine! people following their bliss and devoting their lives to the humble yet perfectly perfect cuban sandwich or whatever.

only marginally related but aerosmith has hummus on our rider and we toured with an Israeli dude last year and the first thing he does is take a bite backstage and go "this is not hummus." he then proceeded to annihilate the whole tub of it, all the while saying "this is just shit, you've never even had hummus." over the course of the tour the quest to find a hummus that would satisfy the Israeli keyboardist became a thing, he swears he only knows of one place in all NY that gets it right, but we did find two other places over the course of a spring's work. One was in Columbus, Ohio, and was adjudged absolutely authentic, perfect stuff. The other, a close second, was north of LA in the valley. Go figure.

articles are tl;dr but the worst thing is American hipsters who say "That's not real _________"

That tour story is good. Reminds me of my Lebanese roommate on year in college, whose chef/caterer mother used to send him back with gallons of the most garlicky hummus I had ever imagined could exist.

what are foods that "everyone" (i.e. "white people") agrees are better in their "white" versions than "real" versions?

i.e. at those "Brazilian" steakhouses they advertise in airline magazines do they serve sweetbreads?

articles are tl;dr

past a certain vintage "tl;dr" is a bad look unless it's being deployed for lols imo

If aerosmith happens to tour Cleveland anytime soon I can tell you that the absolute best hummus around is at Nate's on W. 25th (open for lunch only) followed by Tommy's on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. xxxp

gotta go get me some humble kitchen. YELP:

Yum! Humble Kitchen is a new food trailer that's serving Vietnamese sandwiches, soups and salads in the Harmony Lot in downtown Brattleboro. I just went there for lunch and got the Grilled Tofu Banh Mi sandwich, plus a pear/ginger pudding. It's just out there in the parking lot, so I took the food home to eat. The grilled tofu was just right--not too thick, but not overcooked. The shredded daikon and cucumber were fresh and tasty. The sauce was good. The sandwich comes with mayo, but it wasn't overdone. The roll was a good solid sandwich roll. The pear/ginger pudding was a british-style pudding, so more like a really solid, moist cupcake than a cup full of goo. Very tasty.

Assuming these guys succeed in this location, I will be visiting pretty regularly. I recommend that you check it out if you like Vietnamese food. If you're not a vegetarian, don't panic--they have chicken and pork options as well.

Reminds me, I've been meaning to make blackeyed pea hummus, maybe today. Authentic Mississippi blackeyed pea hummus.

i mean come on brattleboro. i think its cool. i love brattleboro.

my favorite story about stuff like this is how fish and chips is exactly the same thing as tempura, one brought to england by sephardic marranos, the other to japan by portuguese jesuits (who may have been conversos?). the whole earth likes a fish fry.

everything kind of moves around and 'globalization' is pretty ancient at this point.

The stars aligned to have me in Brattleboro at lunchtime on Friday, and I had exactly enough cash on hand for the last available pork banh mi of the day ($7 + tip). I can't speak to its authenticity as I've never had banh mi before, but I can say without hyperbole that it was the best damn sandwich I've ever had. It was a lot more food than a woman my age needs, but I ate the whole delicious thing and then skipped dinner.

Look forward to trying their pho, and wish them all success.

or tomatoes! thank you, conquistadores. 'marinara' = 'sailor sauce'

i LOVE when the stars align to have me in brattleboro. cuz it means i'm buying records.

ewww, sailor sauce...

A huge part of the reason I opened Baohaus is because everyone thought Momofuku pork buns were the original and it pissed me off. I’d been eating them since I was a kid, I knew they were from Taiwan and no one stuck up for us so I did. If you don’t defend the things that matter to you, no one will.

An important bit of context is that this is also a guy who started a $15 all-you-can-drink Four Loko deal at one of his restaurants, publishes recaps of Girls, and is generally known as more of a food-world personality than chef.

past a certain vintage "tl;dr" is a bad look unless it's being deployed for lols imo

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:17 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tl;dr

knew that was coming, lol'd anyway

maybe this weekend...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TFFmGIJ7rZE/T7wLkIwai1I/AAAAAAAACfw/I6y7rnzqVOk/s1600/IMAG0210.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EReGgwHPlFQ/T7wLVESBc-I/AAAAAAAACfg/1Te_MkaZe0c/s1600/IMAG0207.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t3fTYx9kWyE/T7wLcxuNAcI/AAAAAAAACfo/cD98AP6uF-s/s1600/IMAG0208.jpg

140 Characters in Search of A Short Attention Span

past the obvious annoyance of publishing your gchat exchange as an article, i don't think anyone in the second one says anything particularly wrong. or even particularly dogmatic: eddie doesn't say whiteppl shouldn't be allowed to make food or even market as they wish, just that it would be nice if the general discourse surrounding these things always framed it with "of course, this is at (x) levels of remove from the real thing, so to call it the best (y) food is kind of silly". it would be nice if.

same, that dude is a tool.

https://www.phillymag.com/articles/2018/08/11/mayonnaise-industry-millennials/

'identity condiments'

i always kinda forget how chilis (the peppers, not the theme restaurants) didn't arrive in asia until 500 yrs ago or so. for some reason i think of those levels of heat in curries etc as being something that has just about always been a feature of foods in that part of the globe

― dell (del), Thursday, June 7, 2012 9:42 AM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk why* but this is one of those facts that occasionally bubbles to mind and it makes me appreciate just how fascinating the cultural history of food can be

*i do know why it's because i live in new mexico now and ppl are very proud of their chiles and put those fuckers in literally anything and everything

see also taters maters squash and corn

The most amazing part of the history of the sweet potato is that due to genetic testing, it was recently proved that the Polynesians navigated across the (mostly empty) pacific to Peru and brought them back as far as Guam (almost 10,000 miles) several hundred years prior to the better-documented European explorers, using the simple canoe and creative way-finding skills.

Polynesians know a damn fine root vegetable when they taste one... respect!

polynesian way-finding with those strange string maps of currents and that bottom of the boat malarkey is incredible to me

https://ny.eater.com/2019/1/18/18183973/authenticity-yelp-reviews-white-supremacy-trap

The term authenticity is everywhere. Pundits claim that millennials crave it, restaurants boast authentic dining experiences, and Foursquare asks us to make judgments about it. These claims, often used as markers of quality, are employed by diners and restaurateurs alike — often used by owners to evoke a homespun or faraway romanticism. Nowhere does that come into play more than on user-based review sites like Yelp.

I would know: I have read and studied 20,000 Yelp reviews — part of my thesis as a master’s student at New York University in the Food Studies program. I can tell you a lot about what I concluded about the depths of the internet, but I’ll start with this one: The word “authentic” in food reviews supports white supremacism, and Yelp reviews prove it.

proven by science

cc people that yelp are scumbags

I’m calling the FBI pic.twitter.com/X2jIlJmfEt

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 24, 2019

Seems like someone really likes cooking but really hates food. If I wasn’t vegan I would devour that though.

that is perfectly situated in the uncanny valley

Haha, I saw this thread bumped on here, and immediately knew why. What a horrific monstrosity.

It's like a clickhole video where they start with something fairly normal and just keep kicking it up a notch until it's ridiculous

^^^

The "that's gotta be the end, right?" factor is nightmarishly high.

"....The Aristocrats!"

I'd rather just eat a pizza cake. The above had a gross amount of bbq sauce.

Excuse me what

this type of sped-up stoner food cooking video is my bête noire.

i like how the fact that it’s a square video inside a square video made into a vertical widescreen reflects the nightmarish recursion of the recipe

I was somehow on board until they added the pizza ingredients

if someone served me a smaller version of the breaded and fried part as a snack at a party I’d have a few

It is pretty much that SNL Taco Town commercial.

Another thing is that this is the most unhealthy thing you could possibly eat AND YET the person responsible has used chicken breasts rather than thighs, which will make it dry and flavourless, then has drowned the meat in bbq sauce in order to make up for this, this isn't unique to this video but really wtf is the story with this stuff?

I think most reasonably sane meateaters would at least try it up until the pizzification, which is less excessive than stupid.

Seems like someone really likes cooking but really hates food. If I wasn’t vegan I would devour that though.

Exactly! Why would you devote a couple of hours to cooking, then make something that looks like it was scraped off a toilet at a Taco Bell?

Using pretty much all processed foods. I mean it's trash through and through, but why not spend an extra half hour or so and make your own BBQ sauce you lazy prick? Kraft's got enough of your money already, I'm sure.

On twitter it was outed those vidz are produced by internz looking for clix/viewz (ergo jobz).

in that case they did a good jobz

i thought it was real until it got to the pepperoni ...

It is pretty much that SNL Taco Town commercial.

― Yerac, Sunday, August 25, 2019 10:38 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was exactly my thought

On twitter it was outed those vidz are produced by internz looking for clix/viewz (ergo jobz).

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Sunday, August 25, 2019 12:53 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was obvious on the face of it. i have no idea why ppl even bother reacting to this shit.

the food of my people is being exploited for clicks

[Aimless inserts video clip of Marlon Brando's lips in extreme close up, whispering, "the horror! the horror!"]

On twitter it was outed those vidz are produced by internz looking for clix/viewz (ergo jobz).

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Sunday, August 25, 2019 12:53 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was obvious on the face of it. i have no idea why ppl even bother reacting to this shit.

― call all destroyer, Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:44 PM (three hours ago)

Because the difference between the intern produced "content" and "real" "content" is like the thinest slice of prosciutto ever.

ftr I would eat the shit outta this

I’ve just watched a Japanese version of this on tv here.

Take one paella pan, cover it in red pasta sauce, add one kilo of fried chicken, French fries , grilled zucchini, spaghetti and a hollowed our loaf of bread containing cheese fondue.

what did I just watch pic.twitter.com/hkPWdRCOkC

— Angie Treasure (@snark_tank) August 24, 2019

Food train wreck videos have crept into this thread like a hermit crab moving into a discarded tin can.

Thought this was a good read heading into 2020:

What happens when years of migration cause treasured family traditions to vanish?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Death-migration-and-the-loss-of-traditions-14572327.php

a couple of threads prompted by the annual NYT piece on how shitty durian is (now with added mangosteen and rambutan!):

In international journalism, I am willing to say the single most tired Southeast Asian reporting cliche is that of DURIAN, THE FREAK SHOW FRUIT. In this @nytimes piece, “occasional disappointment” turns out to be a meta remark about the article, not the fruit. Thread: pic.twitter.com/60ZY1kBDCL

— Amirul Ruslan (@amirulruslan) June 25, 2020

The recent @nytimes "article" slagging SE Asian fruit — starring the durian — is especially bewildering because it's not new. They does it so often, even other foreign correspondents joked "the biennial durian piece has dropped". I used my NYT sub to find out how true that is. pic.twitter.com/OKsuTdfBDb

— Amirul Ruslan (@amirulruslan) June 26, 2020

lol:

Writing about US food the way the NYT covers Asian fruit: In a nation torn by racial conflict, one unlikely food unites. To those accustomed to chopsticks, the greasy parcel known as a 'burger', a sort of split bao, is crude and messy. Yet it encapsulates a nation's violent past.

— Soon-Tzu Speechley 孫子 (@speechleyish) June 25, 2020

I love that last one

Last year there was one about 'the soul of the nation bound up in the flavors of the durian... acrid and off-putting to the naive and foreign, but rich and rewarding for the (journalist), the educated, and the noble native." Always reminds me of the schoolbus bit in Altman's 'Nashville.'

I love durian and this is totally tangentially related but last weekend I bought a (frozen, but pricy) jackfruit and holy shit it was a fucking chore to uh... dissemble/extract. I was youtubing hacks and it still took the better part of 90 minutes.

Recommended if you have a passion for extracting pomegranate and pomelo fruit I guess?

mangosteen and rambutan are some of the tastiest shit ever. still have not found a way to enjoy durian. this has been kevin k from white man reports, ILX. signing off

i love all of these fruits, but i was raised by people who were into food culture and am married to someone with a broad knowledge of Asian cuisine (he's Chinese), so i am always baffled by these articles, and also baffled by how insular and boring most Americans' tastes are.

Horrible to contemplate what "Chris" has to eat at home:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/08/parenting-indian-food-bubble-covid-families-judgement.html

ahaha, wtf, I was at least expecting that to be about a toddler. my small children love mildly spiced dhal etc.

am now dreaming of being invited to a home-cooked Indian food feast...

people can be horrible about what they think their kids should eat

I remember when friends of my parents were shocked that we let our kids eat olives.

do we have a rolling "these people are horrible" thread for horrible people that aren't politicians or celebrities?

I think that thread is called reddit.com