A few short stories about food and culture
My first exposure to "Chinese Food" was at a restaurant called Port Arthur in the tidewater region of Virginia where I spent my girlhood. Port Arthur's menu featured a romantic story about the "fishing village" as a gateway to culture for the explorers of the British empire. For years, I hazily imagined Port Arthur as some sort of red-lacquered melting pot.
The real story is much uglier: the strategic seaport of Lüshun was the nexus for several destabilizing events in the 19th and 20th century, including the waning days of the Second Opium Wars, the political backlash against the imperial government in Russia and rising anti-Japanese sentiments in Europe and America.
That wasn't mentioned on the menu. I had cashew chicken and imagined British sailors enjoying it as much as I did.
It wasn't until decades later I learned the version of cashew chicken I loved had been invented in Springfield, Missouri, by Chinese immigrant David Leong.
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My favorite chocolate-chip cookie recipe relies on Bisquik. This powdered mix -- which streamlines the process of measuring out flour, salt, a leavening agent and shortening into one shelf-stable ingredient -- attracts some criticism from people who feel passionately about whole foods. In a piece on Bisquik that ran in Taste, Black Culinary History founder Therese Nelson said, "I don’t begrudge anyone their taco pies or whatever other semi-homemade shenanigans they are using Bisquick for, I guess I wonder why you would want to cook like Sandra Lee?”
Paradoxically, Sandra Lee's embrace of Bisquik is what endeared her to me. She talks often about how she used to use it to stretch the household food budget in her hardscrabble upbringing, and she does not apologize for an approach to eating that balances the need for stomach-filling food against the constraints of a very small budget.
I still think her Kwanzaa cake is patently insane, but I have to give her props for her matter-of-fact attitude about food being a place where time and money and taste collide.
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I am old enough to remember when Michael Pollan broke big with The Omnivore's Dilemma and Mark Bittman had Food Matters and basically, two well-connected white men were out there saying the reason Americans had an unhealthy food system was because working mothers had stopped dishing up homecooked meals every night.
A decade on, I read a layperson summary of the research Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliot and Joselyn Bretton did on women and homecooked meals: there are significant obstacles to the reality of putting a home-cooked dinner on the table every night, namely the wildly erratic working schedules of so many mothers, acute budgetary pressures and -- of course -- the reality that men do less housework and childcare than their female partners.
Imagine where we'd be if either of the two men who leveled up their careers on the whole "cook wholesome dinner for your families!" idea had gone so far as to suggest that cooking dinner for your family was something every working father should do.
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I was in the grocery aisles at Target and I noticed the Beekman 1802 Farm Pantry Sour Cream Coffee Cake Crumble Cake baking mix. A few aisles over, Christina Tosi had a line of boxed mixes promising home cooks Milk Bar pie and compost cookies.
(Given that Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi had once made a video where she and Alison Roman made a birthday cake and concluded their labors by tasting it and laughing, "Fat girl moment!" having a boxed-mix dessert line was a real choice.)
The brands had different aesthetics but they both hit that sweet spot: Consumers who knew the attractive and personable brand founders from the multiple media appearances made possible by their presumed expertise.
In 2017, Eater did a great story on when and how culinary professionals license their name to products. Included in the story: Bobby Flay, Alton Brown, Jamie Oliver, Wolfgang Puck, Rachel Ray, Emeril Lagasse, Dominique Crenn, Fabio Viiviani, Jeff Tila, Robert Irvine. Also included in the story: the recognition that having fame on a media platform was a real asset to the brand.
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Few things are so fundamentally tied to our primal senses of self and survival as food. Perhaps this is why we think of food stories as personal. Perhaps this is why we are receptive to food-industry personalities, who seem to be sharing who they are when they share their recipes even while they monetize our idea of who they are.
Yet food is a foundational element in social relationships. We share food to establish or reinforce social ties, to soothe someone or show affection. We use food to signal our moral values, our cultural background, and our socioeconomic status. We make money from food. We shape national policies around food. We control access to food to remind people who's really in charge.
Stories about food are almost never personal. They start that way but they're always about the wider world around us, whether we want them to be or not.
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FURTHER READING
"What Was the Foodie?" (National Review, March 18, 2019) -- "From the outside looking in, it’s clear that foodie culture is roiling with a new awareness of social politics, undermining some of that culture’s unspoken tenets: that taste and pleasure are neutral, universal concepts; that the kitchen is an apolitical zone."
"A Delta Original -- How the humble tamale came to represent a region and its people" (Garden & Gun, February/March 2013) -- Julia Reed is one of my favorite food writers working today and this piece mixing personal anecdotes and researched reporting on the tamale in the deep south shows why.
"Alison Roman’s 'Nothing Fancy' and the Art of the Unpretentious Dinner Party" (New Yorker, November 28, 2019) --"[Roman's] friendliness toward her readers is less convincing—and less interesting—than her annoyance at her guests, which she cloaks in recipe tips."
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