Food is Everything We Are...

"It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go." - Anthony Bourdain

For once this is an actually serious post. This discussion comes up every few months, usually as a way for people who don’t have hobbies to bully other people but I’m going to explain why food tends to be a topic that gets diaspora communities, and very specifically non-white diaspora communities, extremely animated.

Some of these people do just want an excuse to harass people and some of those people aren’t even part of a diaspora and just want to be offended on someone else’s behalf which tends to make people take this less seriously. I think it goes without saying that this topic is rarely acknowledged and reckoned with and when it is it’s usually dismissed as “diaspora hysterics.”

I don’t think I need to say that you should never do that.

I need to stress here that if you aren’t part of a diaspora that grew up in that cultural context, your commentary is going to be at best useless and at worst outright offensive so I would recommend exercising some caution before you tell me about your awful opinions.

There’s going to be no photos here. Something about using stock photos feels deeply disingenuous and I’m not posting pictures of my own family.

Anyways. enough with the disclaimers, I think I’ll just get into it.

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Food is the universal language, everyone eats, and everyone likes to eat. It means that sharing food with your friends is one of the universal means of cultural exchange and a deeply meaningful one.

You’ll see those goofy tweets or facebook posts that mostly exist to farm some interaction and say “How do you say “I love you” without using those three words?” and I “I made you food” is probably one of the most common and most universal responses.

But why does this matter? It’s just noodles or dumplings right?

What you need to understand is that food occupies an very sacred space for the diaspora and it’s something that a lot of us don’t quite fully understand ourselves and this is an attempt to put that into words.

It’s not a controversial statement to say that for a lot of young adults in diaspora communities, but particularly non-white ones, grapple with internalized guilt for their (often percieved) lack of knowledge of cultural customs or language. This can often become outright cruel when family members from “the old country” will mock our attempts to speak the language or undertand the culture. I’m pretty sure every Chinese kid has an uncle or an auntie who made fun of them for “being an American pretending to be Chinese” when they tried to speak Mandarin or Cantonese to them.

This also doesn’t mesh very well with the racial dynamics of being visually foreign in a usually white majority Western country. We’ve get mocked by family for not understanding a culture they feel we should understand and we’re treated as foreigners because we look different.

Food has none of those problems. It doesn’t judge us.

We don’t need to understand complex cultural contexts or to have native level language skills. Every one of us ate those meals with our families. We helped cook those meals. Some of us even had a grandparent teach us how to make them through a language barrier. Simply eating those meals with our families, with cooking passed down from parent to child for generations is something every diaspora kid knows and does.

It’s why we find food so central to our identity and why we’re so fiercely defensive of it.

It might be “just noodles” or “just dumplings” to you but to us it’s one of the only tangible connections we have to our family and our cultural history.

It’s our grandmother’s cooking when she let us watch from the high chair as a toddler while she worked from memory trying to teach us a little bit of the home she hasn’t been to in years. It’s our dad and our uncles, standing around a grill with beers in hand as they argue over whose son is the most successful. It’s our mother’s homemade lunch on the first day of school when our classmates made fun of us because it looked weird and smelled funny and we ate with wooden sticks.

This is why some of the most visceral reactions bubble to the surface when people dismiss “cultural appropriation” out of hand when it comes to the foods we know. And it’s why when people make it about themselves by rhetorically asking “so you’re saying I can’t eat noodles?” some of us see red.

So when (usually white) people write cookbooks or open restaurants for “authentic Asian cooking” it’s deeply humiliating on a subconscious level. Many of us have struggled with claiming to be authentic ourselves because we have no memory of the old country, we can’t speak the language, and sometimes even our own families think that we’re outsiders. We’ve been beaten at our own game by an outsider and they often get championed as an arbiter of authenticity by other white people for having taken a few cooking classes in Asia as if our understanding of our own culture is tainted by time and distance.

This is why some of us often have such a visceral reaction to “just a cookbook” or “just a sushi bar.”

It’s not just a cookbook or a restaurant to us.

It’s an affront to what we’ve lived through and one of the few things we do actually feel confident in sharing with the people we care about. And not only was that opportunity “stolen” from us but they’re often showered with social praise or financial success for doing so.

It’s not just that a white person wrote a cookbook, it’s that there’s hundreds of cookbooks written by chefs in the diaspora or from our home countries and you never bothered to care about those. It’s not just that they opened a restaurant, it’s that they often bill themselves as “authentic” and denigrate the countless mom and pop restaurants who use recipes they learned from their grandparents and adapted to the Western world.

This isn’t saying you should never cook foods from outside of your cultures. It’s saying you should maybe think twice about buying the cookbook about Asian noodle dishes written by someone who is obviously not Asian.

It’s saying that you should be a bit more respectful and understanding of why the diaspora, but often not the recent immigrants or people from the old country, find this topic to be so important to them.