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

Rachel L. Martin, Ph.D. missed out on some key white ppl facts

One interesting footnote (which I guess is almost a “foodnote”) is that fair few people probably have heard of hot chicken but didn’t know why or what they were hearing about. On the album “Electr-O-Pura,” Yo La Tengo has not one, but two, songs with Hot Chicken in the title. Joe York’s got the classic, original second-track-on-the-cd, Hot Chicken as the soundtrack to his film. Now that I’ve had the dish I can say with some degree of groundedness that the song actually reflects the dish, at least to me. I’m not a music writer so forgive my foray into that realm but . . . the song really does have an affinity for the chicken . . . starts with a steady, catchy hook, builds gradually to something approaching but never quite overstepping into all out cacophony. Throughout the beat keeps going, and the music keeps rising and the song gets under your skin in a way that sticks. Think chicken-holism. It all makes sense—the band records in Nashville and they eat a lot of Prince’s hot chicken. Think hot chicken, eat hot chicken, listen to hot chicken.

http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/08/fox-all-white-bbq-pitmaster-list.html

https://www.instagram.com/p/_FNtikNP0U/

http://igcdn-photos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xft1/t51.2885-15/e35/12353344_1535210403437068_2045414289_n.jpg

God that's awful oh the humanity etc

Im guessing youre not britishes, just sayin? Chinese chip shop curry is a p specific type of british artificial curry sauce that you get either at a Chinese takeout with rice or chips, or from a chip shop with chips that doesn't really have another name.

^Also available in many non-Chinese takeaways as gravy for chips. Weirdly, this tastes a lot like katsu sauce.

'chinese'=sweet

incidentally i love it and it's one of the few things i make sure to eat when im visiting home

saw really good public television show about Asian American cuisine last night

http://ww2.kqed.org/about/2015/11/16/interview-with-grace-lee-off-the-menu-asian-america/

xxp i'm not british! i lived in london for a while but somehow never had it.

http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_29347835/cal-state-professor-teaches-students-decolonize-your-diet

cultural appropriation that's the opposite of the original gist of the thread!

yah i was going to preface that with "probably wrong thread"
just think the dynamics of ethnic food culture etc in the west is p interesting

west usa

west usa

time for a break.

no it's interesting! you are right! you shouldn't be so self-deprecatory

Excellent (paywalled) FT piece on the decline of the traditional British curry house here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2165379e-b4b2-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b2f.html#slide0

Some of the key points:

People expect prices to be more of less fixed - there hasn't been significant inflation over the last ten years
Spice prices have gone up in India and Pakistan, cutting margins
De-listing of cooking as "skilled work" for migration makes it hard to recruit staff
Social stigma applied to kids continuing family business, rather than going to university, etc
Cooks / waiters migrating in bulk to being Uber drivers instead
No tradition of muscular chains to compete with Pizza Express, Nando's etc,

Key link to the thread:

The leading pizza and hamburger chains in the UK were started by British entrepreneurs, rather than ethnic Italians or Americans. But almost everyone working in the curry industry believes that native nous remains a magic ingredient. “This is an art and you need to be Indian to understand it properly: how to grind and mix the spices, how to leave the dosa mixture to ferment for just the right time,” says Frederick at Saravanaa Bhavan. “Indian food needs specific skills,” says Lord Bilimoria at Cobra. “You can guarantee there has to be a South Asian chef. You cannot just recruit anyone and follow a recipe checklist.”

“There is a hypothesis that curry houses have a requirement that, unlike pizza, burgers or noodles, you probably need to be Indian to understand the cuisine,” says Shamil Thakrar. “That means the sort of entrepreneurs who have attempted them are from the ethnic group of Indians. And while there have been some Indian entrepreneurs, the mainstream investors have not tackled it.".

However, one of the main reasons they're failing is that non-Asian ppl are waking up to what Asian ppl have been telling them for years - that the food is mostly terrible. The majority of curry houses in the UK are Sylheti joints turning out anglicised staples that can be cooked easily and far more 'authentically' at home. They're being squeezed by Wetherspoons on volume and by M&S ready meals on quality. There's a big Bangladeshi community where i live now. All the restaurants are awful and catering to a local white taste that is probably getting more sophisticated.

This has opened up the space in the market for specialist, high-quality places doing things that are both closer to Asian tastes and harder to replicate at home (Tayyabs is permanently packed, for example) but it'll be interesting to see how that turns out wrt who's setting the places up. Dishoom is run by an Anglo-Asian family but the face of the latest on-trend item, the Sri Lankan hopper, is called Emily Dobbs:

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/what-is-a-hopper-the-lightest-way-to-eat-curry-in-london-a2958511.html

Ideally, you'd get to the situation you have in Dubai where there almost everywhere seems to be offering excellent, specialised regional cuisine but there's a huge gap and a vast chunk of the existing network (which employs over 100k people) will fall away.

http://luckypeach.com/inside-taos-vibe-dining-empire-2/

http://i.imgur.com/DJrSUpF.png

what is wrong w/ pig offal

― just sayin, Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:51 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it is awful

― Player is killed, but they are resurrected, and the 45 Revolver glow gold (dyao), Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:53 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've come around on pig offal

pig ears, pig feet. . . but I don't think I've had pig innards. What is officially offal?

cheeks. bones (boiled down for broth). But have yet to encounter tongue, heart, liver, intestines, pancreas, other innards???

of the pig I mean

Had some of this the other day (Korean pigs blood sausage): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundae_(Korean_food) - it was as you would expect, although I wasn't sure at the time if the noodles poking out weren't tendons or veins or something even more off-putting. Served in a soup with liver, I don't know of which animal, it tasted like liver.

xp there's quite a few dishes that i always see at sichuan restaurants - fire-exploded kidney flowers, husband & wife lung, some sort of deep-fried intestine

the whole idea of "cultural appropriation" (as a negative value) as applied to stuff like food (or music or whatever) is the dumbest concept to come out the academic left (and to spread far and wide) in decades. it's a stupid dead end, and that end is total self-abnegation. i have zero patience with this stuff, and if social-justice movements want to tie their flag to the "cultural appropriation" pole, so much the worse for them.

^^ spoken like w true white person

just saw SV's post upthread about curry houses. i was reading it waiting to jump and make this point, until you made it:

However, one of the main reasons they're failing is that non-Asian ppl are waking up to what Asian ppl have been telling them for years - that the food is mostly terrible.

growing up in ireland, the british curry tradition isn't really in my veins. (our drunken appropriated food was always chinese, ireland has a p advanced or retrograde chinese fast food scene, which i'll come to). the trad curry house is horrible imo, not even nice in a drunken way like a kebab or something is. anytime i ate indian food in ireland it was always a bit more varied or had a smaller menu, i mean generally anyway, apart from that place in temple bar which people used to go to buy a "vegetable platter" and earn the right to then buy 48 bottles of cobra.

the face of the latest on-trend item, the Sri Lankan hopper, is called Emily Dobbs

who is this? imo the face(s) of the hopper trend in london are the sethis: http://www.thestaffcanteen.com/news/sethis-launch-hoppers-soho

away from curry and back to chinese food, i was back in ireland for a funeral recently and i had some beers with my two brothers, and we ended up going to the ancient chinese takeaway where i grew up. we got a "spice bag", which is this huge phenomenon in ireland. i'd seen people talking about it and it's on social media a lot. it's basically like salt and pepper everything, in the way you might have previously had "salt and pepper squid" or "salt and pepper prawns" - so it's like thick cut irish chips drenched in the salt and pepper coating (msg and chilli i guess), bits of chicken or meat, and chillis.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/spice-bag-been-named-irelands-6680781

it seems like a kind of combo of chinese food and the fish and chip shop, which is obv the other big post-pub thing.

for years in ireland, and presumably still, the "3-in-1" was the dominant late night chinese dish. fried rice, chips and curry sauce all in one carton. sometimes a 4-in-1 or 5-in-1 might have other deep fried stuff in there floating about. i think the spice bag has won out partly cos people can eat it while walking, the 3-in-1 always required a scurry home and maybe the microwave, or sitting on a wall somewhere.

sorry if this post was distressing for some.

while i'm here, i should add that i've been going to wong-kei in london a bit lately, at lunch, like an old cafe in chinatown. it's p well known and the rudeness there is legendary but the more i consider it, the more i think it adds to the place. they have a bunch of secret rules ie:

1. sit anywhere. sit beside someone else if it's busy. sit anywhere. ANYWHERE. the first time i went i didn't know where to sit and floated towards the host and he just screamed "SIT ANYWHERE" in a cockney/chinese accent and glared at me. now i enjoy this happening to others.
2. only pay by cash. i often fantasise about attempting to pay with a cheque one day cos they get so angry when anyone fails to produce cash instantly.
3. a menu is a luxury. they'll give you one if you ask but you're supposed to know the menu and know exactly what you want.
4. maybe you aren't allowed to order what you want. i heard one of the waiters bark "you won't like it" at someone once. i liked this as it reminded me of working in and shopping at record stores.

having said all that, once you follow the rules everything goes smoothly, and it's £5 for a bowl of noodles or a plate of duck over rice or whatever - with free tea. the seating also is p cool - sometimes you get talking to people, i had a long lunch chatting to a woman in her 80s from singapore who was visiting friends for christmas. p rare to actually meet someone from such a diff background and generation and converse.

The Indian places I've been to in small-town Ireland have tended to be slightly above average but more focused on sit-down meals than slinging takeaway cartons, which probably helps. I've eaten at Indian restaurants everywhere from Gdansk to Yerevan and, for the most part, even if the spices are hard to come by, the technique is there. With takeaway joints, or places that do a lot of their business as takeaway joints and gear the menu accordingly, you are mostly limited to generic curry with a dash of something added at the end or deep fried bhajis.

Emily Dobbs ran a street stall and then opened a restaurant:

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/what-is-a-hopper-the-lightest-way-to-eat-curry-in-london-a2958511.html

The Sethis came along slightly later but seem to have taken over the buzz. Of course, they aren't Sri Lankan either...

yeah they are kinda entrepreneurs i guess, they run that bao place too which seems impossible to ever get into, and i guess they aren't taiwanese either!

i feel like brick lane is as you describe takeaway joints. i haven't eaten there in years but it felt like the competition there was too much for all the restaurants and the standard of ingredient was as low as possible.

Never heard of spice bags, he's taking the piss
Taco fries otoh

you need to accept you live in dublin and integrate yourself into the culture.

Inappropriate

is taco fries abrakebabra? i never got those there. i used to get the bread roll filled with chips. terrifying.

Original and best is, now everyone else has .....well yknow

abrakepropriated

^^ spoken like w true white person

― 龜, Saturday, March 5, 2016 9:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

atf

^^ spoken like w true white person

Every culture on earth has stolen good ideas from other cultures and adapted them for their own uses. The world has never been any other way. Moreover, unlike stealing people to enslave them, or stealing land from those who live on it to dispossess them, or stealing power in order to rule over your neighbors, stealing ideas does no one any noticeable harm. And of all the ideas humans like to steal, pouncing on new ways to eat delicious food seems about the most universal and harmless of all.

I'm 'white' btw.

what does 'white' mean in this context?

i'm a russian-lithuanian jew by heritage.* does this mean i'm appropriating scotch-irish culture when i listen to old-time music? is it OK if i listen with my girlfriend who is from a scotch-irish appalachian family?

how about food? is my attempt to cook naan any more 'appropriative' than my attempt to make linguini?

i know i kind of butted in on an interesting discussion of chinese food! sorry about that. but the whole idea--broached in some of the articles posted by OP--that you shouldn't cook the foods of 'other' cultures is laughably absurd. in make it's so absurd that it's kind of helpful in pointing out the reductio ad absurdum quality of most arguments about 'cultural appropriation.'

*jews have not always been considered 'white' btw, and still aren't in some quarters.

xpost

i agree w/ aimless, of course.

also it's kind of nagl how some folks make a habit of making gross generalizations about 'white ppl' of a kind that would get them pilloried if they were made about any other group of people (like one of my coworkers, who has an uncanny ability to take any topic and turn it in a "white ppl are like..." direction).

note that i'm not claiming 'reverse racism' or some bullshit like that, it's just insultingly dumb and cheapens discourse.

(my coworker is chinese-american but never misses an opportunity to speak on behalf of african-americans, which he can do because he once spent a summer doing community organizing in the 'inner city')

Lol

Is popcorn.gif safe to eat itt

what does 'white' mean in this context?

i'm a russian-lithuanian jew by heritage.* does this mean i'm appropriating scotch-irish culture when i listen to old-time music? is it OK if i listen with my girlfriend who is from a scotch-irish appalachian family?

how about food? is my attempt to cook naan any more 'appropriative' than my attempt to make linguini?

i know i kind of butted in on an interesting discussion of chinese food! sorry about that. but the whole idea--broached in some of the articles posted by OP--that you shouldn't cook the foods of 'other' cultures is laughably absurd. in make it's so absurd that it's kind of helpful in pointing out the reductio ad absurdum quality of most arguments about 'cultural appropriation.'

*jews have not always been considered 'white' btw, and still aren't in some quarters.

Youre white

Thanks

Do me next

I'm irish