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

I really enjoyed that article!

Huang Feng Zhu sounds like she is the best

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/the-future-is-expensive-chinese-food/491015/

http://kmph-kfre.com/news/entertainment/lena-dunham-says-college-dining-hall-sushi-is-cultural-appropriation

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/the-food-fight-at-oberlin-college/421401/

generally in favor of fighting against aramark et al

Framing it as cultural appropriation is probably not the most useful thing in the world in the current climate but the students are basically right in having a grievance. One of the first things students from other countries want to know when they study abroad is 'what am I going to eat?'. This is probably more critical in the US than the UK where campuses tend to be smaller, less self contained and more integrated into cities.

If universities are marketing themselves to international students on the basis of providing an international environment but make no effort to provide food those students are willing or able to eat, it's a problem. I've spoken to university recruiters visiting Arab countries who have no idea if their canteens provide halal meals. One of the examples cited in the Atlantic article was a "Hindu" meal of beef curry. If you're telling people you can get foreign foods on campus but those foods are poor to the point of inedibility and geared towards the U.S. majority student population, that is going to look like appropriation when the bigger issue is ignorance of / no attempt to accommodate the needs of students from abroad. If all the students were white Americans, it is unlikely it would even be raised. It's one element of a much wider problem with trying to monetise foreign students while not actually doing much to make them feel welcome. Idk how true that is at Oberlin but it's pervasive throughout a lot of US univerisities.

The UK isn't perfect by any means but it's striking that you can go into the SU shop at Sheffield and buy obscure Korean coffee drinks and Chinese silken tofu, etc,.

i dont know if its that smart to term it CA.

the number of pubs and canteens in england that now serve asian cuisine (indian, thai, etc etc), and prob do it poorly is very high. it is a form of appropriation, whether its one worth getting angry about, im not sure. but mainly, its just doing something badly. do people know its not the real thing? probably. do they care? probably not. in my exp, its not like all people in all the proper asian restaurants possess a great respect for what theyre eating, never mind in pubs and cafes.

there is a case that once bigger companies/bigger eateries start serving other cuisines traditionally made by people from those countries that it takes away business from those people, who might really need it (though even then, its not like im seeing a decline in south or east asian restaurants). its more a case of 'can you stop serving bad food please?' (esp if youre trying to make foreign students feel at home).

also, without these bootleg versions of sushi or tandoori dishes, these international students would have to eat, what? hamburgers? not sure thats much better, even if it is more 'authentic'.

Yes, that's essentially it. Make some effort with the food you serve, talk to foreign students to figure out what they want, ensure you have culturally appropriate options available (veg, halal, etc), stop serving rubbish and expecting people who have travelled half way round the world and away from their families to pay you $40k a year to be grateful, etc.

serving beef for a diwali dish is just a major, religious faux pas though. like serving pork for eid.

https://life.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/what-will-brexit-mean-for-british-food/

this is interesting. the garlic bit in particular (i mention this as the piece uses garlic as a sign of cultural/culinary tolerance/open-ness). mainly as, on a purely anecdotal note, english people still seem to hate onions and garlic lol, or least they do when its not extremely, extremely lightly used.

always interesting to me how food is used to enforce cultural superiority.

So, when American children reject strong flavors, they are merely being true to their English heritage? Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and all that.

I never really cared if a university served shitty bagels that are barely recognizable as bagels (they did, believe me), but I'd probably care if they had like specific foods for a specific observance/holiday and just made a mess out of them. Like if they just served crackers instead of actual matzah or something, that would actually be a meaningful faux pas to me, the same way pork for eid or beef for Diwali would be.

It's hard for me to say what the threshold is when a food just becomes of the broader culture - for example I think bagels have crossed that line, and I can do no more than shrug or lightly joke about stuff like "blueberry bagels."

Like how do people feel about something like Chicken Tikka Masala, which I understand is basically a totally British invention based loosely on Indian food (but arguably part of British culture now), or all of the 100% Americanized Chinese recipes that have been sold in the US since the 50s? At some point, shitty pubs are shitty pubs and they're going to serve shitty pub food whether it be burgers or "pad thai," just trying to feel out where the line is here.

imo foreign students are probably more concerned with the content of the meals and not the ethnic style of the cuisine. in a dining hall it's possible some authentic meals would be appreciated since students might be eating there for every meal and not have their own kitchens.

the last place my indian coworkers want to go for lunch is an indian restaurant. they eat that stuff at home all the time, why would they want to go out and eat it?

The fact that they are not at home is significant. They are usually thousands of miles away from their parents and might not always have great cooking facilities or easy access to ingredients.

Colleagues from India who come over to the UK will more often than not go to Indian restaurants because western food suitable for vegetarians is usually either very heavy on dairy or considered extremely bland.

that's fair

I have never ever met an English person who even remotely disliked onions and garlic, wtf

The Queen doesn't eat garlic.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/apr/20/how-garlic-became-the-undisputed-king-of-the-british-kitchen

it fell out of favour during the second world war: food historian Ivan Day thinks garlic was seen as “foreign muck” by the generation of men and women living off bully beef and reconstituted egg - “they got a taste for simplicity”.

Fergus Henderson remembers well how “the British literally woke up and smelt the garlic. Gone are the days of Carry On films with Sid James as Henry VIII complaining of his French wife Katherine of Aragon smelling of garlic.” As Henderson has it, “now, the musk of garlic on the breath is the musk of a good lunch.” And that’s something we can all agree on.

Hating garlic seems to have a (bad, xenophobic) political connection here in Austria, weirdly enough.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/cooking-other-peoples-food/Content?oid=4947606

http://www.bonappetit.com/story/south-philly-barbacoa-cristina-martinez

are you in league w/stevie d to get me to visit philly

http://i.imgur.com/gw7qXZ9.jpg

http://www.bonappetit.com/story/how-you-should-eating-pho

what's really crazy is that this guy's restaurant is in PHILADELPHIA where there are like 100 great pho shops and other vietnamese restaurants already opened by members of philly's v large vietnamese-american community

lol that doesn't stop white ppl, they just have more local places to find "inspiration" from

nobody needs your opinion on this mh

yessir

sorry dude half your posts come off as "white guy who wants everybody to know he's woke and not like those other white guys" without bringing anything else to the table. i mean i know you mean well but you don't need to be performing 24/7.

"anything else to the table"... like ethnic food?

when i was a little kid we went to an american chinese restaurant run by a vietnamese family. when that community got more established, they moved and set up a vietnamese restaurant. then one of their kids got shot because gang violence was a problem in that neighborhood in the late 80s/early 90s. now half that neighborhood is gone after the city moved the interstate exits and other parts got gentrified. a bunch of the newer restaurants are vietnamese families who lived elsewhere in the US and then moved here because there's a strong vietnamese community.

none of that directly affects me. i think i chime in really ephemerally because i don't have deep stakes here, so i'm mostly holding back. i'll hold off more! tbh i am not all that woke and am navigating this with very mixed feelings, especially with the idea that i'm living through a local area that's shifted from the middle american urban blight to a more gentrified scene with a lot of young white collar workers moving back toward the city core and a bunch of fusion places popping up

i feel like i have no claim to anyone's food but it's something i've grown up with and around and don't know if i can judge peers for thinking they have a stake, but some things def feel more off than others

good lord @ "pho is the new ramen"

ramen is a weird one, david chang has been #1 ramen evangelist in celebrity food/restaurant hype/authenticity nexus and he's a korean-american who was enthusiastic and worked in japan ramen places to learn

I'm just learning now that Americans put jalapeno in pho and it is depressing the hell out of me.

Dayo I've been lurking here for years, live in your city and honestly you come off like every failed grad student I know who took 9 years to drop out of their PhD program. Why come down on the guy on a message board that is more empathetic that 99% of the internet, other than wanting to make it clear that you started this thread and thusly own it too.

Forget it. There's a reason why lurking beats nonsense poster hierarchies most of the time. Just the whole I live in the LES schtick is annoying to read. So I'll go back to doing that anyways.

follow up to that bon appetit thing - http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2016/09/bon-appetit-pho-video-columbusing

Dayo I've been lurking here for years, live in your city and honestly you come off like every failed grad student I know who took 9 years to drop out of their PhD program. Why come down on the guy on a message board that is more empathetic that 99% of the internet, other than wanting to make it clear that you started this thread and thusly own it too.

― soma's little yelpers (lion in winter), Thursday, September 8, 2016 12:27 AM (two days ago) Bookmark

congratulations on sticking it through grad school?

oh lord xp

did he really squeeze a whole lime into the broth at the beginning because that is some o_O shit

http://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/special-reports/top-100-independents

two of the three highest grossing restaurants in america is an asian restaurant run by white dudes

ripped from today's headlines!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/nyregion/chopped-cheese-sandwich-harlem.html

kind of a dumb fight though. it's hamburger and cheese...on a roll. i'd rather have a cheesesteak. i could really go for a good cheesesteak...

that list gets more interesting if you order by least expensive to most expensive or just take Las Vegas out entirely

tao is bad

i'm not familiar so i just picture it as a large, pricier p.f. chang's

In ultra-high-priced restaurants the food doesn't matter nearly as much as the reputation, the service and the ambience. The customers want to think they are paying for something super extra special. The food is only a prop within the overall theater production.

the food's usually pretty good if overly focused on presentation, not sure what you're on about

Pretty good food is obtainable at tens of thousands of restaurants.

Tao is an asian-themed nightclub that serves dinner, not a restaurant