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

ok please review it now on yelp

Needs to be called Laphet Up!

(exclamation mark included obv)

yaphet kotto's laphet grotto

women laphet alone with salad

After reading about laphet here I went and got Burmese food for dinner last night night (for the first time), was pretty great

laphet tastes so distinctive, i remember eating it for the first time when i lived on the thai/burmese border and being genuinely surprised by how it tasted. tho i guess i don't eat a lot of fermented foods normally

you can buy it in a box at many asian markets and it is very easy to make

Thinking about trying to make some (vegan) kimchi. I love pickles of all varieties, and kimchi is well up there. Has anyone had any experience making it?

I've made it a bunch of times, it is not difficult and is a fairly quick ferment, it's come out pretty good but not as good as from a real Korean place

ah literally the last tab I was browsing was a takeaway menu including kimchi and vegan Korean food (but not vegan kimchi itself)

https://www.citylab.com/navigator/2017/05/the-new-urban-fried-chicken-crisis/526050/

I do not like it when you order mu shu pork/veg and get wheat tortillas with it.

i've been thinking a lot about this lately

how and where does one draw the line where food is allowed to be appropriated by US people?

asked conversely, the list of food origins in the wiki page suggest that basically most ingredients, fruits and vegetables do not originate in the US and therefore had to be appropriated at some point in time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_origins#North_America

hmm i think this kinda sometimes maybe revolves a bit less around the fact that food is appropriated and more around the manner of presentation and press and coverage, sometimes. like the sense that Thai food is elevated or perhaps more legitimized by a Pok Pok, or that Bayless does the same for Mexican cuisine, and so on.

i'd suggest you read this thread, unless you think for some reason you're the first white person in the world (or even on ILX) to ever have had this thought. xp

the thought was brought on by a recent column (sometime last week) on the globe and mail

xp

oh that's true

like serving "ethnic food" as a pretense that it is authentic but made palatable to white people

i guess that's why places say "inspired" or fusion. is the cost of the food a factor and does it determine their elevation/legitimization under "food appropriation"?

i get the marginalization of non-whites in mainstream culture, but this sounds like people are being selected to showcase whatever food to appeal to whoever has the most buying power, the majority or most influence in popular culture. at this point in time it is white people

sounds like the best thing non-whites can do is continue with the small restaurants and educate people on their culture, but there will always be whites who refuse to learn because of unknowable reasons and a few knowable ones (easy ones are racism and perceived socioeconomic reasons). i think the language barrier is definitely to be considered as well as laziness and intimidation of the unknown

also americans don't like to travel, and when they do, it's only to the typical european destinations. i want to say a lot of this is based on how north americans are taught to think highly of western european civilizations (you still get people wanting to visit greece even though they are one of the poorest in europe) and none of the rest

lol - thanks, we don't need you telling us what to do. how about you think instead about what is the best thing for white people to do and what you're personally doing to further that goal

how do you know i have not already thought of what i can personally do to further that goal?

and more to the point, how do you know i am not already doing it?

feel like i read this exchange in identity politics debates for dummies

the thing is a lot of the articles posted in this thread deal with anecdotes about people who experienced racism. this line of argument only requires to believe the person who experienced it. of course racism exists. it's good for social awareness, but it does little to reduce a calculated form of oppression or marginalization by the majority. it's just a small part of a bigger whole and what complicates things is that some minorities have said they are now less affected by food appropriation than others, e.g. in vietnamese cuisine

last two posts belong in the 'give 'em enough rope' category

who is infinity symbol?

i thought it was jhoshea at first and was all what happened, i am confused?

we are infinite

i've been thinking a lot about this lately

dont

how and where does one draw the line where food is allowed to be appropriated by US people?

one doesnt

needed that dmac

ty

if you concentrate on treating people with respect then respecting their food fades considerably in significance.

imo it's less line drawing than evaluating particular situations in context. like if you wonder if some new, for instance, somali fusion restaurant run by all white ppl is direspecting culture or screwing over authentic somali restaurants/grocers, you can ask the people at the restaurants/grocers close to immigrant communities and maybe consider eating at their place

This isn't a like totally abstract thought experiment about respect and authenticity, nor about what people are "allowed" or "forbidden" to cook or eat. White chefs opening restaurants with white investors cooking Vietnamese or Mexican or Chinese or African-American cuisine can and does deprive Vietnamese- and Mexican- and Chinese- and African-American restaurant owners of opportunities in terms of competition for storefronts, investment, and prestige.

The basic impediment here is that any knowledge that is 'ownerless' and widely shared among hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and cuisine certainly falls into that category, is open to everyone. There is no special protection for that knowledge and no one acquires a 'cultural monopoly right' on economic exploitation of how to cook a culture's dishes. You get into all kinds of weirdness if you try to enforce such ideas.

So, what if you are a white investor and an group of poor Ethiopian immigrants approaches you for capital to open an Ethiopian restaurant? Do you refuse them upon the principle that you are white and must not profit from exploiting their cultural heritage, or do you give them the money, but share in the profits?

that's really far from any negative example anyone has given. that's nearly 180 degrees from what the negative examples have been, unless the white dude claims sole ownership and fires all the ethiopians

silby lays out pretty well why this phenomenon is is somewhat unfortunate. the problem tho is there is no way to legislate against it outside of giving people a hard time about it, which is why the whole exercise is tiresome even to those who sympathize

^ otm

it all runs back to excessive wealth and social status stratification, with obvious, but not absolute, racial determinants on which stratum you belong to. it's not about the food, really. it's about money, status and mobility. like usual.

It seems sort of akin to the problem of white artists and black music, where it's not a problem that white artists are influenced by or even imitate black music, but it's a problem that record companies will favor the white version or promote it in lieu of the black version, and it's a problem that there's an entire audience that is only receptive to the white version.

yeah thats a good analogy

There is no special protection for that knowledge and no one acquires a 'cultural monopoly right' on economic exploitation of how to cook a culture's dishes.

i mean... there kind of *is* a special protection; there kind of *is* a cultural monopoly right? but maybe i'm misreading and you're oversimplifying to prove a point. but the appropration argument IS on some level about about food qua food. imagine a restaurant serving e.g. ethnic huế food. it is highly specific in its appeal and ingredients, and is not same as a more broadly southern vietnamese restaurant, which, in turn, is not the same as a generic vietnamese restaurant, which, in its place is not the same as a chinese-owned pho place, which, to take it further, is not the same as an 'asian-fusion place' that happens to have bun bo huế on the menu. each one of these moves away from so-called authenticity toward bland culinary land-grab. and while any of them might have good food, and 'authentic' noodle soup, and has the potential to introduce patrons to new cuisines, they grow progressively less likely to truly represent an ethos, culture, or unique preparation.

the distinction between all of these tiers may be invisible to patrons, especially ones who don't come from the represented culture. but it isn't invisible to the owners, chefs, and folks who grew up eating the food. and when predominantly white folks, even as well-intentioned and respectful investors, tinker w/ the subtle mechanics that make a cuisine distinctive they are flattening and dismissing its essence, and the story it tells. a white-owned taco bell a small town doesn't represent diversity, it just represents theft and diarrhea. and a mexican-owned taqueria in that same white town, even with a menu that appears similar to taco bell, is much more inclined toward to some sort of *some* sort of integrity, even if it's far wide of *authenticity* as anybody (who needs to do such a thing) would define it.

google doc'in it...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJuHMuAeuHxy-c4nyp6NLghhrCdZYO7I5kDGSt22Ie8/edit#gid=0

https://munchies.vice.com/fr/article/une-histoire-acceleree-de-la-gastronomie-chinoise-en-france

Good article on how Chinese food came to France, and how a Chinese chef had a star for a while.

xp compare with 119 POC-owned restaurants in PDX, according to racist sandwich dot com (not making that up)

ok if we can't have tiki bars then i'm voting for trump next time

jk all bars are bad

The Matador sounds like a Spanish restaurant, not Mexican. I say this not in a gotcha way, more curious about how Spanish and Latino cultures are linked wrt appropriation.

Or maybe it's just a Mexican restaurant with a poorly chosen name.

google doc'in it...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJuHMuAeuHxy-c4nyp6NLghhrCdZYO7I5kDGSt22Ie8/edit#gid=0

― scott seward

only place on this list i really know (outside of voodoo donut which has overpriced donuts they roll in breakfast cereal, not really my thing) is burmasphere, because y'all have been talking about lahpet. reviews i've read say their lahpet is not the most authentic thing in the world, but man there ain't no other burmese place in this town!

saw this posted on FB with some brutal comments, some of which made good points and some of which... didn't. I feel like it could at least be a conversation, but people on both "sides" are already spitting mad.

rough takes I remember - is "how well the employees are treated/paid" a valid metric to make exceptions to the list? one of the dudes running a Mexican place apparently received the highest award the Mexican govt can give to foreigners, does that count somehow? the list treats restaurant expenditures as a zero-sum game, assuming that if you spend money at these places you're taking money away from the 119 businesses k3v mentioned above, which isn't really the case.

High Noon sells Native American frybread under a huge picture of John Wayne, I can see why people are pissed about that one.

of course how the employees get treated matters, but that's generally not information that the potential consumer will reliably have to hand. i remember when i lived in louisville there was a "quirky" brunch places with all kinds of kitsch and really good... something, i forget what particular dish they had that was really good. they were super popular for a long time. anyway a couple years back the owner abruptly shuttered the business in a huff after someone suggested she might want to stop giving her workers unpaid overtime, or something along those lines. if i'd known she was in the habit of doing that, i probably would've eaten there less often.

personally i'd rather have _more_ information available to make decisions rather than less. if somebody wants to set up a separate metric tracking how restaurants treat their employees, goddamn yes i would pay attention to it.

isn't that what laws are for

workers' rights are of paramount importance in kentucky

isn't that what laws are for

― k3vin k., Sunday, May 21, 2017 12:09 PM (nineteen minutes ago)

these are things that aren't consistently reported or enforced.