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Home › Forums › Short Online Seminars › East Asian Foodways Across Borders, Summer 2021 › Sept. 15 - East Asian Food as Cultural Capital in America
Jennifer Smith.
cgaoHow did Asian food become popular and cosmopolitan in the US?
Assignments
Jennifer SmithI grew up in a rural area in Illinois, where small cattle and pig farms are common. As I listened to this week's video, the information about pork production sparked my interest as I wondered about pork production in Asia. I did some very quick research and found a company that produces equipment for piggeries. I also found an article about high-rise piggeries as well. In my search for information I also learned that China produces about half of the pork in the world, though recent numbers are down due to swine fever. Information about pork production could be used in a variety of science and math lessons as students learn about the engineering involved in creating piggeries that including automatic feeders and systems for managing waste.
Sushi was another topic that I think my students would be interested in. I mentioned in a previous post that I have had students complete a food technology timeline. In previous years I have had some students choose sushi as their timeline topic. My students would also be interested in learning about the different types of fish that are used to make sushi and why those types of fish are used. Microplastics is a topic that I have taught about in the past, but I did not specifically include information about sushi in the topic, so that is something I could add. The chart (from the video and the article by Rath) about the nutrition content of supermarket sushi could be used as part of a math or science lesson.
A final aspect of the unit that stood out to me was the use of food as a basis for exclusion. In her TED Talk, Jennifer Lee briefly showed examples of ads and information from the Library of Congress that depicted Asian foods in a negative way. It would be interesting to have students examine these ads for stereotypes and as propaganda.
Amy StammOver the weekend someone showed me this video of the Crunch Bros. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJNVKDiu-g
The Crunch Bros are a father and son team (Jeff and Jordan) from Fountain Valley, California who try different foods and, through their videos, teach their followers about Japanese food. In this video, entitled “Mochi Roulette,” Jeff and Jordan try different mochi balls with fillings that Jeff’s wife/Jordan’s mom prepared secretly ahead of time. I love how Jordan watches his dad to learn how to try new food and encourages him not to eat certain mocha balls that look suspiciously like they are filled with mustard or wasabi. It’s sweet to watch Jordan tentatively trying new mochis and then assessing them, and to watch the intimacy between the father and son. There is a whole series of Crunch Bros videos, depicting Jordan choosing ingredients for dinner, the father and son trying snacks in a snack box from Japan, or the pair cooking with new products or playing different types of food roulette. Their hustle is definitely self-promotional, but it also seems to teach people about a variety of Japanese food using humor and the cuteness of a child’s relationship to food.
Amy StammReading Eric Rath’s history of sushi and the other Japanese food that Americans were introduced to in the 1960s brought me back to my childhood in New York City, where I lived until I was five and then spent years visiting with my mother, who had grown up in Bayside and forever longed to return to New York after we had moved away. After we moved away to Stonington, Connecticut, we would take the train into New York City. My mother, who had a sweet tooth and was always generous with sweets for my younger brothers and me, would buy us a one-pound bar of Hershey’s chocolate on the train, which we would all share. When we were in the city, the three restaurants we ate at were the Auto Pub, the Magic Pan, and Benihana, which, according to Rath, was established in 1964, the year I was born. The Auto Pub was a restaurant filled with the shells of automobiles, which you would sit inside while you ate your hamburgers, fries, and whatever else. https://randolphmase.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/the-auto-pub-in-the-gm-building-a-very-popular-place/
The Magic Pan was established in New York in 1965, and apparently, the chain was backed by the Quaker Oats Company. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/19/archives/crepes-from-a-magic-pan.html
I remember that my favorite crepes there were one that was filled with cheese and maybe fried, one filled with creamed spinach, and a dessert crepe filled with ice cream and topped with hot fudge and whipped cream.
The third restaurant we frequented was Benihana. https://www.benihana.com/locations/newyorkwest-ny-we/ We sat at communal tables with other diners and were mesmerized by the chefs throwing knives in intricate patterns and tossing things to us, which made us laugh and feel special. When I asked my mother what we used to eat there, she couldn’t remember that we actually chose our food. What she remembered was the showmanship and the communal tables and that my father loved Benihana. My father may be on the autism spectrum, though that wasn’t diagnosed at the time. He has problems with social cues and with making friends, but he felt included and special at Benihana to the point of mistaking the chefs there as friends almost. He didn’t understand that the performance was just a show, so this precise and playful show of making our dinner created an illusion of intimacy that became important to some American diners.
It’s interesting to think about this experience in relation to Rath’s discussion of the status of Japanese restaurants compared to Chinese, Thai, Filipino, and other Asian restaurants, and immigrants’ use of that status to make more money by crossing over into Japanese restaurants, as interpreted by American diners. It’s a strange translation to devalue certain ethnic foods because the immigrants who make those foods are devalued (Rath, p 154). It reminds me of a paper the anthropologist Tim Choy wrote years ago about how to read race through people’s cars. That our taste buds are taught status, prestige, disgust as dishes are mediated through our notions of difference is complex and fascinating.
Gabriel ValdezHaving grown up in Southern California and with grandparents who would take us to Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Koreatown, Thai Town, Bolsa Chica, Little Saigon, Monterey Park and other places I kind of took this "cosmopolitian" upbringing for granted. As I have moved to varying parts of the country, Indiana, small town and big city Texas, Guatemala, Korea, Jordan, Mexico etc obviously food is often tailored to regional tastes and regional ingredients especially in the era prior to fast and cheap shipping. (Try not to think of the carbon footprint as folks eat sashimi style bluefin) . Can a restaurant in random small town city in Anystate, USA be as "authentic" as something you would find in a "cosmopolitan" city? Even if the ingredients are localized in an era of which we have had the "benefit" at least in an epicurean sense of waves of trade, diffusion, migration and more - food is universal and authenicity is a relative term. Does having a Michelin star or being recognized by UNESCO make a place more authentic? Nothing is static or operates in a vaccuum. Does having more or less ethnic diners make a place more or less authentic as well? I've often wrestled with these notions and will be ready for the discussion.
Rebecca BlankenshipThis is a really great source we use in my class to virtually explore japanese cuisine. It is a Google Culture site that has lots of curated resources about recipes, ingredients, the history of umami and VR tours of fish markets. I really like it because you can send kids down a virtual rabbit hole and then have them share back out. I had forget about it until I read the about the roll of sushi and how it has been Americanized into items such as the California roll.
I found it really interesting that Korean food ( at least until more recently) remained closer to its original/traditional form than Chinese or Japanese food. I am curious if that was due to the small number of immigrants or if there was some other reason for that.
Angela LeeThis was an intriguing session for me to think about - I grew up and around the Chinese restaurant scene in Boston, MA since my mother worked in the Chinese restaurant business for about a dozen years during my childhood/middle school years. We would eat leftovers from the restaurant, but my mother often "doctored" them up to make them less "Americanized." What the restaurant workers ate, for the most part, was not what they served their patrons, but it was more what would be eaten in home, which did not reflect the sugary, sticky, fried foods like General Tso's chicken. So this issue about authenticity continued to be raised for me because I was always looking for the most "authentic" cuisines every where I travel, but as I got older, into early adulthood, and as I became a teacher of world history, I see that the syncretism of food makes "authenticity" an issue that really doesn't have an answer. So are California rolls not authentically Japanese, even though they were developed by Japanese immigrants who were trying to find a replacement for the fresh fish they were not able to access in the United States? Are they more authentically Japanese American then? I am not sure that the question of "authenticity" is a helpful one.
Based on Mintz's article, there is no food in the world that is authentically from its region since the diffusion of food commodities over the globe and over hundreds of years make it difficult to find any dishes that are purely from that region alone. In my classes, I like following food commodities, because it shows the global nature of trade, and how cultures intertwined and mixed to create new culture. I remember eating in a restaurant in Sichuan, which is known for its spicy foods and use of chili peppers, but on the wall there was a sign about how the chili peppers had originally come from the Americas. So, that means Sichuan cuisine did not really develop their characteristically spicy flavors until the 1500s, so Sichuan cuisine (and by extension Hunan cuisine) are relative "newcomers" on the food scene. These clips and anecdotes can easily be brought into my class to highlight the nature of food, cuisine and culture.
I was surprised to hear that the total number of Chinese restaurants outpace all of those of the major fast-food chains combined, and was thinking about the organic nature of food, and how restaurants can really cater to the tastes of their clientele and what food supplies they can access. The numerous examples of Chinese restaurants adapting to the places where they have settled is quite intriguing, like the fusion of Mexican Chinese or Peruvian Chinese - has this happened with other cuisines in the world? So for instance, I've heard that Italian food, like pizza, looks and tastes very different than they do in Italian restaurants in the United States. What about Tex-Mex? Cajun Vietnamese? Is this a common occurrence of cuisines around the world to mix cultures and create something new that attracts multiple palates?
Amy StammA couple of points I appreciated in the readings and talks from this week: 1) Jennifer Lee’s point that food was perceived in a way that defined immigrants as essentially different from those who were established in their American identities (but were former immigrants themselves). As she explained, “If these people eat food that’s different from us, they must be different from us.” Her research that revealed that Samuel Gompers argued that Chinese men who ate rice would bring down the standard of living from American men who ate meat, and this was one of the reasons we must exclude them from this country, showed an interesting blurring between food/consumption, bodies, and class. It reminded me a bit of Israelis’ mythology around sabras, native Israeli Jews, as inhabiting strong, indestructible bodies that could protect the nation. Lee’s inclusion of food consumed as a way of building or tearing down people’s strength and standard of living, a stand-in for national strength, relates, too, to the prestige accorded different cuisines, which then fix hierarchical values to their creators (French vs. Japanese vs. Chinese vs. Filipino, for example). I also appreciated her investigation into all of these shorthands we rely on and distribute in order to uncover the travel of ideas, the morphing of concepts and ingredients, and the new combinations of factors that become identified with particular countries.
I appreciated Eric Rath’s attention to global warming and the contradictions between different nations’ fishing laws, which allow for the continued depletion of the world’s ocean life and the production of microplastics. He also mentions the widespread mislabeling of seafood, and child labor and human trafficking in the fishing industry. I learned last year that in certain African countries like Liberia Chinese fish farming businesses come in, violate anti-pollution laws, and destroy local fishing industries through their over-stress on fishing resources, partly because of the deals the Chinese government broker with the Liberian government, preventing enforcement of laws due to conflict of interest, and partly because insufficient laws have been passed to address these issues. These topics lend themselves perfectly to a student project tied to the Sunshine Movement. Students could research fishing laws or fishing trends and propose ways for nations to collaborate in order to sustain ocean populations and mitigate global pollution and global warming.
I appreciated Sidney Mintz’ framing of “world cuisine” or “global cuisine” as a process rather than a system, which provides a way of thinking about the interpenetration as well as the disappearance of aspects of local food systems. I also appreciated Mintz’s point that “the diffusion of a plant or spice to a different continent or country may predate by many years its significant use in the larger local food system” (p. 4). Mintz also talks about the circumstances, like migration, rural-to-urban population changes, war, and famine, that change food production and consumption.
Angela LeeHere's an article that I had tagged awhile back about why Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas, that also was a thread in this week's session. While I was growing up, this was always confusing to me, because I thought that Jews would not eat pork, and Chinese restaurants, from what I saw, were not "kosher." I think this follows the adaptability of Chinese food to the diet of those who consumed it, similar to how Chinese cuisine adapted to the American palate.
https://forward.com/culture/43
Bill HiltI enjoyed the lecture for today's class. I grew up in a suburb in the midwest (Ohio.) We did not have much variety for Asian food when I grew up in the '70's and 80''s. Now we have most varieties of East Asian food within the area. Also my mom would occasionally cook chop suey, or sukiyaki. I remember that my brother and I called it Chopped oooey, and Icky-aki. We were not fans. She also attempted fried rice, but it mostly turned out as a mushy glob. I think she used minnute rice, and tried to fry it right after cooking it. Eventually, as I learned that I had a passion for food, I would try more exotic dishes, although prior to the internet, it was more difficult to find recipes and ingredients.
I am looking forward to learning more about sushi. I would say that is one area that I really have much to learn, though I probably know more than the average mid-westerner over 50. Watching the video about the famous fish market made me remember back when I shared a video about the market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv5DloVT3iU Students really seemed to like it, and I used it for 7th grade social studies. I was a bit sad when the market closed.
Jennifer Jung-KimHere is the article I mentioned.
Angela LeeThis helps answer the main question I raised about how Chinese food doesn't seem like it would be a natural fit with those who needed kosher food.
Thank you!
Jennifer SmithAmy,
This is an interesting video. You hit on a very important aspect in your post regarding the relationship aspect of food. The films that we watched for this course also depicted the manner in which relationships and food are intertwined. It would be interesting to explore this connection further.
Jennifer
Jennifer SmithRebecca,
This website is fantastic! It contains so much information on a wide variety of topics. I really appreciate that the site includes information about how produce is grown and harvested, as well as the people who produce the foods. This will be a great resource for my science class.
Jennifer