[Amy Stamm]

Yes, the idea of micro-cities or multiple centers around which people can walk to find a sense of neighborhood, food, and most of the things they need for daily living - along with designing into cities bike paths, walkways, and renewable energy - seems like a hopeful way of both attending to indigenous histories and their unique expressions (design, daily living habits, lifestyles, language), and addressing climate change through ground-up participation in decision-making. Portland, OR is a U.S. city designed with these ideas in mind. I'm wondering how federal policy decisions to support renewable energy will affect city design over the upcoming years.

[Amy Stamm]

Thanks so much, Professor Bharne, for elucidating how the changing perception of the Buddha from the original idea of the social reformer to a spiritual icon has been expressed architecturally and how the environmental conditions of each country have exerted their influence on design decisions, which in turn, influence the particular ways in which people interact with each other and with the idea of Buddhism and the Buddha.

Mark Twain’s poem seems to express the shifting meaning of the enormous statue of the Buddha at Kamakura as it is interpellated into the various religious frameworks that people carry with them to Kamakura. Twain uses a number of traditionally Christian terms, like “Judgement Day,” “heathens,” and “sins,” which don’t occupy conceptual space within Buddhism. It seems in the poem that there is a tension between the people encountering the Buddha “on their way to Judgement Day” and the Buddha, who sits unmoved by those who encounter him, practicing the principles of Buddhism, letting the world pass through and by him.

The discussion of Zen practitioners illustrated another way in which practitioners continue to shift and refine their practice of Buddhism and use their environments to do so, at the same time that shifting environmental conditions shift their methods of practice. It was interesting to learn about how economic upheaval changed these gardens into dry gardens and how the tea trade from China to Japan served both a ritualistic and physical (caffeine-induced) function in developing Zen Buddhist practice.

I’m wondering what your thoughts are, especially considering architecture, about how Buddhism’s focus on the present moment (like the Zen ink drawings express) and the Buddhist concept of not harming interact with climate change as a global and future-oriented issue. Are there attempts beyond constructing temples with more sustainable principles to relating the concept of not harming to a wider set of practices?

Also, I had a technical question. When you discussed the Shosoin, you wrote, “In the summer the heat contracted the logs letting in the breeze through the gaps; in winter the dampness expanded them keeping the interiors dry” (p. 16).  I’ve always experienced summer expanding wood and winter contracting it, so I’m wondering how these conditions worked.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Nina, I love your questions and appreciate your trying to tease out the implicit connection between concepts of modernity and understandings of what is considered Western. I have a lot of similar questions about the word "progress" associated with modernity - its deep connections to technology (the assumption that technological development automatically equals progress), and the embedded assumptions of the positivity of the ever-increasing march toward the constant interactions with technological products.

[Amy Stamm]

I found Professor Bharne’s discussion about the distinction between the conceptual underpinnings of Michelangelo’s Pieta vs. Ryoanji Temple so interesting. Whereas Michelangelo sculpted stone into a realist human scene, the Japanese artist created a work that revered and preserved the form of the natural world. I’m interested in how this reverence for the natural world and natural forms sits with Paul Wheatley’s explanation of how the design of certain Asian cities was thought to create a portal from the heavens down to the earth and in some cases then to the underworld. Was the idea that “only the sacred was real” (p. 148) operating in the temple design in the same way as the city design as a whole? Rene Berthelot’s framing of the complex of ideas behind the city as “a mode of thought, which presupposes an intimate parallelism between the mathematically expressible regimes of the heavens and the biologically determined rhythms of life on earth” (p. 148) made me wonder what relationship the grid structure of the city might have to the Ryoanji Temple design in terms of replicating, revering, or relating to the natural world, and how the sacred realm was conceptualized in the temple design. I’m also curious about how the city design of many Asian cities as a way of imagining space and the relationship between the different dimensions and layers of living and breathing every day has shaped people’s emotions, relationships, movement, and sense of inner organization or relationship to other inhabitants and the world around them vs. the design and conceptual underpinnings of cities from other cultural histories (African cities? European cities?).

 

I’m also wondering how people thought about the liminal space between the delimitations of the sacred space of the city planted in the middle of the secular space of its bordering lands. Or maybe there wasn’t thought to be liminal space because the cities were walled off so definitively. In the case of Japanese cities where the membrane or wall that separated the house from the street in Japan was not impermeable or permanent, was the entire city conceptualized differently, or were there more permanent walls or delimitations around the city delineating the sacred from the profane, as in Chinese cities? I love the malleability of the paper screens, their entire façade, being open to redefine the street space and the space inside the house.

 

Professor Bharne’s distinction between urbanities and urbanisms was helpful, and his conceptual framing of ten landscapes was a helpful way of holding the overlapping forms and histories of cities in relation to each other. I’m interested in how the tenth landscape is reflective and productive of new relationships with histories of cities and new concepts of our relationship to the earth as a whole – if that’s a new, unifying identity of city inhabitants, given the universal threat of global warming, a force that overtakes regions, nation-states, continents, or other demarcating concepts of belonging and identity. How do ideas about urban sustainability define the relationship between people and reproduction (economic sustainability vs. biological or ecological sustainability), between people and other fauna and flora? And what new imaginations will form for inhabitants of Masdar, Abu Dhabi or Putrajaya, Malaysia?

 

[Amy Stamm]

Hi everyone,

My name is Amy Stamm, and I teach at a tiny special education high school in Northampton, MA. I taught incarcerated students for years before this, and I'm so appreciating working in a school and context in which the first priority is to do everything we can to help our students to feel safe and cared for. Plus, I am now able to bicycle to work, which fills me with happiness every single day.

I started taking courses with NCTA a number of years ago, and I've loved every one of them. I'm especially excited about this class because I have had a lifelong fascination with design and architecture. I'm viscerally affected by space and aesthetics, and the way different elements shape our moods, interactions, and choices is fascinating to me. How cultural values are expressed through social, visual spaces and how people learn visual techniques and design preferences are things I would like to better wrap my mind around.

[Amy Stamm]

The course “East Asian Foodways Across Borders” made the case that the under-studied topic of food and foodways, which is often delegitimized or overlooked as a valid academic subject, is not only an ideal subject to hook students’ curiosity and motivation, but also provides a complex entry point into multiple cultural and historical topics that can give students a nuanced grasp of global politics during different historical periods. The course introduced me to history that made me think about what changing eating practices can tell us about global events. For example, Jennifer Jung-Kim’s video lecture in Week 2 about the development of department stores in Japan and Korea, the introduction of Western foods/meals in the restaurants that anchored the experience of spending a day in these stores, and the status imbued on those who could afford to shop and eat in these new social centers illustrated a changing pattern of social interaction that was founded on the global exchange of products. Another interesting idea introduced in the course was how cultural values about meals, for example, Chinese communal/family eating vs. European individual eating became framed in terms of hygiene and notions of modernity. Frank Dikotter’s work showed how new technologies like enamelware, tin cans, and rice hulling machines “profoundly transformed the material culture of food,” as tins “democratized consumption” for those without money, allowed food to reach into remote areas, and provided nutrition when fresh foods weren’t readily available. These new technologies changed people’s eating habits and created new global systems of exchange for food products like Spam. These stories point to how I can use a familiar food or eating practice to teach my students complex about patterns of global trade, exchanges of cultural ideas and hierarchizing practices, and power.

This course gave me new ways of thinking about how to contextualize my students’ daily lives and eating practices within a historical and cultural frame. Because I work with incarcerated students, I am in the process of developing a curricular unit about Asian influences on prison food and prison practices of meal sharing, food trading, and recipe development. When I think about Frank Dikotter’s point that new technologies change people’s eating habits and create new global systems of exchange, I think about the vast U.S. prison commissary system, which relies on centralized distribution points, plastic packaging, and inexpensive products like ramen. Ramen serves multiple purposes within prison communities. It forms a base for many types of meals, as incarcerated folks mix it with other commissary and dining hall ingredients like sauces, freeze-dried and cooked vegetables, and tortilla chips. The spice packets found in packaged ramen are used to enhance the flavors in generally-dull dining hall meals and in multiple other ways. And ramen is used as a form of currency to purchase other products in the informal economy of jails and prisons. The accumulation of ramen represents the accumulation of power within the prison economy.

In order to help my students place themselves within the global migration of food, foodways, and cultural ideas about food, I plan to show them Jennifer 8. Lee’s TED Talk, “The Hunt for General Tso.” Lee talks about the prestige accorded different cuisines, which then fix hierarchical values to their creators (French cuisine vs. Japanese vs. Chinese vs. Filipino, for example), and importantly, she talks about all of the unrecognized history makers who have transformed U.S. (and global) eating habits. Lee’s investigation into the shorthands we rely on, the travel of ideas, the morphing of concepts and ingredients, and the new combinations of factors that become identified with particular countries would be of interest to my students, who have adapted constrained food choices to create an entirely unique culture of eating, sharing meals, and distributing power via food. I think Lee’s message about the unspoken heroes of food history will be important for my students, who often feel left out of history and who do not give themselves enough credit for their creativity and innovation in inventing new recipes, art practices, and other creative projects within the constraints of the carceral system.

I also plan to assign George Solt’s article on the history of ramen. I plan to collect students’ stories about their own relationships to ramen and their understanding of its roots before they read Solt’s essay. Their uses of ramen demonstrate the participatory, locally-based transformations of certain foods to meet local needs. Solt’s illustration of how ramen was used to remake the image of Japan as both hip and unthreatening shows food as an ambassador, something that can jump references – from anime to movies to fashion – and invites consumers into a kind of international pop culture world. His history of ramen will provide a global context to this common food that has been largely stripped of its history as it has become a more mainstream commodity in the U.S. I want to ask my students to evaluate why certain foods are more flexible and transformable in their uses and why it is important to understand the histories of food consumption and foodways that have created current eating habits in different local and “glocalized” contexts. I also plan to have students research and analyze Asian influences on federal and state prison commissary offerings. It would be fun to compare those influences to Latin American influences on prison commissary offerings and to hear students’ ideas about where this new knowledge takes them.

Another way that I plan to utilize the teachings of this course is to integrate 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, into a climate change course that I teach. In addition to drawing our attention to overfishing, a lack of consistent international laws about ocean depletion, and the ocean pollution caused by disposable food products, Rath raises issues about the widespread mislabeling of seafood, and child labor and human trafficking in the fishing industry. 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. They could investigate greener methods for packing and shipping food products transnationally. All of these topics are likely to ignite students’ imaginations about how their own personal eating and consuming habits are tied to much wider processes. Food is a great way to build students’ sense of their personal contributions to history and to engage them civically.

 

Citations

Dikötter, Frank. Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 219-239.

Jung-Kim, Jennifer (September 8, 2021). “East Asia’s Adaptation of Western Foods” video lecture.

Lee, Jennifer 8. “The Long March of General Tso,” in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2008), 66-88.

Rath, Eric C., “The Global Spread of Sushi,” in Oishii: The History of Sushi (London: Reaktion Books, 2021), 137-175.

Solt, George. The Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 162-177.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Website review: https://www.asianfoodgrocer.com/collections/munchies

This website is a visually very well-organized, easy-to-navigate site that is an online source for nonperishable Asian groceries. They charge a flat $5.00 shipping fee for all orders over $30.00. The website is divided into the following categories: noodles, munchies, dranks (sic.), eats, smarts, wants, and sake & beer with visually pleasing icons. I counted 224 varieties of instant noodles offered from Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam.

The Munchies section opens with 12 flavors of Japanese Lay’s chips, and one fun activity to do with students could be a blind taste test to see if they could identify any of the flavors. Students could be provided with a list of the possible flavors after a round of blind tasting, as well as surveys of their reactions to each flavor. It would be interesting to solicit students’ opinions about why different groups of people are drawn to such different types of flavors. A follow-up project to this might be for students to research the culturally specific adjustments that global chains like MacDonald’s make to their products to suit local tastes. Groups of students could choose a country and present their findings to the rest of the class, and then the teacher could facilitate a discussion about why students think these particular changes were made in each place. This might require students to research the cuisines of their chosen countries to uncover local food histories.

Back to the munchies section…it is filled with a wide variety of chips, crackers, dried fruits, cookies, small cakes and other sweets, puffed rice snacks, a variety of peas and peanuts, and candies. Students could compare the visual design of two chosen snacks and make an argument about which one they think would sell more based on visual elements of design. Similarly, students could compare drink packaging design, which the site depicts in a variety of forms, from plastic bags to hard plastic characters to aluminum cylindrical cans. The drinks include teas, coffees, sodas, juices, yogurt drinks, brown sugar pearl milk, and tapioca drinks, among others.

The eats section focuses on rice, grains, cooking ingredients like seaweed, sauces, oils, and seasonings, as well as some cakes and breads. To mimic a Japanese convenience store, the smarts section offers notebooks, pencils, origami paper, and decorated tapes from Japan, China, and Taiwan. The wants section focuses on thermoses, mugs, pencil cases, stuffed toys, and other items like rice cookers. The sake and beer section is self-explanatory.

The website is so organized, visually pleasing, and full of tempting products that I it made me very hungry and thirsty to try its products.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Hi Jennifer, a certificate of completion would be great. Thanks so much for this course and for your ongoing work. Amy

[Amy Stamm]

Thanks, all, for another great discussion. I think the concept of "food as a gateway drug to studying East Asia" encapsulates the hunger, longing, and enthusiasm that food elicits in us and the routes it then takes us on to dig up cultural connections and histories. Bin He, thanks for bringing up the series Hello Refrigerator, which reminds me of Becky's virtual class in which students took each other on tours of their fridges. Clay, thanks for pointing out the use of sportscasters manufacturing drama as a key to the success of Iron Chef. It's interesting that taking elements from one form of entertainment, sports, and infusing another art form with them can reframe the art form and create a whole new set of relationships and stakes. The topic of food touches on so many aspects of life that I hope through your work, Jennifer and Clay, at the university level, a new major and focus of graduate study may be developed. Thanks to all of you for allowing me to be part of this class.

[Amy Stamm]

In Eat Drink Man Woman Ang Lee shows that the essence of life can be found in the four words of the film’s title. All of the subplots revolve around the pursuit of creating the perfect dish, eating elaborate feasts with a perfectly developed palate, building intimacy through drinking, or pursuing love. How students would react to Chu’s meal preparations would say a lot about their cultural backgrounds in terms of the relationship between live animals and the food they become. Some of my students have expressed a real lack of understanding about where food originates, so it would be interesting to look at food systems or farm to table routes in different countries, including statistics about how far different types of food travel before arriving at their final destination.

Gendered roles in relation to food and cooking was another theme in the movie with Jia-Chen’s lifelong passion for cooking suppressed from the time she was a young girl, as Uncle Wen reminisced in the hospital about her following him and her father around the kitchen. Her father kicked her out of the kitchen as a way of guiding her toward opportunities, but it becomes clear through as the story develops that opportunities mean little when they don’t connect to one’s soul, like cooking does to Jia-Chen’s. Her love of cooking was portrayed as her deepest part and the bond with her father that was stronger than all else. Her cooking was the only thing able to break through Chu’s growing loss of taste as he aged. At the same time, the generosity Chu showed in eating Jin-Rong’s inferior cooking was an expression of his love for her and her daughter Sha Sha. I loved the scene of Sha Sha’s friends ordering their lunches and Sha Sha rejecting fried rice and egg, saying, “That’s too simple. He won’t cook that. Order something more complicated.”

 

[Amy Stamm]

Tampopo was such a weird and interesting film. I don’t remember seeing another film in which so many scenes are unrelated to, or don’t forward, the main narrative of the film, except in this kind of thematic way, as if creating a structure that surrounds the main story and conveys the centrality of food to every stage and aspect of life: childhood, relationships, social structures, love and sex, and death. I loved the humor in the film – all the rivalries, secret-stealing, meta-narratives, references to Westerns and other film-historical moments. I loved the message that eating ramen is as important an art as preparing or cooking ramen. My favorite scenes were of Goro training Tampopo, of her lifting the pot of water from burner to burner and of running to condition her body for the task of becoming a great chef. These scenes reminded me of Rocky. I loved that through watching the film, the viewer learns all these aspects of how to cook a brilliant ramen.

I think it would be interesting to show students the early sequence of the ramen master teaching his disciple how to eat ramen and to ask students what eating rituals or traditions they’ve experienced and also what their reactions to this scene are. I could see showing students excerpts of Tampopo training to cook the perfect bowl of ramen and then analyzing why this process is important and how it shapes people’s relationships to eating.

 

[Amy Stamm]

The number of shows and films you shared with us in this video lecture was so comprehensive, Jennifer. Thanks for compiling this mini-history. Given what Cervantes pointed to a while back about how chefs in Asian countries weren’t traditionally propelled into the spotlight or given individual attention, it’s interesting that Iron Chef was created in Japan in the first place and then had such a dramatic effect on food culture. I’d like to understand more about these dynamics culturally. Cooking competition shows make sense to me in an American context, the U.S. being such an individualistic and competitive culture, but I’d love to hear from other people about the tension between individual stars and attending to the group in other countries. I’m also wondering how much prestige or status comes with cooking and what the gender dynamics are in Korea, China, Japan, and other Asian countries in the 2020s. I think it would be fun to have students write reviews of their favorite cooking shows, analyzing what creates interest or drama in the shows and what they’ve learned by watching them, as well as how they think about food differently. I like your idea, Jennifer, of having students analyze children's books' depictions of food.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Hi Jennifer,

The link for Tampopo takes you to Eat Drink Man Woman. If there's a way to fix this, that would be great. 

Thanks,

Amy

[Amy Stamm]

Thanks, everyone, for your insights and stories last night. Bin He, thanks for sharing that KFC calculates the GDP in different towns/areas and adjusts their prices to fit. That’s such an interesting form of localization, along with adjusting their menu to respond to customer demand for things like the Sichuan beef wrap that you talked about. Cervantes, your knowledge of the fast food industry is so extensive. It’s so enlightening to hear your insights about marketing, restaurant presentation, statistics on sales, how the reputation of different brands has changed over time, etc. Catherine, it’s so sad to watch how social media is destroying girls’ body image in so many countries. I’m sure that the prolific plastic surgery industry in South Korea, the apps in China that let you adjust your facial features, and the K Pop and J Pop industries add to this sense of the standardization of narrower and narrower concepts of beauty. It makes me so sad to watch girls’ and women’s relationships to food and eating become increasingly mediated by punitive frameworks. Becky, I love your hack instant ramen assignment. I’m thinking of creating lessons built around jail recipes and having students investigate the origins of the snacks they are able to order through commissary. I wish I could have an active cooking class with them. Your students must love your classes. Ellen, thanks for sharing the link for Towzen. Clay, thanks for your suggestions for how to create assignments and for the reference to Francesca Bray’s book. Bill, thanks for explaining how to cure an egg and use it in ramen. I’m definitely following up on that. And Angela and Gabe, I’m so jealous of your eating life.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Jennifer, thanks for including so many video clips this week. They really helped paint a picture of various fast food chains’ presence in different countries, and they’re great footage for students. I like your idea, Jennifer Smith, about analyzing ads and/or examining changes in their narrative structure over time. My students tend to be low income and hardly ever travel, so they tend to think of chains in American-centric terms. That’s why I’d like to use the interview with James Watson in class.

I think he does a great job of showing how children have taken on a driving role in terms of consumption and how the local conditions, cultural priorities, and uses of public space in different countries have forced what many U.S. students perceive as immovable behemoths like McDonald’s to reshape themselves. I also really like Watson’s point that anthropologists have to “live where people live,…do what people do, and…go where people go” (p. 7) and his observation about the unfounded assertions of academics who draw baseless conclusions about phenomena like fast food chains because they remain sheltered in their elite circles. His story of being forced by his godchildren to pay attention to shifting conditions in Hong Kong was powerful. And it was so interesting to read about how high school students in Hong Kong transformed McDonald’s restaurants into after-school social clubs, which influenced McDonald’s to consider new ways of marketing their restaurants as safe, clean, gang-free, and alcohol-free afternoon clubs for teenagers, influencing parents to encourage their teenagers to hang out there and give them additional money for meals. I thought Watson’s argument that “consumers have appropriated corporate property and converted it into public space” (p. 8) was an important counter to the usual assumption that chains like McDonald’s are in full control of their customers.

I also appreciated Watson’s examples of how McDonald’s exerted influence on other businesses in Hong Kong by providing clean bathrooms and air conditioning, thus raising standards for customer treatment, and Sanmee Bak’s illustration of how McDonald’s has acted as an example to other businesses of social responsibility (p. 141). Bak’s discussion of how McDonald’s adjusted to Koreans’ thinking that something that is inexpensive lacks quality by focusing on the term alch’an, which reframes value as something good packed in a protective shell is another great illustration of the constant negotiation that takes place as large chains land in different countries. Bak also shows how local values have influenced McDonald’s to adjust its supply chains in Korea to local suppliers in order to counter anti-American sentiment (p. 153).

Solt’s illustration of how ramen was used to remake the image of Japan as both hip and unthreatening showed food as an ambassador, something that can jump references – from anime to movies to fashion – and invite consumers into a kind of international pop culture world. All of these articles showed the dialectical relationships, the constant on-the-ground negotiations, and the creation of new roles and new definitions of public/social space that fast food chains have enabled.

 

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