On the Left's Obsession with Race
The Racism of Racialism
It’s really hard to know where to start. Perhaps we ought to go back to Adam and Eve or even white God? But let me skip forward to the Uncle Roger controversy, something that struck me to the core as an avid cook and lover of all things culinary minus meat. Nigel Ng’s reaction to Hersha Patel’s form of cooking white rice is pretty much the same reaction I had when I saw friends in Italy who were otherwise perfectly skilled in the kitchen cooking rice. One friend took the pot of rice boiling in water and poured it into a colander, straining and then rinsing it. I let out a mild shriek asking, “What on earth are you doing?” Completely perplexed by my horror, she stated, "I am straining the rice." I responded, “I can see that! But that’s not how you cook white rice.” I kindly told her that while Italian risotto had its place on the culinary map of top cuisines of the planet, that this form of barbarism certainly did not. She laughed, of course.
My resistance to this form of massacring rice was not in reaction to my friend being Italian or white-ish, but rather to the basic rules of rice cooking that my Gujarati father had instilled in me and his mother before him, and so on. So too had I seen the “correct” method for making white rice in Vietnam, China, Morocco, Peru, Honduras and dozens of other countries where I lived. What was it about westerners who cook rice as if it were pasta?
Obviously, we have all been there with the cooking “betters”—do you fry in sunflower oil at high temperatures or do you test carcinogenic fate with olive oil? Do you really need to use stevia instead of sugar? And we all have that person in our lives who tells us the "right way" to prepare a certain dish which is generally based upon familial tradition or an overwhelming obsession with macrobiotics. Who gets to define these valences of good or bad cooking, after all? Some will say the person who is cooking gets to decide which, though a fair argument, discounts the science of the kitchen long established before Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene(Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) first published in 1891. But then two centuries earlier, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz whose response to Sor Filotea, itself treatise on feminism, contends that philosophy has always been made by women in the kitchen thus bridging the cultural conventions of preparing food with the very philosophising about food and the world.
So, let me take this 17th-century invitation of Sor Juana to suggest that cooking is its own philosophy that need not be the indicator of which sex or ethnicity prevails, but the fact that it is a terrain fraught with ideological debate. Indeed are Ng and I correct in our assertion that straining and rinsing of white rice is a slaughter of the culinary art of rice preparation? If you survey the cooks of the planet, we will undoubtedly win this debate. But what is it about cooking that has now led in recent days to Rice-gate to turn into a politics against white people? Might we ought to stop saying “white rice” and simply say “uncoloured rice” as the non-male members of the UK’s Green party know only so well?
Let me now turn to Anya Zoledziowski’s piece from last week, “Dear White Vegans, Stop Appropriating Food” published in Vice. Unlike Ng’s astute observation of culinary carnage, Zoledziowski addresses her article to veganism which is, according to her, “going through its own racial reckoning.” So many thoughts passed through my mind when reading this bit beginning with the basic fact that I had no idea that movements even had a consciousness with which to “reckon.” Additionally, Zoledziowski's oddly demarcated “traditional foods” that "white vegan influencers" have apparently appropriated seemed entirely staged and anachronistic. I realised that not only has Zoledziowski no clue about history but more troublingly she has zero knowledge about food. And that, in Ng’s kitchen as well as my own, is its own trigger warning. You might as well put cream and then jam on your scone and call it an outright lost cause!
Zoledziowski begins her article by focussing upon Afia Amoako, a Canadian who has been a vegan for five years, claiming that the influencer vegan community is dominated by “wealthy white women.” Amoako contends that the titles of these influencers’ recipes for “African peanut stew” an “Asian stir fry” rely on racial stereotypes. But do they? Indeed, peanut stew is specific to a very particular region within the vast continent of Africa as is stir fry a generic western term for any number of east Asian dishes. I see no racism here since when novice cooks call a dish “Asian stir fry” they are generally attempting to give a culinary nod to a particular part of the world where a particular dish originated. Sure, the specific region might be a nice addition for many, but are we aiming to have a good meal among friends or are do we want to score political points? After all, the British regularly offer invitations to dine out at an Indian restaurant like this: “Fancy a curry?” I once joked to a friend who extended this invitation to me, “Are you entirely ignorant of dosas, idli, aloo dahi puri, rogan josh, and sarson ka saag?” For the outsider, India, home to hundreds of types of cuisine looks like a homogenous subcontinent just as "Africa" becomes this catch-all phrase in the kitchen which fails to distinguish why pastilla is not to mulukhiya is not to fukko hoy, and so forth. Africa and India are home to hundreds of languages and culinary traditions and the general references are not made in the spirit of denigration but of recognition. Or so I thought.
Surprised was I, therefore, to see Amoako’s Instagram page where she touts herself as the “Canadian African” which reads very similarly to me as her critique of cuisine entitled “African fill-in-the-blank.” I thought the point of Amoako’s disapproval was the non-specificity of various African cuisines that are rendered ahistorical and lacking in cultural specificity being lobbed together under the title of African something-or-another cuisine. So, now I am up to speed. I think. The issue that this particular Canadian African has with wealthy white women cooking foods is not the names of the various dishes that they prepare but the fact that these "wealthy white women" are cooking her foods, or as Amoako states: “One, they don’t look like you, and, two, they are appropriating your food. Those are ways to turn racialised people away.” Hmmm, it seems the racialism is inverted here, but let’s proceed with this analysis in good faith.
Zoledziowski’s article goes on to interview other vegans who hail from various parts of the world to include where much of my family lives in India. Zoledziowski also calls her interview subjects “racialised vegans,” a term which is as revealing of this issue at heart as it is troubling. This begs the question if food can ever be “racial” especially given that race is simply not category amongst humans. What becomes apparent in Zoledziowski's article is that that race is being used to stir up faux emotion around yet another chapter of cultural co-optation, this time it is cuisine in the cross-hairs. This polemic begs further investigation since cuisines are as widespread as the expanse of humans who have throughout time immigrated to new lands bringing their culinary traditions with them. And when someone with the name Zoledziowski writes an article entitled “Dear White Vegans…” one cannot resist the urge to search out this writer’s biography. I did. And yes, dear reader, Zoledziowski does not hail from Africa which begs yet another question why “white” writers are composing callouts to “white people” about the integrity of racialised foods. It’s a true head-scratcher.
Let me begin with a few axioms here. First, there is no "racialised" cuisine or people. Food is a shared tradition amongst peoples not limited to countries, regions, cities, and even families. I am sure you have all had that experience of showing up to someone’s house where they explain the reason why their lasagna is like this and not like that because...skip to the Sophia Petrillo-esque story, “Picture it: Sicily, 1922…” which explains this particular family’s addition to the culinary syncretism of lasagna. Second, food is shared across time and space for which the attempts to trace the innovators or countries of origin of each cuisine has led to many a debate, fictionalisations, and even embargos on products. We have even lived through the absurd such as the “baklava war" of 2006 where Turkey's baklava makers protested the European Union posters presenting their traditional dessert as the national dish of ethnically Greek Cyprus. There was also the US ideological embargo of French fries in 2003 when the former Republican Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, Bob Ney, renamed this item in three Congressional cafeterias in response to France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. Even when it’s not about food, ideology has always been inserted into cuisine as that is where the heart of our cultural debates reside. Happily, French fries are back to their former appellation and the Belgians are still scratching their heads over that one.
Pick a food, any food and point to a place on the globe. Let’s start with tortillas. When you eat tortillas in Mexico and not Taco Bell, there are two primary types as any Mexican will tell you: there are tortillas árabes (Arab tortillas) and tortillas de maiz (corn tortillas). Where did the tortillas árabes originate? Compared to the flat corn tortilla which the early Mexicans called in Nahuatl tlaxcalli, the flour tortillas are similarly round and flat and cooked over a fire. In Mexico, the flour tortillas were said to originate in the state of Puebla, arguably Mexico’s culinary Mecca. (And yes, I know—I appropriated a city and displaced it for the sheer use of metaphor, but my point stands.) Others contend the adoption of the Arab tortilla came sometime in the late 19th and early 20th century with the arrival of immigrants from Lebanon to Mexico, a new world adaptation of the pita bread. However, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain documents that Hernán Cortés, after brutally conquering Mexico in 1519, sat down with his captains and the caciques (native chiefs) to a feast which included tlaxcalli. Since the conquest of the Americas, wheat was eventually imported to the region from Spain and from this era the flour tortilla emerged.
Tortillas ended up being that food into which other food was placed making the tortilla—corn or wheat—the perfect vehicle for transporting to the fields or the mines. It was and still is a type of sandwich which allows the carrier to stick various items—meat, vegetables, cheeses—into its centre, roll or fold, and then place into a pocket to eat at a later time. When stuffed the tortilla is transformed into a taco or when baked in a sauce, an enchilada. In a transformation of the taco, according to local folklore, a man named Juan Mendez from Chihuahua, Mexico is said to have carried this food around on his donkey (burro) becoming what is today called the burrito. Am I saying that Mexicans invented the sandwich? Certainly not, for such a claim would require evidence of which we have none. We have only history books which make references to foods and which attempt to put culinary traditions on the map. Hence, the Escoffier School of Culinary Arts has devoted some of its webspace to this issue. Even Escoffier himself penned a sandwich recipe in Le guide culinaire.
Did the Mexican taco make its way north of the border to the early colonies placing itself upon the original Thanksgiving table as the colonies' first sandwich? Or did the sandwich make its way over to the United States far later than the Mayflower? There is much made of the legend of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, and his propensity for gambling long hours which led to the invention of the sandwich which allowed him to stay seated at the gambling table at London's Hellfire Club as he was able to eat while continuing to play cards. But one could easily argue that this innovation already existed some several hundred miles west, in the region of Cornwall where the Cornish pasty, standard fare for miners, could be described as bread with a filling inside, a veritable sandwich for those on the go. Don’t tell that to Croque Monsieur or Croque Madame because they will no-platform you in a heartbeat as the French live and die by these elaborately named sandwiches. And don’t tell my cousin, Deven, who will swear that the best sandwiches in the world are to be found at one specific food stand in Baroda, Gujarat, where the Mumbai sandwich is all the rage. And yes, I just linked to the recipe from the Great British Chefs in homage to the concept of racialising food.
Where does it all end—or rather begin? Will the Argentines come to claim the empanada as the true origin of portable food in a bread packaging? Will the pupusa go to war against the arepa? Did the Philly cheesesteak sandwich originate in Philadelphia and did Pat Olivieri invent it? If so, wouldn’t that make the Philly cheesesteak sandwich an Italian invention? And let’s jump over to Italy where they call these things panini from panunto meaning “greased bread.” I guess such lovely words are given to these food items because that’s what you do when you have the Roman Empire blood pumping through you. And it’s not enough to just make a regular sandwich—the Italians have to do something to it. So, they wrap the food items inside the bread and then they grill them. How far back does the panino date? Domenico Ramoli’s La singolare dottrina was first published in 1560 in Venice. Still, the Italians hardly claim this as their "racialised" production as they have bigger fish to fry.
Then there is Vietnam’s bánh mì sandwich which has its origins in the French Colony of Cochinchina. Head towards South Africa and there is an expansive sandwich cuisine from the kota which made its first appearance in Durban a century ago to the spatlo which emerged in Gauteng and the Gatsby from Cape Town. There are so many sandwich foods that we can racialise them if we really wanted to: Turkey’s doner kebab, Serbia’s pljeskavica, China’s roujiamo, Uruguay’s chivito, Austria’s bosna, Senegal’s spicy bean ndame sandwich, Brazil’s bauru, Netherland’s broodje kroket, Portugal’s francesinha, and Chile’s Barros Luco named after Chilean president Ramón Barros Luco (1910-1915) who was a great admirer of this sandwich. Head over to Singapore and that tiny city-nation is teaming with sandwiches that people are enjoying such as the otah sandwich and kong bak pau. Tunisia’s fricassé is served on a taboun, a flatbread cooked much in the same way as tandoori, or French bread is also used. (Trigger warning: Don’t say taboun outside of Tunisia or you will be referring to a part of the female anatomy!)
How can we claim food or its makers are racialised in a good way when race is the one thing that food entirely transcends? If I am to take my cues from an article written by a Polish-Canadian that leads with a Canadian-African who lays out the claim that “owning” food culture is part of her “racial reckoning” as she armours herself with the woke-speak aimed at “rich white women,” then perhaps the problem isn’t the food or the “white” women. In fact, this problem seems very much to be firmly entrenched by those who are dead set upon making the world table at which we are all seated about an extremely outdated concept of race. That is if you take Darwin’s word for it.
Let’s just agree to put the left-handed eaters at the corners of the table. And let’s also dispense with the use of terms like “cultural foods” to refer to cuisine that everyone but “white people” consume and prepare. Such language and concepts have no business in any adult discussion of cuisine any more than the racist tropes Zoledziowski and Amoako employ that espouse difference as oppression and that attempt to divide culinary traditions against a colour scale which they alone have established. Blaming “white people” for preparing dishes originating from around the planet is as absurd as claiming that only Italians should listen to the radio. While Alexander Popov, Jagdish Chandra Bose and Nicola Tesla are three examples pointing to the fact that Marconi’s radio was not the first, the wise people of our planet have still peacefully shared this innovation for decades without anyone being terribly bothered if it was Italy, Russia, India or the United States which supplied the origins of their morning news.
It’s not only difficult to believe that someone who uses the hashtag #AmplifyMelanatedVoices is fighting racism, but it’s hard to understand such mechanisms as anything other than the hallmark of racism itself. From the elite writers and graduate students in one of Canada’s most expensive cities who use the media to shame “white people” to the many sycophants who follow this very conservative movement that sets up the scene for the virtual mobbing of people based on race, I’d say that we are in the throes of witnessing the political left shifting dangerously and speedily to the right. The minute any movement makes food about race and possession, it’s hard not to think of lunch counters during the Jim Crow era when quite similar arguments were made to segregate and silence.
In A Taste of Ethnographic Things (1989), anthropologist Paul Stoller elaborates what he calls a “tasteful ethnography” whereby language is ultimately freed from the responsibility of portraying the “real.” Stoller argues that taste—to include the embodied and performative sensations that arise from placing things in our mouths—is problematic in the Western philosophical traditions because “it is non-theoretical.” Studying culture in the Songhai region of West Africa (today which includes the countries of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria), Stoller advocates for a cultural understanding that liberates us from the theoretical limitations inherent within western discourse: “Free from the social, political, and the epistemological constraints of realism, a tasteful ethnography would take us beyond the mind's eye and into the domain of the senses of smell and taste.” He uses a sauce prepared by a local woman, Djebo, as a metaphor for this ethnographic approach. So great are her social frustrations and anger for the fact that she is married to an unsuccessful man that Djebo expresses her emotions through the culinary creation of fukko hoy, a sauce “that filled the anthropologists, as well as the other members of her compound, with disgust.” Stoller writes: “A tasteful ethnographic discourse that takes the notion of mélange as its foundation would encourage writers to blend the ingredients of a world so that bad sauces might be transformed into delicious prose.” Stoller broke down the ethnographic fourth wall between western anthropologists and the cultures they attempt to experience by bringing into the mix our need to invest theory into our every interaction and our inability to simply taste, to live.
So here’s my suggestion regarding the good writers at Vice and the steaming pile of conservative-sycophantism-dressed-as-progressiveness they serve on a platter with astounding frequency: Let’s ignore this elite clique of racists and sit down at the table with the evil “white people” in the hopes that the only bad taste left in our mouths is that of a badly seasoned dish and not the racism being stirred by those marking their capitalist territory. When we seek to racialise local and national cuisines prepared by non-“racialists” or non-nationals, we cheapen the cultural exchange that cuisine has always facilitated and we hurt our collective spirit in the process. Let’s take a cue from American chef Julia Child who evoked some of the deepest truths of the kitchen transcending national and ethnic boundaries when she infamously stated, “The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.”
Bon appetit!