Category Archives: chinese-ish food
Authenticity, again
Excerpt from Taco USA, by Gustavo Arellano
I can’t express how much I love this article. Arellano is writing about Mexican food, but he perfectly encapsulates what I find so eyebrow-raising about “authentic Chinese cuisine.” “Authenticity” may be a favorite term of the left, but it’s a deeply conservative concept, one that chains immigrants to an “Old Country” culture artificially purified through some sort of anthropological reverse osmosis. Give us our fortune cookies and margaritas, our fried-to-a-crisp chow mien and our tater tot burritos! Okay, fried-to-a-crisp chow mien is kind of gross, but I will defend to the… er, gag your right to eat it.
A few delicious quotations:
“Food is a natural conduit of change, evolution, and innovation. Wishing for a foodstuff to remain static, uncorrupted by outside influence—especially in these United States—is as ludicrous an idea as barring new immigrants from entering the country.”
“With due respect to my fellow lefty professors, they’re full of beans. I’m not claiming equal worth for all American interpretations of Mexican food; Taco Bell has always made me retch, and Mexican food in central Kentucky tastes like …well, Mexican food in central Kentucky. But when culinary anthropologists like Bayless and Diana Kennedy make a big show out of protecting “authentic’ Mexican food from the onslaught of commercialized glop, they are being both paternalistic and ahistorical.”
“I’ll never forget the delight I felt a couple of years ago when I worked on a series of investigative stories on Orange County neo-Nazis. One of the photos I unearthed showed two would-be Aryans scarfing down food from Del Taco, a beloved California chain best known for its cheap and surprisingly tasty burritos. The neo-colonizers have become the colonized, and no one even fired a shot.”
Filed under cantankerousness, chinese-ish food, mexican-ish food
The Most Exotic Vegetable in the World
Having had enough of beets, Dr. Unexploited and I decided to get something new and exciting at the farmer’s market. (Yes, that’s our idea of excitement. We are the kind of people who find TV overstimulating; we use the previous … Continue reading
Filed under chinese-ish food
The Inimitable Shrimp Ball*
Despite what yuppies would have you believe, processed foods are found all over the world, not merely in the poorer and therefore less virtuous parts of America. Where the West has spam, bologna, and hot dogs, the East has fish … Continue reading
Filed under chinese-ish food, shrimp, whimsical and strange
Introducing The Exploited
As you probably noticed, the title of this blog is a play on “conspicuous consumption,” Thorstein Veblen’s theory of the birth of the yuppie. I mean, his theory of the middle and upper classes’ gratuitous displays of wealth. My (significant) … Continue reading
Filed under chinese-ish food, introduction, noodles, whimsical and strange
Authentic and inauthentic Chinese food
Because I learned to cook from a Chinese woman, namely my mother, many of these recipes will have an unmistakeable Chinese influence. None of them are to be mistaken for authentic Chinese cuisine. However, if you still crave authenticity, I’ll … Continue reading
Filed under chinese-ish food, shrimp
