Category Archives: mexican-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
Cheap Approaches to Regenerating Labour Power
By The Exploited Lunchtime is not a time for celebration, merriment, or joy, but instead, serves as a tender reminder that the day’s servitude is barely 25% complete. As such, the lunches I prepare tend toward the repetitive and unoriginal … Continue reading
Filed under cantankerousness, mexican-ish food, quantitative
Culinary Miscegenation
It is perhaps something about the nebulousness of American identity that leads to our obsession with tracing national origins. It doesn’t matter whether or not these designated origins have any relation to actual history. Witness French fries, which are actually … Continue reading
Filed under mexican-ish food, pizza, whimsical and strange
