Exotic Appetites

Ruminations of a Food Adventurer

Lisa Heldke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317827740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Exotic Appetites is a far-reaching exploration of what Lisa Heldke calls food adventuring: the passion, fashion and pursuit of experimentation with ethnic foods. The aim of Heldke's critique is to expose and explore the colonialist attitudes embedded in our everyday relationship and approach to foreign foods. Exotic Appetites brings to the table the critical literatures in postcolonialism, critical race theory, and feminism in a provocative and lively discussion of eating and ethnic cuisine. Chapters look closely at the meanings and implications involved in the quest for unusual restaurants and exotic dishes, related restaurant reviews and dining guides, and ethnic cookbooks.

PART ONE

Let’s Eat Chinese

WHILE VACATIONING IN IRELAND ONE SUMMER, MY PARTNER AND I FOUND OURSELVES ravenously hungry very early one evening in Dublin. Five-thirty is an inconvenient time to be hungry in Ireland; most restaurants don’t open for dinner until a much more fashionable hour, so unless you can satisfy yourself with pub food, your only option is to tough it out—or wander the streets in hopes of finding someplace open. Luck, however, was with us that evening; we stumbled upon an open Thai restaurant.

Finding a Thai restaurant in Ireland felt oddly like landing on home turf. When we are at home in Minnesota, we eat Thai food whenever we get the chance—which means whenever we can manage to be in Minneapolis or St. Paul around dinner time. Walking into this restaurant, we were strangely confident after days of moving tentatively through an unfamiliar world of pub lunches and full Irish breakfasts. I remember walking into the restaurant thinking, “Well, at least I’ll know how to behave here; I know how to behave in Thai restaurants.” Armed with this sense of belonging, of being in the know, I immediately began deciding which features of the restaurant’s decor were genuinely Thai, and which were of obvious Irish origin—this, despite my never having been in Thailand in my life, and having spent a grand total of six days in Ireland so far. I found myself chuckling just a bit smugly at the sight of the redhaired, freckled Irish teenager dressed in traditional Thai shirt and trousers who filled our water glasses. What in the world did those wacky Irish think they were trying to prove by dressing up in traditional Thai costumes? Surely they didn’t think they were passing for Thai with that hair!

In the midst of my complacency, however, I also found myself confused and a bit ill at ease. Here I was, staring in the face of a cross-cultural entrepreneurial enterprise that did not in any (apparent or necessary) way involve the United States, or a U.S. influence. Some Thai people apparently just moved to Ireland and opened a restaurant—and it looked like they didn’t even pass Go (a.k.a. the United States) to do it. How could this be?

While I assessed the restaurant and its staff, another part of me (the part that was supposed to be writing this book) observed myself at work, and wryly noted my eagerness to neatly separate the restaurant’s authentically Thai elements from its “Irish Thai” ones, despite the fact that only a couple weeks earlier I’d been furiously writing away on the spuriousness of authenticity. I was surprised—and embarrassed—to realize how willingly and easily I slipped into my food adventurer ways, with all the presumptions and ideological underpinnings that go along with them.

I realized that I regarded myself as knowledgeable about the difference between authentic Thai and Irish-influenced Thai restaurants quite literally because my Thai food experience had been restricted almost entirely to the United States. Unintentionally—indeed, despite my best and most highly reflective efforts—I had slipped into conceiving of the United States as culinarily neutral, as a beige backdrop against which other cuisines could display their features. According to this line of thinking, when a Thai restaurant appeared on the U.S. scene, it would not in any way bear the imprint of its locale; it would be just like a Thai restaurant in Thailand. By this line of reasoning, I, as an inhabitant of the United States, was in a perfect position from which to judge authenticity, since I’d seen Thai food cooked in a culturally neutral atmosphere—surely the next best thing to seeing it cooked on its native turf. My culture is a plain white plate—perfect for setting off features of a cuisine without imparting any flavors of its own.

I had also slipped back into conceiving the United States as Culinary Central—as the place through which any “foreign” cuisine would have to pass, before relocating in another “foreign” locale; this presumption produced my discomfort over seeing Thai and Irish culture linked together without any mediation by the United States. This particular food adventurer belief of mine even comes with its own mental image: a wheel with spokes radiating out from its axis to points on the periphery. The United States is the axis, and all other countries (and all subcultures within the United States) are points on the periphery. Peripheral cultures can only connect with each other by traveling on a spoke, through the center, down another spoke to the other culture. They cannot simply travel around the outer ring to engage with each other without involving the center.

Sitting in this Irish Thai restaurant, I recalled having had the same “How can They do it without Us?” feeling several years earlier, when I’d eaten in a Thai restaurant in Nairobi. How could Thai food have made it to Kenya without any (apparent) help from Us?¹ How could two cultures interact with each other without the United States being somehow involved?

The United States, on the cultural food colonialist view from which I was operating, was both centrally important and transparent, both a necessary party to any cross-cultural dialogue and an entirely neutral party.

And I was having a classic food adventurer moment.

Colonizing as an Attitude Problem

Food adventuring, as I conceive of it, is in part an attitude, a particular spirit or disposition I embody as I go into a restaurant or a grocery store, as I read a cookbook or talk with a friend about a meal. What do I mean when I describe food adventuring as an attitude? Before I turn to examine the specific features of the food adventurer’s attitude, it’s worth briefly examining my use of this term.

Attitudes Involve Practices

The term “attitude” may seem an odd choice here, because we often tend to think of attitudes as purely mental entities—private, internal possessions that have no tangible outward manifestations. On this view, we can “keep our attitudes to ourselves”—hiding our evil ones behind a façade of polite and friendly behavior, for instance. If attitudes were purely mental, purely internal, it would not be useful to describe food adventuring as an attitude. Such an identification would isolate attitudes from actions, leaving them with virtually no explanatory power.

But attitudes are not purely mental. I do not simply carry them in my mind; I carry them on my face, in my posture, and (crucially) in my interactions with others. I constantly display my attitudes in the ways I approach the world. (That doesn’t mean we can never keep our attitudes to ourselves—I can at least temporarily conceal an attitude from you, for example, by pretending to have a different one.) Attitudes are in principle always at least partly public—open to observation, scrutiny, praise and criticism. Behavior is part of the attitude itself, not just the outward manifestation of it. More than a promissory note for action, an attitude is best understood as a kind of action. Any activity into which I carry a particular attitude will, therefore, come to be shaped by that attitude. Any activity into which one carries a colonizing attitude becomes structured by colonizing. The reverse is also true; that is, attitudes manifest themselves in actions; and actions are shaped and formed by attitudes.

Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey provides further insight into this relationship. In describing it, Dewey variously uses the notions of “attitude and act,” “motive and consequence,” and (most often) “character and conduct.” In an early work, we find this definition of character and conduct (a definition in which Dewey even uses the word “attitude”): “If we take the moral feelings, not one by one, but as a whole, as an attitude of the agent toward conduct, as expressing the kind of motives which upon the whole moves him to action, we have character. And just so, if we take the consequences willed, not one by one, but as a whole, as the kind of end which the agent endeavors to realize, we have conduct.”² Character, then, is the entire package of motives and aims, out of which spring our various actions. These various actions, taken together and understood in turn as the consequences of our motives and aims, comprise conduct.

In a dichotomy-smashing move that is familiar to readers of Dewey, he defines character and conduct as “morally one and the same, first taken as effect and then as causal and productive factor.”³ Character, to oversimplify, is “yesterday’s conduct,” while conduct is “tomorrow’s character.” The two cannot be understood in isolation from each other, and indeed, they are formed (and continually reformed) in intimate relation to one another. “In a word, character is the unity, the spirit, the idea of conduct, while conduct is the reality, the realized or objective expression of character.”⁴ What Dewey holds for character and conduct I likewise maintain for attitude and action.

Understanding attitudes in this way means that when two people engage in what is ostensibly the same activity but with different attitudes the activities are not the same in the two cases. A group of people eating in an ethnic restaurant are not all doing the same thing, but are engaging in a host of different activities that are infused with the attitudes of those who participate in them. On Dewey’s terms, conduct differs because character differs.

What follows from this analysis of the relation between attitude and action? Simply this: sometimes eating in an ethnic restaurant actively supports and advances colonialism, and sometimes it does not; sometimes it even resists colonialism. If attitudes can be colonizing, then surely they can be anticolonizing as well; and if anticolonizing attitudes were to shape eating practices, then activities that are vehicles of colonization could be transformed into vehicles of anticolonialism. Once we recognize attitude and action (character and conduct) as mutually constitutive, we must also recognize that activities do not carry their moral meaning and worth independent of the attitudes of those who carry them out; it is not the case that some actions are “anticolonialist in principle.” Challenging food colonialism will not be accomplished by my simply forswearing some set of activities (no more eating in ethnic restaurants, no more shopping in ethnic grocery stores)—or even swearing on to some other set. The relation between attitude and action makes any such simple moral commandments impossible.

I’ll return to this topic in much more detail in part 4.

Attitudes and Ideologies

I understand attitudes to be individual embodiments of culture-wide ideologies. Paolo Freire, the Brazilian radical philosopher of education, describes the relationship, noting that “the dominant ideology ‘lives’ inside us and also controls society outside.”⁵ The ideology of colonization that pervades and controls a particular society also lives inside us as a colonizing attitude.

Thinking of attitudes in this way connects the macroscopic level to the microscopic; it links large scale political and economic systems to individuals’ actions and beliefs. Such links are vital because, without them, we are left to understand systems like colonialism either as large scale systems of oppression only (an understanding that obscures the ways in which individuals perpetuate those systems) or as individual acts entirely (an account that hides the powerful institutions linking individuals’ actions, and that makes it look as though individual action alone can transform the world).⁶

In exploring and confronting a phenomenon such as food colonialism, it is important to stress the relationships between large and small, between ideology and attitude. To see why, consider this example from my work as a teacher. I teach courses on racism and sexism, in which I focus on large-scale systems of oppression. I do this as a way to counter my students’ tendency to see oppression only in the individual attitudes of bad people. However, I have also learned that if I focus exclusively on systems, I tend to immobilize students, who become confounded by the sheer size of the problems they confront, and end up feeling that their own actions are of no consequence whatsoever. I have come to appreciate the importance of interweaving discussions of systems of oppression with discussions about how the attitudes and actions of individuals can work to support or resist oppressive systems. Otherwise, students disengage from the problems they confront, figuring that they as individuals are no (meaningful) part of the problem, and thus cannot be any (useful) part of a solution.

That same principle carries over to my thinking about food adventuring. Without question, we must understand the ways that colonialism shapes the world food system on the macro level (think, for example, of the ways in which entire local economies are given over to the production of luxury crops for export, leaving local farmers in the position of paid workers who cannot afford to purchase the foods they once grew). But if we locate colonialism only in such large-scale relationships, ordinary individuals within colonizing societies may well feel that we are innocent of any participation in colonialism, or are at least powerless to do anything about the colonizing relationships that do exist. (I, personally, don’t control any multinational food companies, and the trifling amount of stock I hold in such companies surely can’t make any difference, can it?) In an effort to resist such disengagement, I think food adventurers are warranted in devoting attention to the ways that individual attitudes and actions manifest and reinforce colonizing relationships.

Food Colonizing Attitudes

There is no single set of beliefs, dispositions, and behaviors that can be called “the colonizing attitude,” just as there is no one thing called “the ideology of colonialism.” The ideologies and attitudes we call colonialism have as many faces, as many aspects, as there have been colonizing relationships in history. It would be not only impossible, but also foolhardy, to try to characterize all colonialism in terms of a single ideology.⁷ Instead, I choose to focus on two elements that play an important role in the attitudes of many contemporary Euroamerican food adventurers and other cultural colonizers: their often obsessive interest in and appetite for the new, the obscure and the exotic; and their treatment of dominated cultures not as genuine cultures, but as resources for raw materials that serve their own interests. These two elements are linked together by a third element that plays a supporting role: the adventurer’s intense desire for authentic experiences of authentic cultures.

In this section of the book, I explore each of the three aspects of the food colonizer’s attitude in some detail, beginning with the quest for novelty and exoticism in chapter 1, and ending with the Other as resource in chapter 3. In this initial description of the three, I will draw my examples primarily from diners’ experiences in restaurants—my own experiences and those of people with whom I’ve talked. In parts 2 and 3 I will reexamine these three aspects of colonialism through the lenses of restaurant writing and cookbook writing, to see what more we can learn about each of them if we consider other food adventuring activities.

Chapter 1

The Quest for Novelty

Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture

—bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation

FOOD ADVENTURERS ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING NEW TO EAT. WE’D rather try a new dish than eat the same one we had last time—even if we loved the one we had last time. We’d rather try a new restaurant than eat at an old standby. And, more than anything else, we love to try cuisines we’ve never had before. I used to think that everyone sought out variety in their diet—everyone, that is, except for children and picky eaters, whose eating habits were anomalous and in need of special explanation. The rest of us, I assumed, just tried new foods as a matter of routine.

But humans do not universally desire novelty. Many eaters—including many ethnic food fans—place a high premium on constancy in their diet.

I’ll Have the Usual: The Virtues of Tradition

In many cultures of the world, people eat the same kinds of foods for generations, coming to define themselves in terms of their relations to those traditional foods. A South Indian waiter explained to me once that “South Indians are rice people; North Indians are wheat people.” To him, South Indian cuisine, in all its variety and complexity, could still be understood in terms of one single, staple, defining food. In many cultures, a single starchy food plays such a central role in the culture’s foodways that its absence means there is no meal. To ask, in Chinese, if one has eaten, you literally say “Have you had rice?” When I was growing up among Lutherans, the joke was that you only had to say a prayer before eating if there were potatoes—no potatoes, no meal. Within this kind of eating context, variety—at least variety in staple foods—is accorded little value.

Some cultures place such value on the traditional preparation of their cuisine that their members tend to systematically reject new ways of preparing foods. Cookbook author Claudia Roden writes that “Cooking in the Middle East is deeply traditional.… Its virtues are loyalty and respect for custom and tradition, reflected in the unwavering attachment to the dishes of the past. Many have been cooked for centuries, from the time they were evolved, basically unchanged.”¹ She notes that when an outsider suggests a variation in a recipe, the outsider is likely to be met with incredulity, scorn, or laughter.

Such aversion to new food preparation techniques or new foods sometimes has considerable political and social significance, as it does when a colonizing culture rejects the foods of the people it has colonized—or vice versa. Nineteenth-century European colonials living in Asia and Africa often pointed to the food of ...