Two Nouns # 17: Gastrodiplomacy
Hello! With a sorry-not-sorry for the weeks without words. It's too easy to be paralyzed by the headlines and the heat. During one recent week of travel, it struck me that Paris should not be warmer than Lagos, even in July, and that we are doomed. So I've been avoiding Twitter, exploring British festival culture, taking a train across America.
One thing on my mind
If you know and love a Thai restaurant in America, it is so not by accident. Rather, you have been incepted by a country whose soft power takes the form of tom kha soup and penang curries. As Vice reports, the Thai government has financed tens of thousands of restaurants across the globe, staffed by Thai nationals sent to evangelize flavors and ingredients. Now, millions of people who have never been to Thailand rattle off noodle types quick as you can say “galangal.” Thailand has more restaurants per migrant to the US than China, Mexico, or other populous countries with American diasporas.
This sign on the Colorado-Kansas border is 8,600 miles from Bangkok.
I was shook to learn the special occasion takeout of my Chicago childhood (Thai 55), fuel for late nights editing in Washington (Thaitanic) and law school group study (Bangkok Gardens) were byproducts of intensive political and social engineering. Sweden, Malaysia, and Peru have tried so-called gastrodiplomacy, with less success. Kudos due to the Thai Department of Export Promotion, providing both a case study in franchising and trade strategy, and a reminder that food has a frontline connection to immigration and assimilation politics.
Of course, the $863B sized American restaurant industry relies fundamentally on the labor of global diasporas. Food service work is more common for the foreign born than native born. And as displacement becomes routine around the world, refugees and other vulnerable migrants have a propensity to engage in food sector work – in part because asylum countries limit the right to work for new arrivals in limbo.
What’s more, the trajectory of ethnic foods functions as a trailing indicator of demographic change. Basically, food preferences track who has immigrated and when – and often their social status in a new land.
For instance: German, Dutch, Nordic and Italian dishes are today seen as evidently American—like the early "white" settlers who imported them. Other cuisines have taken longer to be absorbed into the bloodstream, if at all. Greek diners pepper the northeast (though Greek yogurt only just happened). Thai has thrived, Filipino food kills it in California, but South Asian restaurants are underrepresented, given that the American population born in India alone has grown five times since 1990. The west African cooking I crave is scarcely available in retail form. Ethiopian food is giving it a go the vegan route.
To be sure, consumption is hard to measure with restaurant statistics – many immigrants feed their communities in private. And some foods come assimilated. California sushi rolls are the offspring of a Japanese medium and an American palate. Same goes for the recipes of the fictional General Tso (watch the film), or the unrepentantly mestizo burrito. This long read on the American origins of crab rangoon is delightful reminder that authenticity is a moving target.
This is America?
Still, the diffusion of culinary businesses tied to new arrivals tells a clear story about the plasticity of a nation. And to look closer, and check the tastes of wealthy nations against their immigration politics is to visit a terrain of hypocrisy and tone deafness.
Take the example of South Asian food in England. Waves of migrant restaurant workers from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India defined the postcolonial palate of Britain. Which is why, in 2001, the UK foreign secretary proclaimed the national dish of England to be chicken tikka masala. An upgrade from fish and chips, to be sure, the notion was framed as charming tolerance rather than a fact extracted (like everything) from the former empire. Because while it’s true Britain has warmly embraced chicken tikka, it hasn’t embraced south Asian people. The economic decline of independent curry houses can be traced directly to the restrictive immigration policies of Britain’s last two decades.
A 1980s British comedy sketch: “I like curry, but now that we’ve got the recipe, is there really any need for them to stay?”
Similarly, millions of Americans tuck into their hummus, their Popeye’s, or kung pao—hardly thinking of the battles fought to legitimize cuisines and people once seen as dirty and backward. Since 2001, elements of western political culture have casually vilified the people of the middle east, even as the simultaneous surge of hummus consumption triggered a global chickpea shortage. While barbecue is considered to be endemic to the American south, the resourceful cuisine of black Americans has often been excluded from that heritage story.
It’s obvious, now, that we have to talk about Mexican food, which, in 2014, edged out "hamburger" as the third most common US menu type (after "pizza" and “varied”). To describe the cuisine as dominant in the Americas is actually selling it short. There’s a good argument that beans, maize, tomatoes (native to the continent) and the beloved avocado are the only authentic American food.
Mexico's soft power spans the continent, yet its nationals and diaspora are villified.
When might tacos, tamales and the rest get bundled with corn dogs, s'mores and other things born in the USA? I suspect the answer is never. The goalposts have shifted -- just as they have in the Anglo-America immigration drama. Mexican food will not be assimilated into an American palate for the same reasons some portion of the American people believe America is “full,” that nation formation is officially over. See border wall. See El Paso.
Better to stand apart than to be Columbused. But to me it's more evidence that the abstraction of supply chains (for goods, people, and customs) is politically dangerous. Food is not the main immigration battlefield, but culture has always been a meaningful driver of goodwill. Which Latinx communities could use these days.
Something to read:
A reasonable moment for Langston Hughes.
Do take your long weekend or lazier days to reeducate yourself about the consequences of African slavery in the American story. The New York Times' 1619 Project makes it easy and beautiful.
We bow to Toni Morrison. Tributes abound--but the books are the work.
And a coda from the last newsletter on monster women: This curtain opener for Succession season two – about monster men.
I will check you in September.
Dayo