by Holly Hughes
A couple months back, I gave a dinner talk to a meeting of SEC conference academic provosts. I opened by declaring that this was a hopeful moment. I told them that the South was in renaissance. I said that, just as economists customarily declare a recession or boom six months or more after it occurs, we will not recognize this renaissance until it has passed. But it is here.
To sketch what is different this time out, I talked about how all Southerners may now claim the region. And I cited Brittany Howard, lead singer of the Alabama Shakes. To mark her love of the place over which George Wallace once lorded, Howard wears a tattoo of the state of Alabama on her right bicep. This time, I said, “Southerner” is not code for “white Southerner.” When we speak of the South and of Southerners, the reference is no longer monochromatic.
When I took a seat at table, after delivering a talk that focused on how food now serves as a unifying symbol for Southerners of all colors, one of my tablemates leaned in to question my vision. Faced with the Trump carnival of bigotry and intolerance, she asked kindly, how could I see the region (or the nation) with such optimism? Was I not paying attention? Or was I willfully ignorant? Identity, it seems, is an especially thorny subject at a moment when Trump supporters adopt Nazi salutes and Trump himself incites racial violence.
Tunde posed a complementary question, flipped to reveal an obverse that I hadn’t glimpsed before. How could I claim the moral pulpit in the Southern food dialogue when I take my stances from the levee? If you live on the same street as me you know I’m a liberal. If you follow my Twitter feed, you recognize that I reserve a circle in hell for the neo-Confederates and country club privilege jockeys who knead and twist and shape the history of this region until they render themselves victims.
When attacks on my beliefs and stances occur, they come from the right. Or from someone who has a score to settle. But here came Tunde, without personal malice, and with great charm, saying things that made me supremely uncomfortable, making it clear that he saw me as a kind of colonial force, appropriating black cultural processes and products.
As a columnist for this magazine, I’ve observed that the true promise of writing about food lies in the opportunity to pay down debts of pleasure and sustenance to the cooks who came before us. I’ve acknowledged that, for much of our region’s history, blacks and women did much of the conceptual and physical labor in the region’s kitchens but received niggling credit.
I think of myself as a progressive. I’m proud of the subjects I’ve written about, from the race-baiting politics of Lester Maddox, the Atlanta restaurateur turned Georgia governor, to the booty-call white patronage of an Arkansas Delta barbecue joint. I suspect that if I had said any of this to Tunde, he might describe that as comparatively easy and riskless work. He might say that it’s guilt-assuaging work. And he would be right.
After the Eater article came out, I exercised my power in what seemed a becalming way. I wrote Hillary Dixler to thank her for asking good questions. I called Michael Twitty to talk about the power I believe he now possesses. I spoke with Sean Brock about the reconciling possibilities I see in the meal they plan to cook together. And, as I barreled toward New Orleans, I suggested to Tunde that the article and its fallout might serve as a text for our dinner conversation. As you have now read, I got what I asked for. What I deserved.
I’ve been on this path for a while now. From Ta-Nehisi Coates, I learned to talk about racism instead of race. From Osayi Endolyn, I learned that Africa is not a country and West Africa is a more complex region than I could comprehend. From the fallout after the Eater article, I learned that a wide range of folks, both black and white, burn for these conversations. Now I brace for what comes next. Demographers tell us that 56 percent of Americans will be people of color by 2060. That doesn’t mean that people of color will control the power. When blacks were the antebellum majority in states like Mississippi and South Carolina, they didn’t wield monetary power or control politics. Tunde suggests that, unless power is ceded this time, there will be hell to pay. I fear that he’s right.
Over dinner in New Orleans, I told Tunde a couple stories about the late Will Campbell, the white Baptist preacher who was born in rural Mississippi, educated at Yale, and who practiced a radical Christianity during the civil rights movement. One story involved Campbell’s decision, on a prompt from civil rights leader John Lewis, to work with his own people. Brother Will, I told Tunde, took that message to heart and began ministering to Klansmen, who needed God’s grace, too. Instead of fighting on the front lines of the civil rights movement, as he had done in 1957 when he escorted black children to a Little Rock high school, Brother Will moved to the rear, where the wounded were white.
Tunde liked the message embedded there. And he interpreted it this way: Leave black culture alone. Let it find its own way beyond your white gaze. Stand down, and, in your absence, black voices might be heard, black thought might find purchase, black enterprise might flourish.
I heard Tunde as loud and clear as I was able. So loud and clear that, when I called Jeff Allen to talk through his incendiary comments, I heard myself voicing Tunde’s power dynamic critiques.
Still, I know this about myself: I’m not willing to step away. I’m not able.
In the South, black and white culture are enmeshed and codependent. To walk away from writing about black life would be to divorce myself from writing about the South. To parse by color would be to render a syncretic culture a racial or geographical one. To step away, at the moment when Brittany Howard is climbing the charts and inking her troth, would be a rejection of the possibilities that she sees clearly and I squint to apprehend.
What I can offer rings meager, even to me. I aim to listen more and speak less. I pledge to cede what is not mine and try to understand the difference. And I aim to do this, not out of noble obligation, but owing to the thoughtful path Tunde charts. He may see that promise as inherently false. As much as I’m open to and appreciative of Tunde’s reality, I can only act on mine. What I offer is as true and graceful as I can manage.
Despite my best efforts, and his, and despite my pledge, I didn’t really get Tunde’s point until I returned home to Oxford and opened my mail. A month prior, when I submitted the manuscript for my next book, a history of Southern food that begins with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, I treated myself to a gift. To commemorate a chapter focused on the black power movement of the 1970s, I bought a sweatshirt from a company called Philadelphia Printworks. The design was bold and elegant. At center on a field of dove gray, the legend people’s free food program surrounded a leaping black panther, rendered in midair strike.
I knew the history behind the legend. I admired the actors in that historical moment. But I recognized, as I slipped the hoodie over my head: This shirt is not mine to wear. Removed from the context of Southern history, that story is not mine to tell. As I took stock of what Tunde said, I recognized that, by refashioning a symbol of black power and resistance into a white fashion statement, I had unwittingly made Tunde’s argument. That next Monday morning, I repackaged my own gift and dispatched it as a present to Tunde. When the mail carrier arrived to pick up the package, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a gator retreat. And then I saw her retrench.
—JOHN T. EDGE
Who Has the Right to Capitalize on a Culture’s Cuisine?
BY LAURA SHUNK
From Food52.com
Putting cultural appropriation issues into thoughtful context, journalist Laura Shunk—former dining critic at NYC’s The Village Voice and Denver’s Westword—adds the perspective of a college degree in global food politics, plus her most recent experiences as a Henry Luce Scholar in Beijing.
Six years ago, I published a story about a live octopus hot pot I ate in Queens that hinged on a video of the cephalapod writhing across a hot stew of vegetables. Predictably, animal rights activists skewered me for my insensitivity, and as someone who wrestles constantly with questions of ethical eating, I can’t say that I bl
ame them.
But I’m more uncomfortable with that piece today because it was sloppy journalism: it was a story built solely for page views, and to accomplish that goal, it removed an aspect of Korean food culture from its broader context and exploited its oddness for the American audience. Worse, I, a white woman who grew up on the Wonderbread cuisine of middle America (and had eaten Korean food about 10 times before writing that piece), potentially shamed Korean readers for their food habits while elevating myself for being “brave” and trying such a “bizarre” food.
This type of journalism—and dining—has been a major component of American food culture over the last several years. A few years ago, New York had an annual balut-eating contest, daring diners to house fertilized duck embryos popular in many Southeast Asian nations as fast as they could. The Travel Channel airs a show called “Bizarre Foods,” and bills it as an exploration of other cultures via the weirdest regional specialties host and creator Andrew Zimmern can find. Outlets as diverse as National Geographic, USA Today, and Buzzfeed have run columns asking travel journalists, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?” Eating clubs fetishize dining on odd animal parts or racy chilies or fermented vegetables; restaurateurs and chefs scour the globe for inspiration that hasn’t yet hit mainstream eating consciousness; and writers rush to collect street cred by “discovering” “new” cuisines and ethnic enclaves.
But over the last year, we—diners, chefs, journalists—have begun to discuss whether this is okay. Who has the right to capitalize on a particular culture’s cuisine? Who has the right to cook it, and who can write about it?
I’ve spent the last year pondering this from afar. Last June, I touched down in Beijing, where I planned to spend a year studying Chinese food and agriculture so that I could eventually write a book, and so that I could immediately apply what I was learning to stories I’d pen for a variety of publications. I hadn’t been here long when campus protests erupted across the States, bringing to the forefront, among other issues, a roiling conversation about cultural appropriation, which, as transgender writer and activist Julia Serrano masterfully articulates, takes issue with white Americans profiting off of cultural contributions made by minorities and outside groups, while erasing those groups from the cultural historical record in the process, or worse, denigrating those groups by perpetuating negative stereotypes.
I watched the discussion hit the food world soon after, when Rick Bayless caught flak for building an empire off of Mexican food, and Sean Brock and Mike Lata were chided for carrying the mantle of Southern food without properly acknowledging the slaves who’d originally brought to the region the dishes they were now using to form the foundation of their menus. In the journalism world, Eater’s Hillary Dixler found herself in the middle of her own appropriation controversy when she asked a black DC-based food historian whether Charleston’s food culture was appropriative (thereby launching that Brock/Lata controversy), after which John T. Edge and Tunde Wey discussed whether white writers should be commenting on black food at all.
It’s been an odd conversation to observe from China, partially because I’m living in a culture where the power dynamics are reversed: I am the outsider. Moreover, unlike an immigrant in America, who can eventually become a naturalized citizen, I will never be Chinese, no matter how long I live here, how well I speak the language, or how much I fold myself into society. Even if I married a Chinese person and had half-Chinese children, I would still be a wai guo ren—a foreigner.
Therefore, it is totally non-threatening for me to write about, learn about, or cook Chinese food here—Chinese culture reigns supreme as the superior culture of the land, and China doesn’t much care what a non-Chinese person has to say about it. Of course they should want to participate in this culture, the thinking goes. It’s the best. The cultural appropriation debate is not a conversation China is interested in having, at least not in the way we’re having it.
But this is not really a conversation about China—it’s a conversation about America, and what it means to be American, and it’s about to get personally relevant for me: I’m getting ready to come back to America, and when I start to write about Chinese food there, I’m going to be forced out of the observational perch into which I’ve comfortably nested abroad. I’m going to have to confront this conversation head-on, and, as Edge said, I’m going to have to prepare to be uncomfortable with other Americans who disagree with me or take issue with my context.
And context is not easy. Living and researching here has made me realize how much Chinese food—hell, Chinese culture—has been flattened in mainstream American conversation. Despite how it’s presented, China is not a monolith. It’s a country with incredible regional diversity, and it’s more accurate to talk about Hunan cuisine or Xinjiang cuisine or Yunnan cuisine than it is to talk about Chinese cuisine. These are all Chinese cuisines—but they’re about as different from each other as German food is from southern Italian, or Tex-Mex is from mid-Atlantic seafood.
Moreover, Chinese food, as with any part of a living culture, is not static. Sichuan food is world-famous for its spice, but the region boasts a 5,000-year-old history of civilization, and it didn’t fully integrate chile peppers until the 1800s. The most common preparation of Beijing duck, an iconic dish here, evolved over at least 600 years, and didn’t take its current state until the 1850s (and Da Dong, a celebrity restaurateur here, is famous because he tweaked that duck further in the 1990s). One of this country’s most ubiquitous dishes, a spicy chicken number called la zi ji, was invented in the 1920s, and it didn’t become a menu staple until the 1990s.
As I think about who should tell that story, it’s weird to me that we’d necessarily expect Chinese-Americans to speak on behalf of the entire culinary canon. Asking your Chinese-American friend to weigh in on whether something is “authentically Chinese” strikes me as just as problematic as debasing their childhood comfort foods as “weird” or referring to a Chinese restaurant as a “discovery”: It totally misses that individual’s own history, personal identity, and, frankly, their Americanness, in favor of referring to them only by their race. (In a similar vein, any attempt to qualify anything in America as “authentic” misses the point—it’s been removed from its own complex cultural context and layered into the complex cultural context in America. To qualify a dish as such is to imagine it in some sort of cultural vacuum, and implies a kind of end of history—that dish can no longer evolve or adapt to circumstance, we’re saying, or it will lose something essential.)
And to insist chefs adhere to recipes from their own cultural background or demand eaters not venture out to experience new cuisine seems to build the very walls we’re trying to tear down. Experiencing positive aspects of other cultures is often the first bridge to breaking down the other-ness barrier, and food seems like an obvious way to do this.
But to dismiss this conversation out of hand is dangerous. Because the problem is, a lot of us haven’t been asking any Chinese-Americans—or Chinese food experts—to weigh in on our “discoveries” or “oddities,” which means we’ve no hope of bridging any sort of cultural gap or increasing diners’ understanding of the cuisine. We’re stripping out the context, and so not only might we be unintentionally perpetrating negative stereotypes or myths, we’re likely missing out on incredible stories.
So where does that leave me? I’ve always seen my role as a journalist as an imperative to immerse myself in something so well that I can explain it, clearly and entertainingly, to my audience. To illuminate murky subjects. To find the story. China is now inescapably part of my own story, and that’s going to come into play, in ways both subtle and pointed, as I encounter things that are overtly Chinese and things that are not. It’s going to color my writing even if I try to separate it. But it’s on me to continue to expand my own understanding so that I can more accurately illuminate a realm of food that is tasty, relevant, and vastly underexplored, and it’s on me to listen to Chinese people and Chinese-America
ns who might have a different perspective or interpretation, or who think I’m dead wrong.
It’s on me to be a better journalist. It’s on all of media to elevate voices of diverse backgrounds to add to our collective understanding of the complex cultural and racial history that we’re a part of in America. And it’s on all of us to consider the context of our actions, to seek perspective that might differ from our own, to engage in breaking down walls, to listen to each other, and to understand that America is really a patchwork of contributions from a multitude of backgrounds, and culture is always a work in progress.
It’s on us all to continue this conversation. And there’s no better place than over a meal.
Writing About Food at the Intersection of Gayness, Blackness & Faith
BY MICHAEL TWITTY
From Food52.com
The title really says it all. Culinary historian Michael Twitty—who blogs at Afroculinaria.com—wields a multifaceted perspective on the food scene. His 2017 book The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African-American Culinary History in the Old South touches on all this and more.
My Daddy was not very happy with Mama’s choice of holiday gifts for three-year-old me. Seeing my penchant for all things culinary, she bought me a Fisher-Price toy kitchen set. This particular toy lasted me a good five years of my childhood. Its fake ranges were where I enacted the kitchen rituals I’d witnessed since my first cup of potlikker and cornbread (my first food after milk and formula). I played at making greens, frying chicken, and stirring morning pots of grits. I hoped for a toy oven, too, so that I could make hot rolls and biscuits like my grandmothers did—one born and raised in Virginia, the other in Alabama.
It wasn’t that the men in my families didn’t cook—they certainly did. But my Daddy was old school, and to him, despite my action figures and love of toy guns, the play kitchen was a sure sign of my coming homosexuality and thus an unsuitable toy for his only son. For once, he was half-right: Although I wouldn’t really fully know it for about seven more years, I was to be a gay male. I knew then and I know now that the play kitchen was nowhere near the culprit. I think the first dead giveaway was the fact that I gave my toy records the identities of Donna Summer and Blondie, but nobody really seemed to pick up on that.
