Migrants, Nationalism and Culinary Heritage

Back to the question of culinary heritage that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.  And to my book, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage. When I said that I picked the title just because it sounded good, that’s not quite right.  What is true was that then I had no clue about the gathering storm of articles and books on memory, patrimony, and heritage.  But what is also true is that I was a bit unnerved by much of the common wisdom about cuisine and heritage.

For me, this was summed up by an encounter at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, one of my favorite events. But like all events, the attendees are a mixed bunch.  And when one of them years ago, on learning that I lived in Hawaii as we chatted over lunch, let out “Oh you poor dear.  There’s no food there.  There’s no peasant background.  Nothing culinary of interest I’m afraid,”  I could feel my hackles rising, my bristles going on alert.

I thought about explaining about the extraordinary mix of people in the islands, about the culinary ferment, about the creation of a grass roots Local Cuisine.  Then I thought better of it.  My companion across the lunch table was wedded to one of the great myths of our time, or better clusters of myths:  that cuisines have their origins in peasant societies; that cuisines are rooted in the local environment; that cuisines are immobile and that the older and deeper their roots, the more respect they deserve. Shattering that set of assumptions was more than I could do in a noisy lunch setting.

Hawaii–a place where the cuisine was created by diasporas, by migrants–had one of the most vibrant food cultures I had ever encountered as cooks in the home and in restaurants found ingredients, utensils, condiments, and above all techniques with which they could experiment to their hearts’ content.

This culinary ferment paralleled the intellectual, economic, cultural and technological ferment that so often results when different peoples come in contact.  When Greek geometry meets Babylonian measurement. When ceramics soar thanks to interchanges between Persia and China, and then between Europe and the Americas.  When Europeans rediscover and rework the philosophy and science of the Ancient World.  And so on.  It’s not invariable but it is very common.

So that’s why I blink a bit at the two proposals that Mexico has submitted to UNESCO to make all or some of the indigenous cuisine of Mexico a patrimony of humanity (and a source of tourist revenue).  The first in 2005 was entitled Pueblo de maíz. La cocina ancestral de México. Ritos, ceremonias y prácticas culturales de la cocina de los mexicanos  (The people of maize.  The ancestral cuisine of Mexico. Rites, ceremonies and cultural practices of the cooking of Mexicans).  The second, under consideration right now, narrows the focus to the cuisine of certain rural settlements in the state of Michoacán in central Mexico.

Mexico is a country that is at least 70% urban.  It was created as a nation in the early nineteenth century when it included huge chunks of what is now the United States. Before that it was part of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, an empire that I needn’t remind you stretched all the way south to present day Argentina and that put its stamp on the cooking of that entire territory. Before that what is now Mexico was in the hands of various peoples, again whose territory did not map on to present day boundaries (and who were not always maize eaters). And to cap it all off, Mexico, like most of the world’s nations, has had a stream of immigrants–Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, American, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, South and Central Americans, to name just some–who have contributed to the country’s cuisine.

That extraordinarily rich past, that mixing of peoples, the creative fusions that have resulted never appears in the UNESCO proposals, proposals that assert that Mexican identity and a cuisine that purportedly reaches back 8000 years is one and the same.  Defining Mexican identity this way leaves most of the population with the choice of opting for a past that is not theirs or for being left out of the official national identity.  Primogeniture wins again.  The present powers pick on the first occupants as the genuine ones (setting to one side the actual history of the indigenous in Mexico).

Can you imagine the US defining its national cuisine as that of the native Americans?  Even the New Englanders, who had a go at defining it as their cuisine in the late nineteenth century, couldn’t get away with that.  Can you imagine most other Latin American countries defining their national cuisines as ones that including no Spanish colonial let alone later migrant influence?  I don’t think so.

Next week I will be talking on culinary heritage in Panama City, a city that like Honolulu has been the beneficiary of global migration.  And I will be taking the opposite tack from the UNESCO proposals, arguing that it is this very synthesis that has created their rich and fascinating cuisine.

Finally a couple of links for those who read Spanish.

An analysis and critique of the first Mexico UNESCO proposal by Albert Moncusí and Beatríz Santamarina can be found in  an anthology Identidades en el plato: El patrimonio cultural alimentario entre Europa y América edited by Marcelo Alvarez  (President of the College of Argentinian Anthropologists and on the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food) and Xavier Medina (Barcelona, President of the European branch of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food).  Thanks to Luis Vargas of the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicos of the UNAM for the link.

Taking the opposite tack, a Course on culinary tourism given that the Universidad del Claustro Sor Juana can be Programación curso Gerardo.

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