Other People’s Food: Preliminary Thoughts
No one but a fool, particularly a white upper middle class fool, would plunge into the debate swirling around culinary appropriation. I’m that fool.*
Like many people, I’ve been trying to get my head straight about culinary appropriation.
Culinary appropriation is not a distant issue to me. My first food book on the cuisines of Hawaii nearly didn’t get published because the publisher, the University of Hawaii Press, thought that a “mainland haole (white person)” author like me publishing on the foods of the Islands would provoke a political uproar. The uproar never happened. The episode did, however, mean that I was never in the slightest doubt that dealing with the foods of other peoples could be political dynamite.
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Edit. This is one of a series of posts on attitudes to other people’s foods, arranged in rough historical order. I anticipate about five or six in all. Although this is a hot topic, the posts won’t be coming thick and fast, in part because I have other things I want to blog about, more important because I need time to think and read before sounding off.
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Now, to be clear. Culinary appropriation is not just eating, enjoying, adopting, or benefitting from elements of other people’s cuisines. That’s gone on throughout history. Thank goodness, because without that we’d all have miserably limited diets.
No, the core elements of culinary appropriation are three.
- A transfer of knowledge of food (raw material, ingredient, dish, or whole cuisine) from one group to another group or individual.
- A sharp difference in power such that the obtaining group can exploit the food knowledge in a way that the original group could not. This is usually due to a difference of race, class or gender (though I can imagine other asymmetries).
- Hence recognition and money accruing to the obtaining group (or individual) without acknowledgement or reward to those who generated the food knowledge.
As a white upper middle class person and citizen of two of the most powerful empires of the twentieth century, I can appropriate the cuisine of others. But by the above definition, if others chose to write about or offer for sale my cuisine (English, so I am not in fear and trembling that it will happen), that is not appropriation.
The great advantage of the term appropriation (which has been around much longer in music, literature, and the arts than in food) is that it suggests theft, it creates shock, it makes people examine their behavior in a new way.
The consequences (or perhaps disadvantages, depending on your perspective) are two.
First, that since it’s often not defined precisely, it leads the kind of shouting matches that have occurred on social media in the past few weeks.
Second, that this leads to antagonism and defensiveness from which it’s hard to recover.
As a result, I’ve bracketed “culinary appropriation” for the time being in favor of “dealing with other people’s food.” (I’d also love to introduce a little humor, or at least irony, because humor can both lighten and enlighten moral competitions that verge on the priggish. Unfortunately, humor is not my strong point so there won’t be much.)
Dealing with other people’s food is something every individual, every society has to decide how to handle. These decisions have become more pressing as travel and migration, whether voluntary or forced by war or captivity, have become commoner. I’ll be looking at how these decisions have been re-worked over time because I am, after all a historian. So expect several posts.
In the meantime, I’ll end with a favorite quote of mine from the distinguished historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown.
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*This is the second time in two weeks that I am doing so, the first being in on the BBC World Service program The Food Chain in a discussion called Hands Off My Food. The other participants were Michael Twitty, author of the forthcoming, The Cooking Gene, Clarissa Wei journalist and author of a Munchies article “On the Struggles of Writing about Chinese Food as a Chinese Person,” and Alex Stupak, chef and founder of the Empellon chain of Mexican restaurants. Unlike some of the debates about culinary appropriation I’ve seen on social media, this was both civil and wide-ranging, thanks to generous participants and Emily Thomas’s fine moderation.
Excellent preliminary points. Thank you for even considering wading further into the murky waters, let alone applying your sharp analysis with such care — very much looking forward to reading your future posts on this.
Thanks Thy. It’s not something I relish and I just hope other readers are as charitable as you have been.
I agree with the Wanderingspoon.
Your (Rachel) habit of defining terms provides a way to discuss as it defuses issues of misunderstanding.
The appropriation kerfuffle reminds me of the Fox News anchor asking Reza Aslan ‘what right did he, a Moslem, have to write a book about Jesus?’ And Aslan continually repeating, ‘because I’m a religious scholar’
You, Rachel, are a scholar. Write on!
The Fox News segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMR0a35tmnQ
Thanks Norm. Just wish I were an expert in intellectual property law and much else. And thanks for the Fox News link.
As always, it’s lovely to hear from you. BTW, have you been on any podcasts lately? Is Food Chain available as a podcast?
IP and food? I think it was Matt Ridley, in his discussion about IP in Rational Optimist, who pointed out that recipes aren’t copyrighted but they are considered sacred and one chef does not take another chef’s recipe.
Yes, Norm it is. I’ve added the link to my post. But here it is again.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0537nj8
I appreciated Alex Stupak’s thoughts. Food is a trade negotiation. He has to provide a fare that people will want to eat. If the food and drink is so unfamiliar, so strange, it can turn off customers.
Some may discount this idea of eating as a trade negotiation between a ‘buyer’ and ‘seller’ because Alex runs a restaurant. Food is a negotiation, whether for pay or simply nutrition. A decade ago I visited my eldest who was then living in Tokyo, Japan. We visited Kyoto and stayed in a Ryokan (Bed and Breakfast). At breakfast, we were served what I was told was a traditional breakfast. Seated next to us, was a Japanese couple with two young children. The children were frowning and the parents were speaking to them. My son told me, “They are saying what parents around the world tell their kids, ‘Try it…just a couple of bites. How do you know you don’t like it if you don’t try it?'”
This debate has become very shrill – I’m looking forward to your views on it, Rachel.
No avoiding shrill at the margins. At best hoping to enable conversation among those not on the margins.
Hi Rachel, this is a real issue here in Australia regarding native ingredients and Indigenous Australians’ cultural knowledge about their traditional foods. There is a growing recognition (is like to say respect but not sure that’s the case) of their food sovereignty but too often Aboriginal people are closed out or worse, exploited (including cultural exploitation in branding – names and graphic motifs etc) bringing them to market.
For more info refer academic papers by Charlotte Craw, John Newton ‘The Oldest Foods on Earth’ and the brilliant Aboriginal voice Bruce Pascoe, ‘Dark Emu: black seeds’.
Thanks so much for bringing this to the fore Rachel.
So many thanks for those references. One of the points I hope to make is that this is both a global discussion and a very local discussion in the sense that the issues work out differently in different places.
Thank you for your adding to the conversation about culinary/cultural appropriation. What bothers me about this discussion is that while I understand the power differences inherent in your definition is key to the issue, I find it hard to accept that skin color or ancestry (e.g. white, European) can limit a persons options in what they are allowed to cook or make money on. You provide the example of how it is not appropriation for someone of an oppressed/exploited culture to write or profit off of English cuisine but does that make that use of your cuisine any worse than appropriation? I do look forward to reading more of your thoughts.
Jeffery, thanks for taking the time to comment. I’m intending to address this question of power in one of my follow up posts.
Jeffery, thanks for taking the time to respond. I’m intending to do a whole post on power so perhaps we can follow up after that.
Thanks for taking this on, Rachel. The discussion around this issue has become shrill to the point that I am beginning to dread book events. I dislike feeling defensive about doing work that I take seriously, and try to do well and fairly. This post is a good start in helping me to grapple with it.
Robyn, I’ve thought of you often when in discussions about this. The kind of work you do requires all kinds of skills and lots of time. I couldn’t agree more that it should be taken seriously. Hoping now that you are moving closer (just an ocean away) we will finally get to meet.
I’ve thought of you often during these debates Robyn. Given the skills and the dedication that it takes to do your work, it really deserves to be taken seriously. I’d love to see more events (I remember some in the past) where people who are interpreting foreign cuisines explain their techniques, their successes, and their remaining problems.
I love your writing because it is so well researched. I found myself annoyed at the BBC interview when Stupak echoed what annoyed me (a white resident of the USA without an inherited food culture) in the same manner as the Rick Bayless/Sporkful backlash. It isn’t “cooking other people’s food” that is offensive, it’s the denial that as a white person in the USA they get automatic benefits, largely financial. Thought those two dudes are genuinely appreciating and immersing themselves in the cultures they respect and cook, they don’t seem to recognize they have any advantages over native cooks of those food here.
Thanks for writing. I have so much to respond to in your comment and my plate is a bit full right now. Hoping we can pick up some of these themes later.
Well, that’s very kind of you. And I’d love to respond at length to two of your points (no inherited food culture, and financial advantage over native cooks) but I’m a bit overwhelmed right now. Let’s see if they get covered in the coming days and if not circle back to them.
Very much looking forward to read your thoughts on this, Rachel. Even though the motive that started the whole debate and fired up our keyboards (Portland resto list) is, in my view, beyond silly, I think discussions are always good. Yet, my cynical side is wondering if bringing all this into the spotlight is not somehow legitimizing the issue. Maybe we should all just say “let food be food, who cares”, shrug our collective shoulders and show them a big middle finger. Will keep an eye on this space, greetings from Belgium!
Good to hear from you. I loved your post on the early Chinese restaurant in France. Yes, there is always the worry about legitimizing issues that shouldn’t be legitimized. On the other hand, there is now such confusion, perhaps anything that helps clarify is of use. We’ll see.
As usual, you are terrific, Rachel.
This issue is very similar to white groups and producers ripping off black bluesmen in the music industry at the beginning of rock and roll.
The answer was for legal protections for the authors of songs and professional access to the recording industry. This was why the registry, BMI, was created, to establish authorship. We have similar protection in this country with copyright for books and other forms of media. The great producer John Hammond was a pioneer in discovering and giving opportunity to black talent.
The problem was also lack of access to honest representation. Thievery abounded.
I have long felt that the model of micro-industry and micro-representation among the originating population would protect rights. This is difficult but not impossible. It requires innovative thinking.
Another problem for persons of any background is what to do with profits. Often creative people are really awful with money and even when they are successful financially, they do not manage assets well. This is another area that requires training.
Perhaps competitions for venture capital or venture capital offering support in these communities when the talent is recognized. To do that, one needs a venue for the recognition of talent. Part of the problem is training in business modes, often unfamiliar to creative people. These are the two components: access to capital and access to training. This is why incubators are good.
Food is difficult. The whole food system of distribution in the U. S. is overly complex. I am writing about an innovator in this regard. He has an idea for localization that circumvents the old system. Stay tuned. More in the future.
Diane, Thanks for all the information on music. It’s clear those issues are being re-visited here but you are much more on top of them than I would ever be. Hoping to use some of this is in a future post.
Rachel, As an author who writes narrative history about Asia, I was working on a book, in my usual writing and research mode. Completely by happy accident, I happened to get the opportunity to write a documentary film about swamp blues in collaboration with a music producer from Florida, where I live. This man was a legend and he recorded legends, down here in the South, where the music comes from, not in Los Angeles or New York.
He recorded legends as well as contemporary artists in a low-tech studio down in Florida. I am a music lover and have always been passionate about rock and roll and the blues.
Working with him, I had a chance to interview bluesmen from the New Orleans area (and other locations in Louisiana) where the swamp blues had its roots. I also got to interview the owner of a record studio in Chicago that specialized in blues. I got a chance to get the background of many legends in the business and also find out about their early careers. I also got down a lot of stories of the recording industry, the radio dissemination of blues artists early on in American music history, and I listened to stories past and present about access to the recording studios, registry of songs, and payment of royalties. Many bluesmen had white artists cover their original material. The white artists made money.
The role of music journalists in writing some of these wrongs cannot be underestimate, for they traced the history of the music and the origins of the music. Later, after the marketplace for the music developed, when the access was greater and the means of distribution was greater, there was more opportunity and more profit. I should say that the music business was not limited to stealing from black talent. Plenty of white talent were also robbed.
This might have been a question of race in the early days, but later on, it was simply a testament to human frailty and corruption.
I personally witnessed over a number of year, the phenomenon that many have alluded to in your comments, the idea that a person who creates a recipe or a cookbook or a restaurant from another culture is paying homage and respect to that tradition. This is the stance of Rick Bayless. I sympathize with it. Should a curator in a museum only show works of the culture of his own ancestry? I think not.
In many instances, white artists of the blues and rock and roll pay homage to their predecessors in the tradition. I will mention such famous names as Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and yes, even Mick Jagger. Those British boys worshipped the black artists that preceded them and often hired them as opening acts. Another white artist who paid tribute to his forebears in the blues was Eric Clapton.
I am always reminded of Paul Simon and the release of his brilliant album “Graceland.” He was speaking at a black college when a student in the audience rose and accused him of taking material that should have been done by black artists. Simon’s album featured the brilliant harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mombasa (sp.?), the South African group. Simon’s reply was simply that he had done it. It was music to him. It is like saying you have to be German to play Bach.
Is art the universal property of humanity or does it belong to only the originating group? You tell me. I include cuisine in art.
I like the tie-in with music adapting and synthesizing. It rings true to me (so I should have my shields up…but I don’t.)
I once had a chance encounter with a young professor who was an expert on pop culture. During the course of our short interchange he said of today’s western culture, “I don’t know how the youth of today find anything authentic. Everything is so pastiche.” As if during his formative years, everything WAS authentic.
Bach’s music, as inspired as it is, had its roots in previous music, which influenced what he wrote. He used ideas that had been developed elsewhere and melded those with his (and his audiences’) preferences to create something new and yet familiar.
The professor of pop culture had (and I expect the people decrying “cultural appropriation” have) forgotten an iron law: Everything Comes From Somewhere.
Absolutely.
A couple more thoughts: you might add ethnicity to the list of asymmetries. In the case of Turkey (most on my mind, obviously) I’m thinking of ethnic Turkish chefs and writers and Armenian-Turkish, Kurdish-Turkish, Assyrian-Turkish etc. foods.
I appreciate the inclusion of ‘class’. I’ll be honest and say that I found Clarissa Wei’s piece shrill, especially seeing that as a Chinese-American ‘privileged’ enough to travel to China to write about food there she’s essentially ‘appropriating’ as much as any Caucasian American who did the same would be.
And I would love to see, at some point, a serious look at all the alleged financial benefits that we appropriators enjoy. I often feel that folks who make those claims don’t understand the mathematics of book publishing. I enjoy what I do to earn money and in that I am, indeed, privileged.
But taking into consideration the amount of time (and money) that goes into writing a proposal, doing the on-site research, developing and testing the recipes, writing the manuscript, dealing with edits and proofing and more proofing (so much proofing!!), I, and many cookbook authors I know, actually only break even (or do less well) on their books. I didn’t realise that until I did it myself. (Of course there are the Big Names who do well on their books, and the opportunities that come from their books. But I believe they are in the minority.)
I know you’re overwhelmed! Just throwing that out there. Cheers Rachel.
Dear Rachel,
Very interesting article. Another very important instance of food appropriation is cheese, particularly the various cheeses made in Europe. I cite the case of feta cheese, which everyone loves and many countries make disregarding the fact that the cheese and its name are Greek and under P.D.O. [protected designation of origin] protection. Real Greek feta cheese must be from a combination of goat and sheep milk from animals that are grazed in Greek Macedonia [not FYROM, former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia!], Thrace, Thessaly, Epirus, central Greek, Peloponnese and Lesvos. Other mild white cheeses made in other areas of Greece and elsewhere (including Bulgaria, Turkey, USA, Denmark, and often even made from cows milk) MUST be designated WHITE CHEESE. Some producers go so far as to use the Greek flag on their product! Another case of appropriation of a nation symbol to sell a product!
But who is paying attention! Feta cheese (feta means “a piece” in Greek) is being produced and used in recipes all over the globe, and I am sure no one really understands or cares about what authentic Greek feta is. The EU is supposed to be protecting Greece’s right to be considered sole producers of authentic feta, but I don’t really see it happening. So for what it is worth, I suggest interested parties go back to their school days’ copies of THE ODYSSEY, Book Nine, which has the first written description of cheese-making in Europe by Cyclops in his cave where Odysseus and his men took refuge. If this doesn’t prove the “Greekness” of feta, I don’t know what does. The description is exactly the way the traditional cheese is still made. You can even buy the little wicker baskets in traditional shops all over Greece.
Here’s to more input on this modern problem of the globalization of foods. Thank you Rachel for increasing public awareness of OTHER PEOPLE’S FOOD.
So much to follow up on about your reply, Linda. Hope I touch some of the points in my upcoming blogs.
Echoing thecolonialgastronmer I think there is much to discuss about who benefits and the uses to which appropriation is put. I don’t think ‘dealing with other people’s food’ is the same thing as appropriation which I think has the weight of unjustness to it. Of course foods travel, are absorbed, reimagined. But what thecolonialgastronomer points to is the inequity we both see in Australia right now in who profits from the faddishness for native/indigenous produce. It’s often not at all clear to what if any extent indigenous communities whose knowledge has informed the use of the produce share in the profit from the marketing, usually at premium prices. We do need to tease out practices of ‘dealing with’ and ‘appropriation’ and not treat them as hegemonic.
Thanks for the comment (and the interesting web site which I have added to my RSS feeder). I think the question of indigenous produce that you refer to is an important issue and one that has not yet become central in the United States, the place I am most familiar with. I’m following up The Colonial Gastronomer’s suggestions to learn more about this.
Rachel you make two good points in your pieces on the theme of culinary appropriation: the historic disdain for other people’s food before the current fashion for omnivorousness; and the role of middlemen in transmitting cultures. Yet, I think you over-extend your argument when you presume that your interventions answer what is at stake in the culinary appropriation debate. As I have said elsewhere I think not cooking or eating other people’s food is the wrong answer to the problem of culture and power. The cure here may be worse than the symptom. Yet, neither of your pieces engages with the disease or the symptom of massive inequalities of culinary power between communities. Let me specify: how exactly would your theory account for the imbalance in about 200 years of cookbook writing in the United States, when more than 100,000 recipe collections were written and sold, and less than 200 were by African Americans, who in fact dominated the cooking trades in many parts of the United States? The proximate reason is illiteracy and access to to the press. But Black women were written out of many of those cookbooks as Barbara Haber and John Egerton note in Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code. Solid historical work by Marcie Cohen Ferris in The Edible South and commentary by John T. Edge in The Potlikker Papers make the same argument. If there is a clear evidence of culinary misappropriation this is probably a good place to begin. I do not think individual cases of middlemen transmitters of cultures fully answers the question on inequality in access to making claims on a culinary culture. As you can see the problem is even more complicated when it comes to accounting for the contribution of Native American farmers and cooks. So, I think you have to transform your argument to better address the question of historical inequalities of credit-taking and career-making in American food history. Of course the locus of that inequality changes over time — by race, gender and ethnicity — but I hope you do engage with inequalities more robustly. I think in both these pieces you sidestep the issue at hand.
Reading the March edition of Milk Street — print magazine, so article written long before the brouhaha over Mexican food appropriation went viral — I was struck by something in an interview with Diana Kennedy — something that adds another consideration to the discussion, I think. She does not shy away from the issues of Spanish conquest and the damage they did, but the article also notes that she has spent decades “scouring for the disappearing cuisines of rural Mexico, the kitchen secrets otherwise to be lost as generations fade.” Because she is among those who has been accused of appropriation, it made me wonder what it was that the accusers actually cared about. If she is rescuing recipes that will be lost, and no one else is doing that work, what is gained by attacking her for appropriation? Would they rather the recipes be lost? It seems to me that making sure someone does the very hard work of gathering and disseminating this knowledge serves the less powerful more truly than denying others the right to cook that food. And how many people first conceived of a vacation in Mexico because they loved the food they had elsewhere, possibly prepared by someone like Rick Bayless, who has done more to expand the concept of what the words “Mexican food” mean than almost anyone else? There are few things that help the less powerful more than having people come to visit — and spend money.
My concern is that the effort to protect will become an effort to harm the less powerful — to ensure that their secrets will be lost. Sure, not everyone is going to put in the time that Kennedy and Bayless have, but since they have been targeted, too, not just the two women in Portland, I think it’s something to think about.
I agree completely. The reason I bring in the comparison to other art forms is that it is easy to put the cuisine issues in context when the ethical issues are applied in other areas.
For example, the recent destruction of the antiquities in Syria is a loss for the world. Some of the artifacts and antiquities that have been removed from their original sites have thus been preserved. They may be in the museums by way of colonial forms of export, but if they were not in museums they would be reduced to dust by religious fanatics.
I believe this is analogous to the idea of a lost heritage were it not for the efforts at preservation by Kennedy and Bayless and others.
Why does the accusation of appropriation sound so mean-spirited and narrow-minded? It is meant to be righteous, it is meant to show pride, but as one of the commentators said, everything comes from somewhere. The river of influences has been flowing since the dawn of humanity.
Even American popular music is a river with many tributaries, the same as Cuban music and Brazilian music and African music.
Another thought occurred to me — another consideration in the discussion — and that is that even people on the “same side” — i.e., givers vs. takers of culture and cuisine — are not agreed on the issue. When I was working on my book Midwest Maize, I interviewed executives of the Tortilla Industry Association, and their entire industry exists to get non-Mexicans eating Mexican food. There are hundreds of tortilla manufacturers in the Midwest alone. Tortilla chips, tortilla wraps, and tortilla bowls are so ubiquitous, thanks largely to their efforts, that tortillas are hardly even considered Mexican at this point. School cafeterias are top purchasers of tortillas, because of the popularity of wraps. The folks at the TIA announced with considerable joy that several years ago, sales of tortillas surpassed sales of sliced bread for lunch boxes. And the executives at the TIA are Hispanics. They have not stolen the culture; they are promoting the adoption of tortillas with all the resources they have available — and with good reason. Their efforts are making a lot of the Hispanic owners of the tortilla companies quite successful.
This doesn’t mean that the idea of appropriation is not worth discussing, but I think it’s also worth considering that there is never a simple, clean line between two clearly defined sides in any discussion.
I think this promotion of culture by those in the culture, and their considerable success, leads back to the idea of the benefits from increased popularity of foods across cultural lines.
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