Another Voice on President Hu’s White House Dinner
This time from Yong Cheng of UC Irvine. Read the whole post here.
A quintessentially American meal is perhaps more appropriate than a Chinese feast with dishes like shark’s fin and bird’s nest, and Hu’s chefs certainly know better than the White House chefs about how to prepare that kind of food.
Besides, some Americans would find such fare distasteful, not only politically but also gastronomically—after all, these were the kind of foodstuffs that 19th-century Anglo Americans strongly disliked and mocked the Chinese for eating.
For others, such a Chinese feast would have too much a flavor of Orientalism.
But the all-American menu was still less than ideal. Despite the saying “as American as apple pie,” even most Americans do not eat apple pie more than a couple of times a year. And meat and potatoes are not just that special any more.
The large-scale consumption of meat used to be something distinctive about America—the young and fast-expanding nation’s abundance in meat, especially beef, attracted millions of immigrants and visitors to the New World—but those days have passed.
Meanwhile, while the potato, a New World native, was once new to China, it is now a staple food there. And both meat and potatoes are readily found in American-style restaurants, which are doing very well in China these days.
Would you volunteer as overseer of a state dinner?
Yes, I would volunteer in a heartbeat! When President Calderon came to the White House I posted this proposed menu: http://tinyurl.com/4qgqgwo
You are a brave woman. And yours is a much more appropriate menu for a Mexican President. Like you, my jaw dropped when I saw a Mexican menu prepared by an American chef. Not the way diplomatic dinners work. But then diplomatic dinners have always been a problem for the USA.
Isn’t there some middle ground where foods more or less typical of a country and it’s national pride/identity are served but with an eye to leaving out the ones that would be anathema to a guest of honour from a different culinary tradition?
Hmm. Huge question. The nineteenth century solved it by having French High Cuisine for all diplomatic meals whether you were Japanese, Hawaiian, British or French. The one exception was the Americans. And American state dinners have been all over the map. Very interesting topic.