How Americans pretend to love ‘ethnic food’
There is a lie we like to tell ourselves, a bending of the truth that permeates most of the food world in the West. We like burgers and fries, and other quintessentially American dishes, but we also love foreign cuisines, the vast and varied bucket of foods we rush to dub "ethnic."
Why do we feel that way? Or, at least, why do you think we act as though we feel that way?
I think it's partly a misunderstanding, a question of us just not knowing as much about these cuisines and cultures as we think we do. I actually have a really good example.
A recent graduate from the Culinary Institutes of America — so a trained chef, someone who should know more about food than the average person — was very upset that I had written this book. She said, 'well there are no Chinese chefs in the top 100 chefs in the world, because Chinese food and cooking is one-dimensional.' I couldn't believe it. Chinese food is one-dimensional? It's the cooking of a billion people, over thousands of years of written records and connoisseurship. To dismiss the whole cuisine as one-dimensional, but think about French cuisine, which doesn't date back nearly as far, as the home of all these complicated and varied techniques, tells you everything you need to know. She clearly knew very little about Chinese cuisine. She didn't have a taste or a palate for it. But, as it has been said many times before, she did not know what she did not know, and that's kind of the pitfall here.
Are you saying we have such a warped desire for these foods, that the reasons for it are so warped, we would rather have someone make the food that looks the part than someone who actually knows the cuisine very well?
Yes, and that's a pretty astute way to put it. If it appears to be authentic, it is authentic to us.
A really good example is the fact that most Japanese restaurants in the United States are run by Chinese, most inexpensive ones anyway. At expensive Japanese restaurants, this isn't the case — those employ skilled Japanese chefs — but those are few and far between. If you want to lure a skilled Japanese chef to a place like New York City, you have to pry them from a high-wage market in Japan. That means we have to pay them a lot more money. If you're going to pay $8.99 for sushi, which is the bottom of the market, there's no way you're going to get a Japanese chef to do it. That price cannot pay the opportunity costs for this chef to leave Japan. So instead we get poor immigrants, and not ones from Japan. Often that means a Chinese chef, since to most Americans they look similar.
The same can be said of Indian, and in many ways it's even truer. Most cheap Indian food is made by Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, and most Indian food here is cheap. Of course, people don't realize that. But it's true. More than 70 percent of the Indian restaurants in New York City, for instance, are not run by Indians. They are run by Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurateurs.
And you know what? All of this works, because we can't make out the difference.
(WashingtonPost.com)
