noodsletter #.0028
Asian-Americans; promises of future recipes I will definitely keep.
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you.
If any of you want to send over things you find interesting, or that you think I would find interesting, I encourage you to do so! (Thank you to all who do!)
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber!
Book Bit
He doesn’t remember the details, except for the sudden lash of hunger, the wound of hunger: the munchies. He made an effort to eat at a normal speed, but when Yasna came in with the tortilla chips and an immense bowl of guacamole, he lost control. Tortilla chips and guacamole had only recently been introduced in Chile, he had never tried them before, he didn’t even know what they were called, but after trying one he couldn’t stop, even though he knew everyone was watching him: it seemed like they were taking turns looking at him. He had bits of avocado on his fingers, and tomato and grease from the chips; his mouth hurt, he felt half-chewed bits of food stuck in his molars, he extricated them tenaciously with his tongue. He ate the entire bowl almost by himself, it was scandalous. And still he wanted to go on eating.
—From My Documents by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell.
Somewhat related, since the Zambra book I have was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, but the very first noodsletter has a quotation from The Years by Annie Ernaux, who just won the Nobel for literature (also published by Fitzcarraldo in Great Britain).
Asians in American Food Media
New York Magazine published an issue about Asian-Americans, and I think it’s worth reading. Granted, two of the pieces seem more focused on my kind of Asian-Americans, that is, half-Asians, so perhaps it was more interesting to me than it will be to you, regardless of the fraction of Asian-ness you may or may not contain. I bring it up in part for laughs—the “Confessions of an Asian Diversity Hire” is, I think, pretty funny in a grim sort of way, since it’s an uncannily accurate description of how I view my own professional life—but mostly because of the piece in that issue about the “Asian identity” and its relationship to food.
From the piece (emphasis mine):
If you are a member of the Asian diaspora in America, the push-pull around foodstuffs may be a tension you recognize. On the one hand, there is the desire to maintain a connection to the ancestral land. On the other, a sense that too much weight is placed on food as a source of meaning and identity. There’s an impulse to share and celebrate all the culinary wonders of an inheritance and to bristle when some wellness influencer mispronounces turmeric or khichdi.
I’ve been wondering about the degree to which this is a a specifically “Asian” phenomenon, and what it means that a lot of Asian-Americans believe it to be the case. After all, if you look around, it’s not just “Asians” who place a fair amount of weight on food as a source of meaning and identity.
The same is true for famous, hyphenated Americans like Stanley Tucci and Tony Soprano; the same is true for famous, hyphenated Americans like Anthony Bourdain and Daniel Boulud; the same is true for famous, hyphenated Americans like Questlove; this list could go on forever, since eating food is a necessity for all and making food, talking about food, and making money off food-related endeavors is entirely relatable to the vast majority of human beings on the planet.
The piece seems to blame Asian-Americans for creating this emphasis on food as an avenue for exploring who you are and what’s important to you, and it posits that many (if not all? it’s unclear to me) are engaging in “soothing food theater” by trying to lay claim to specific dishes or organize their kitchens so they can eat the food they grew up eating, which the author seems to find kind of crazy.
I obviously don’t think it’s crazy; I have organized my kitchen—one could say I’ve organized my life—so that I can produce with relative ease a range of foods that I grew up eating. This is not because I’m “Asian,” nor is it because I am, in some minor ways, effectively an immigrant. It’s not because I’m trying to cosplay being “Asian” (or “Indian” or “Japanese” or “Chinese” or “Filipino”) for people who look at my social media shit-postings; it’s because I like eating the food I ate when I was growing up, much like anyone else who ate decent food at home as a child, and it’s relatively difficult to find good (and cheap) paratha, ramen, pho, fried rice, chicken curries, chicken adobo, corned beef hash (this list, too, could go on forever) in my neighborhood/city.
What the piece misses is the commercialized element of Asian food identity, or, rather, the specific way in which Asian food has been commercialized in America, particularly in food media. Is it really Asian-Americans—the vast, undifferentiated group of Americans from the constellation of countries that lie within the geographical boundaries of “not the other continents”—who have made food an integral part of their identity, or is it that the American public, Asian and non-Asians alike, tend to group all Asian cuisine under one useless umbrella in a way that’s not done to other groupings of countries and cultures that by chance happen to share space on large landmasses, and the disparate diasporic communities that originally hail from Asia are forced into the position of saying, simply, “There are some distinctions, actually"? The closest analog is “Middle Eastern” food, I suppose; Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Australia don’t seem to suffer from this problem. And why, when we—all of us—talk about Asian food, does Russia seem to exist as a galaxy apart?
As much as I find the Asian-Americans on social media who seem devoted to culinary gatekeeping mildly annoying, I empathize with them, and I don’t view their activities as primarily inspired by performative progressive politics (although of course there’s a fair amount of that, since social media engagement incentivizes it). The people who went insane about Alison Roman making bad curries went overboard, sure, but the complaint is pretty clear: Why does this person get to make money off butchering “our” stuff. It’s not that she’s doing something wrong, per se, it’s that she seemed to reaping immense rewards for what she’s doing.
Of course, this is envy; that it’s often framed as an offense against identity doesn’t change that. I am envious, too! But that envy isn’t limited to remuneration; it extends to the fact that the privilege of approaching the topic of food as if it were one largely undifferentiated mass, with faintly drawn and porous borders demarcating mushy concepts like “Asian” or “Western” or “Middle Eastern,” has been seemingly granted to just one group of people.
That “seemingly” is important. On the one hand, I can think of a couple of prominent Asian Americans who have afforded themselves of that privilege; on the other, it is undeniable that for most Asian Americans, it's easier to sell their stuff--to people who put on TV shows, to editors at websites, to book publishers, to readers of blogs and the slack-jawed viewers of social media--if they frame it as integral to their diasporic identity, with bonus points for demonstrations of discovery: how to make food your dead mom/grandmother/aunt used to make, how to use foundational ingredients for a cuisine, like gochugaru or shrimp paste.
Partly, that's because this framing is quite easy for the intended audience--primarily affluent white people--to digest: they, too, are likely unfamiliar with whatever is being “discovered,” and so the audience and creator are meant to go on a little journey together. And to the extent that's the motivation, it's as true for manchego or parmigiano cheeses as it is for fermented tofu. But it's unlikely you'd see an explainer for brie framed as an integral part of the French identity of the explainer's author, and an explainer about unfiltered fish sauce would almost necessarily have some bit about how it's pungency “smells like home.” (Here’s an example that’s about pandan.)
If you are interested in food and you consume food media frequently, and you want to be involved in the discussion, whether by writing articles and essays and recipes or by engaging in what passes for discourse on social media, I don't think it's particularly blameworthy to mimic what you see. If Asian Americans seem to have made food more integral to their identity than other hyphenated or unhyphenated groups of Americans, it has less to do with their relatively greater need to connect to their vastly disparate motherlands and to stake out ownership over their incredibly diverse cuisines than it has to do with the fact that Cantonese, Japanese, and Northern Indian food have made deep inroads into the American mainstream and yet are still treated as exotic. You simply hear more about various Asian cuisines as a result--similar, almost familiar--but still exotic enough that editors like having the exotic self discovery as an entry point to the subject.
I'm certain that many Ghanian-Americans view food as intrinsic to their identity, just as many Americans who can trace their roots back to the Mayflower view food as intrinsic to their identity. That this is rarely emphasized as often as it is for various Asian identities has to do with that same largely affluent and largely white audience that editors and showrunners are trying to target. The former doesn’t have a very large national audience, the latter would be ridiculous. Asians just happen to hit the Goldilocks spot for the food-as-identity frame.
“News”
Everything about the NFL is gross to me.
Sardine forks? Sardine forks!
I don’t understand the framing of “it remains to be seen if this one generally advisable set of practices will entirely fix the existential threat facing the planet”:
These techniques, known as regenerative or climate-smart agriculture, are a cornerstone of the Agriculture Department’s approach to addressing a warming planet. For Ms. Klaunig, the practices yield practical benefits and adhere to her convictions, but it remains to be seen whether more widespread deployment of such methods — as the administration has sought to encourage — can truly reverse the effects of climate change.
Incredible interactive/graphical treatment illustrating China’s fishing industry.
The degree to which Native Americans were both dispossessed and erased from our country’s history is a never ending well of horror (this, specifically, is about salmon runs).
Onishi Yuki, founder and chef of Tsuta Japanese Soba Noodles, died at 43.
PSL macarons! (This is from ChefSteps! It’s free!)
A piece about drinking a beer “in the ass” on The Takeout…and it’s NOT written by Dennis Lee? What happened?!?
A study about ladybugs in a colon…and it’s NOT Dennis Lee’s colon? What happened??
Sorry, chocolate bunnies are protected.
If you’re interested in Kansas City barbecue, this series on eating it “like an expert” may be of interest. I wanted to note that eating at three separate barbecue restaurants in a single day sounds like a terrible idea.
Interesting piece on the Indian etymological roots of some English words. Ex:
Sometimes words came from Portuguese and were applied to several different classes of being. The Portuguese used ‘baneanes’ to mean the hereditary business classes (vania, bania). The English followed suit. We find this as early as 1689, when Ovington called them ‘bannians’. This word was adopted into English as banyan/banian, and applied among other things to the fig tree sacred to the ‘banyans’.
There was this crazy controversy about two guys cheating in a freshwater fishing tournament; they were caught stuffing weights and fish fillets into fish. Just totally nuts. They were indicted! There’s video!
This five dishes to try when you go to Asia is… as basic as you’d expect from the NYT Travel section. Funny that they say to go to Sagar; I miss Sagar, used to get a dosa and a cold coffee.
This piece about the not-so-curious dearth of data about book sales is really dispiriting to read, from my point of view a person worried that no one will buy the book they’re supposed to be revising.
Top Ten Reasons Why They're Putting Drugs In The Halloween Candy This Year
Taste test: novelty creamer edition.
The NYC Michelin list, which is effectively useless to me since I’ll never go to any of them, and yet here we are.
There’s a fancy ramen place on this list of the 25 best restaurants in San Francisco.
Never had a cottage fry.
Best steakhouse in NY discussion from the critics at Eater. I take issue with Sutton touting the mutton chop at Keen’s. A) It isn’t mutton, it’s lamb. B) It’s just a double cut loin lamb chop, and it’s just ok. The vegetable sides at Keen’s are a travesty.
Good critique about discussions about Indian food, and not just applicable to discussions in India.
A low move: Medieval Times is suing its workers’ union for copyright infringement.
I find the Paris Review’s cooking/reading column a little weird, generally speaking, but this one is doubly so; not just the subject, but look at the spread at the end (the photos are always off-putting to me, but this is different). What kind of “meal” is that? The only rice is in the koji and the sake…
Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes Try Guys Cake
Axios released a “style guide” of sorts (it’s ridiculous), and if you want to see how much damage a bad style guide can do, look at this restaurant review. And then: this is how people read and digest political news, about important stuff. End times.
This bit about loser restaurateurs defending James Corden is what Gawker is made for.
I’m not a fan of the street seating (had a bad time with rats one time lol), but I can see why people and, more importantly, restaurants like it, so this seems like a promising move.
The people are demanding a corned beef hash issue of the noodsletter.