[Amy Stamm]

Thanks for bringing up the topic of gender norms and food, Becky. Like you pointed out, preparing and serving food in the home - largely and stereotypically by women - is given an almost servile status, but male chefs dominate public spaces and are accorded all kinds of professional status. Women experience all kinds of discrimination, belittling, harassment, exclusion, and erasure in these spaces and are rarely accorded the status that men regularly achieve. It's interesting how the very same process is defined so differently when performed by different bodies. Though different, it reminds me of education systems in which women tend to occupy the teaching positions that are given lower status while men are much more likely to be promoted to administrative positions, making significantly higher salaries and holding significantly more power.

[Amy Stamm]

I just read an article by anthropologist Adam Liebman that was in the Spring 2021 issue of Education About Asia (Vol. 26, No. 1) called “Waste Politics in Asia and Global Repercussions,” which I thought was particularly relevant to the topic of fast food. Liebman documents a new turn in the environmental movement in the Philippines, led by Froilan Grate, to shift the narrative on food packaging waste. For years, the United States, Canada, and European countries have been shipping their waste to Asian countries. In China there has been an industry around plastics recycling, but as Liebman points out, garbage is regularly mixed in with plastic recycling streams, and the unregulated processing of plastic has exploited poverty-stricken people and devastated the environment. The entire recycling industry, according to Liebman, is premised on exploitation because countries find it too expensive to recycle when they have to follow environmental regulations calling for non-pollution and pay workers fair wages.

When wealthy countries ship their waste to less wealthy countries, those on the receiving end are then more likely to be framed as polluters when plastics shipped to their countries drift into waterways. For example, in 2016, The Ocean Conservancy published a report stating that 60% of the oceans’ plastic pollution was caused by China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Another study found that 95% of ocean plastic pollution came from eight Asian rivers and two African rivers. What some Asian environmental activists, forming the coalition Break Free from Plastic (BFFP), have started to do, though, is to identify the names of the brands that have washed into the oceans and to publicize the waste produced by these brands. In so doing, the activists have effectively intercepted the media blame aimed at end consumers and placed it squarely on the original corporate producers of food packaging and other single-use plastic. BFFP has now grown into 11,000 organizations and individual members around the world, and as a result of their global brand audits, unwanted attention has been directed at Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, Mondelez international, Mars Inc., Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris International, and Colgate-Palmolive. In addition to placing pressure on corporations to reduce their plastic waste and pay for the waste streams they create, BFFP led a campaign that resulted in amending the international treaty that regulates transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal so that countries like the U.S. can’t just use the world as our dumping ground.

I think these issues of packaging and waste are critical for the food industry to consider as the world reckons with the devastating effects of global warming. The inconsistent regulation of waste streams, enabling plastics to fill the world’s oceans, relates to the inconsistency in fishing laws that is resulting in the threat of fishing population collapses around the globe. It is a global and micro-local issue that asks each of us what we will sacrifice and how we will re-organize our eating and other daily habits in order to care for the other people, plants, and animals with which we’re interdependent.

 

[Amy Stamm]

From what I’ve learned, though I’m sure others know more, the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Moon (or Mooncake) Festival, has happened for something like 3,000 years and is the second-most important holiday in China after Chinese New Year. According to one account I read, the festival originated when the Chinese emperor worshipped the moon in order to bring full harvests. According to another article I read, the tradition of eating mooncakes originated in the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368). Secret messages were supposedly communicated through patterns formed on the mooncakes with the aim of forming a rebellion against the Mongols. The festival falls on the 15^th day of the 8^th month in the Chinese lunar calendar and involves worshipping the moon, lighting candles, and eating mooncakes. The round shape of the moon represents coming back together (in circular manner), so family reunions are central to the holiday. Traditional sweet mooncakes are filled with sweet fillings like bean paste, lotus seed paste, or dried fruits and nuts. Traditional savory mooncakes are filled with roast pork and radish or sausage. However, with the widening recognition of the Mid-Autumn Festival in various parts of the world and the widening appreciation and consumption of mooncakes, new fillings have included spiced apples, ice cream, jelly, tiramisu, eggs, chicken, diced ham and honey, mushrooms, and, I’m sure, many others.

 

[Amy Stamm]

A couple of points I appreciated in the readings and talks from this week: 1) Jennifer Lee’s point that food was perceived in a way that defined immigrants as essentially different from those who were established in their American identities (but were former immigrants themselves). As she explained, “If these people eat food that’s different from us, they must be different from us.” Her research that revealed that Samuel Gompers argued that Chinese men who ate rice would bring down the standard of living from American men who ate meat, and this was one of the reasons we must exclude them from this country, showed an interesting blurring between food/consumption, bodies, and class. It reminded me a bit of Israelis’ mythology around sabras, native Israeli Jews, as inhabiting strong, indestructible bodies that could protect the nation. Lee’s inclusion of food consumed as a way of building or tearing down people’s strength and standard of living, a stand-in for national strength, relates, too, to the prestige accorded different cuisines, which then fix hierarchical values to their creators (French vs. Japanese vs. Chinese vs. Filipino, for example). I also appreciated her investigation into all of these shorthands we rely on and distribute in order to uncover the travel of ideas, the morphing of concepts and ingredients, and the new combinations of factors that become identified with particular countries.

I appreciated Eric Rath’s attention to global warming and the contradictions between different nations’ fishing laws, which allow for the continued depletion of the world’s ocean life and the production of microplastics. He also mentions the widespread mislabeling of seafood, and child labor and human trafficking in the fishing industry. I learned last year that in certain African countries like Liberia Chinese fish farming businesses come in, violate anti-pollution laws, and destroy local fishing industries through their over-stress on fishing resources, partly because of the deals the Chinese government broker with the Liberian government, preventing enforcement of laws due to conflict of interest, and partly because insufficient laws have been passed to address these issues. These topics lend themselves perfectly to a student project tied to the Sunshine Movement. Students could research fishing laws or fishing trends and propose ways for nations to collaborate in order to sustain ocean populations and mitigate global pollution and global warming.

I appreciated Sidney Mintz’ framing of “world cuisine” or “global cuisine” as a process rather than a system, which provides a way of thinking about the interpenetration as well as the disappearance of aspects of local food systems. I also appreciated Mintz’s point that “the diffusion of a plant or spice to a different continent or country may predate by many years its significant use in the larger local food system” (p. 4). Mintz also talks about the circumstances, like migration, rural-to-urban population changes, war, and famine, that change food production and consumption.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Reading Eric Rath’s history of sushi and the other Japanese food that Americans were introduced to in the 1960s brought me back to my childhood in New York City, where I lived until I was five and then spent years visiting with my mother, who had grown up in Bayside and forever longed to return to New York after we had moved away. After we moved away to Stonington, Connecticut, we would take the train into New York City. My mother, who had a sweet tooth and was always generous with sweets for my younger brothers and me, would buy us a one-pound bar of Hershey’s chocolate on the train, which we would all share. When we were in the city, the three restaurants we ate at were the Auto Pub, the Magic Pan, and Benihana, which, according to Rath, was established in 1964, the year I was born. The Auto Pub was a restaurant filled with the shells of automobiles, which you would sit inside while you ate your hamburgers, fries, and whatever else. https://randolphmase.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/the-auto-pub-in-the-gm-building-a-very-popular-place/

The Magic Pan was established in New York in 1965, and apparently, the chain was backed by the Quaker Oats Company. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/19/archives/crepes-from-a-magic-pan.html

I remember that my favorite crepes there were one that was filled with cheese and maybe fried, one filled with creamed spinach, and a dessert crepe filled with ice cream and topped with hot fudge and whipped cream.

The third restaurant we frequented was Benihana. https://www.benihana.com/locations/newyorkwest-ny-we/ We sat at communal tables with other diners and were mesmerized by the chefs throwing knives in intricate patterns and tossing things to us, which made us laugh and feel special. When I asked my mother what we used to eat there, she couldn’t remember that we actually chose our food. What she remembered was the showmanship and the communal tables and that my father loved Benihana. My father may be on the autism spectrum, though that wasn’t diagnosed at the time. He has problems with social cues and with making friends, but he felt included and special at Benihana to the point of mistaking the chefs there as friends almost. He didn’t understand that the performance was just a show, so this precise and playful show of making our dinner created an illusion of intimacy that became important to some American diners.

It’s interesting to think about this experience in relation to Rath’s discussion of the status of Japanese restaurants compared to Chinese, Thai, Filipino, and other Asian restaurants, and immigrants’ use of that status to make more money by crossing over into Japanese restaurants, as interpreted by American diners. It’s a strange translation to devalue certain ethnic foods because the immigrants who make those foods are devalued (Rath, p 154). It reminds me of a paper the anthropologist Tim Choy wrote years ago about how to read race through people’s cars. That our taste buds are taught status, prestige, disgust as dishes are mediated through our notions of difference is complex and fascinating.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Over the weekend someone showed me this video of the Crunch Bros. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJNVKDiu-g

The Crunch Bros are a father and son team (Jeff and Jordan) from Fountain Valley, California who try different foods and, through their videos, teach their followers about Japanese food. In this video, entitled “Mochi Roulette,” Jeff and Jordan try different mochi balls with fillings that Jeff’s wife/Jordan’s mom prepared secretly ahead of time. I love how Jordan watches his dad to learn how to try new food and encourages him not to eat certain mocha balls that look suspiciously like they are filled with mustard or wasabi. It’s sweet to watch Jordan tentatively trying new mochis and then assessing them, and to watch the intimacy between the father and son. There is a whole series of Crunch Bros videos, depicting Jordan choosing ingredients for dinner, the father and son trying snacks in a snack box from Japan, or the pair cooking with new products or playing different types of food roulette. Their hustle is definitely self-promotional, but it also seems to teach people about a variety of Japanese food using humor and the cuteness of a child’s relationship to food.

 

[Amy Stamm]

“Food categories encode social events…They express hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries.” Mary Douglas and Michael Nicod, as quoted in George H. Lewis p. 92

A couple of interesting ideas from this week’s readings stood out to me. One was Frank Dikotter’s point about how new technologies like enamelware, tin cans, and rice hulling machines “profoundly transformed the material culture of food,” as those with money could experience “foreign” food and thus increase their own status, and tins “democratized consumption” for those without money, as they allowed food to reach into remote areas and provided nutrition when fresh foods weren’t readily available. These new technologies changed people’s eating habits and created new global systems of exchange of food products like Spam. At the same time, people formulated critiques of these new technologies, in one case commenting that “as most noodles are made by machines, people’s hearts are also becoming mechanical” (Dikotter).

The department store as a new technology or design of social interaction and consumerism through which citizens could demonstrate their modernity and show their status through consuming hybrid, Western-influenced meals shows how spatial design can reconfigure social relationships. This makes me think that an interesting student project might be for students to choose a cultural/public space in their communities and analyze how it shapes people’s interactions. For example, students could think about how public graffiti reconfigures public spaces to include those who may traditionally be excluded from such spaces. Or a particular café might bring its customers into contact with a specific culinary tradition or might rely on certain relationships between local farmers and the dishes the cooks create.

Another interesting idea was how cultural values about meals, for example, Chinese communal/family eating vs. European individual eating, affected how utensils and tablecloths, for example, were used in restaurants. These different practices, furthermore, became framed in terms of hygiene and notions of modernity. It was also interesting to read about how political histories and relationships, like attitudes about Japanese imperialism, meant different receptions of the same foods or food products. The use of cultural values and aspirations to tailor the marketing campaigns designed for MSG’s penetration into different countries’ food systems meant that images emphasizing new Japanese bourgeois kitchens weren’t effective in China, for example, where marketing campaigns de-emphasized housewives and emphasized servants or empowered women. The Japanese Ajinomoto, which held imperialist associations and solicited animosity, had to be rebranded under a Chinese name in order to penetrate this market (Jordan Sand). As Sand writes, “MSG was born in the nexus between the late nineteenth-century ideals of civilization, Victorian science, dietary reform, and the modern profession of housewifery. Propagated through Japanese imperial expansion, it became a part of Taiwanese and Chinese cuisines, but in the process also became a political commodity inseparable from nationalist opposition to Japan” (p. 47), asserting the point that “our taste buds are historically shaped (p. 47).

George H. Lewis’s discussion of how geography constrains consumption I found to be a critical framework for understanding part of how Spam caught on in some places and not others. As Lewis explains, island cultures’ circumscribed land areas make animals high on the food chain expensive to keep because they eat too much, while smaller animals like dogs compete with humans for the same foods. Unfussy pigs, who could forage from the land and eat humans’ scraps, fared better, which helped Spam to gain its status in Hawaii, for example (Lewis p. 95). Koreans’ higher consumption of meat than other Pacific Rim countries made them more receptive to Spam, which was easily accommodated into Korean cuisine.

 

[Amy Stamm]

While recently watching the miniseries AlRawabi School for Girls, which takes place in Amman, Jordan, I came across a scene that made me curious about the history of Koreans and Korean food in the Arab world. In the first episode the main character’s father cooks Korean shabu shabu for his family. This dish consists of a family-style hot pot in which beef and mushrooms are cooked in a broth with Korean spices and greens. From what I researched, sabu shabu originated in a Japanese restaurant named Osaka in 1952, and Koreans adjusted the Japanese dish to accommodate their own spicing and flavors. However, the concept of hot pot dishes more generally  originated with the Mongols thousands of years ago. The scene in AlRawabi School for Girls uses humor that derives from both the Arab world and broader contexts. For example, after serving the dish, the father jokes, “Bless my hands,” which is a play on an Arabic expression, “Bless your hands,” that people say when a waiter or typically the wife in a family brings your dish. In another jokingly self-congratulatory comment referring to his own initiative, the father says, “#relationship goals,” which is a hashtag that has been generated globally and certainly in the U.S.

When I researched Korean in Jordan, I found out that Koreans started migrating to the Arab world in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s as migrant laborers. Between 1975 and 1985, 1.1 million Koreans migrated to Arab countries, the third most popular destination of the Korean diaspora. This migration reflected a deliberate policy in South Korea to promote exports in manpower. The government created a special department in the 1960s, focusing on facilitating construction companies’ entry into other countries and resulting in the first contract awarded to a South Korean firm to in 1974 to build a highway in Saudi Arabia. A number of factors, including a decreasing wage gap between South Korean and Arab countries, led to a decrease in migration in the 1980s, though North Koreans continue to provide manual labor for Arab countries. Most Koreans who migrated to Jordan have lived in Amman, working in construction, providing Korean language instruction, and acting as missionaries. One South Korean who grew up in Jordan and became a Jordanian citizen is the comedian Won Ho Chung, whose Axis of Evil Comedy Tour in 2007 brought him fame.

 

[Amy Stamm]

This salad contains several ingredients commonly used in Thai and Vietnamese dishes: basil, mint, cilantro, cashews, shallots, beef, and cucumbers, along with radishes, cabbage, carrots. I made the green dressing in the jar to the left using Curry & Kimchi cookbook author Unmi Abkin’s jalapeno lime salad dressing recipe, which calls for blending up shallots, jalapeño, garlic, lime zest and lime juice, seasoned rice wine vinegar, honey, coriander, salt, and olive oil.

 

Unmi was born in South Korea, and because her mother left shortly after her birth and her father was an alcoholic, Unmi spent her first years homeless and hungry until she was sent to an orphanage. She was adopted by a Jewish American man and a Mexican woman, after which she moved to the United States and spent summers in Mexico. She studied with chefs in California, Massachusetts, France, and Morocco, and opened a series of restaurants over the years. She was forced to close her most recent restaurant, Coco in Easthampton, MA, because the business just couldn’t make it under ongoing COVID conditions, and it is a big loss for this area. She’s been a James Beard semi-finalist for several years in a row.

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[Amy Stamm]

Website review: https://www.asianfoodgrocer.com/collections/munchies

 

This website is a visually very well-organized, easy-to-navigate site that is an online source for nonperishable Asian groceries. They charge a flat $5.00 shipping fee for all orders over $30.00. The website is divided into the following categories: noodles, munchies, dranks (sic.), eats, smarts, wants, and sake & beer with visually pleasing icons. I counted 224 varieties of instant noodles offered from Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam.

 

The Munchies section opens with 12 flavors of Japanese Lay’s chips, and one fun activity to do with students could be a blind taste test to see if they could identify any of the flavors. Students could be provided with a list of the possible flavors after a round of blind tasting, as well as surveys of their reactions to each flavor. It would be interesting to solicit students’ opinions about why different groups of people are drawn to such different types of flavors. A follow-up project to this might be for students to research the culturally specific adjustments that global chains like MacDonald’s make to their products to suit local tastes. Groups of students could choose a country and present their findings to the rest of the class, and then the teacher could facilitate a discussion about why students think these particular changes were made in each place. This might require students to research the cuisines of their chosen countries to uncover local food histories.

 

Back to the munchies section…it is filled with a wide variety of chips, crackers, dried fruits, cookies, small cakes and other sweets, puffed rice snacks, a variety of peas and peanuts, and candies. Students could compare the visual design of two chosen snacks and make an argument about which one they think would sell more based on visual elements of design. Similarly, students could compare drink packaging design, which the site depicts in a variety of forms, from plastic bags to hard plastic characters to aluminum cylindrical cans. The drinks include teas, coffees, sodas, juices, yogurt drinks, brown sugar pearl milk, and tapioca drinks, among others.

 

The eats section focuses on rice, grains, cooking ingredients like seaweed, sauces, oils, and seasonings, as well as some cakes and breads. To mimic a Japanese convenience store, the smarts section offers notebooks, pencils, origami paper, and decorated tapes from Japan, China, and Taiwan. The wants section focuses on thermoses, mugs, pencil cases, stuffed toys, and other items like rice cookers. The sake and beer section is self-explanatory.

 

The website is so organized, visually pleasing, and full of tempting products that I it made me very hungry and thirsty to try its products.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Hi everyone,

I found a link that seems perfect for this class: https://foodtank.com/news/2021/08/asian-pacific-islander-voices-books-on-food-and-culture/?vgo_ee=B%2F0G5e9jpcXu8yRyJmT5E2OydrNu0IfTHp%2FZjmnKcNs%3D

It is an annotated bibliography of 15 books about Asian Pacific Islanders and food. I could see a fun student project in which students would choose one of the books to review and then present their reviews to the rest of the class. They would have to used text-based evidence to show how the author has expanded their understanding of a particular piece of culinary or cultural history. If a class had more time, students could then choose a second book to read based on these presentations.

 

[Amy Stamm]

Bill, I like the framework of adoption and adaptation that you use to talk about this subject and the "weaving back and forth...of the Chinese cuisine" that you quote from Ken Horn. Our discussion last night illustrated how widely creative cross-cultural collaborations, and the results of immigration and immersion in dual countries can be when it comes to expanding food possibilities, like some of the restaurants some of you have worked or eaten in. I just read a review of a new restaurant in New York City called Kjun, which is a Korean-Cajun fusion restaurant. The founder is Korean and lived in New Orleans for several years, apprenticing in some prominant Cajun restaurants, and then set out to incorporate Cajun spices and preparations into Korean dishes and vice versa. I think that food is a great curricular topic for students because there are multiple entry points that create inclusion: the sensory experience, family history (and family history as tied to wider historical trends and contexts), global politics, environmental issues, etc. For example, Bill, I love the idea of your map of candy wrappers because it connects students with the pure fun of eating, the diversity of visual design across the globe, and geography. In terms of possible student projects, I was thinking about looking at trade tariffs' effects on the movement of food between the U.S. and China, say. Another idea I've been thinking about is having students looked at energy/global warming issues tied to importing and exporting specific foods. For example, we could look at rice or soybeans. Another idea I was thinking about was having students analyze some of the humor and cultural references in one of the Uncle Roger videos, which I think would be such a fun way to develop critical thinking skills in terms of creating a narrative film. Anyway, it was wonderful to meet you all last night and to hear your perspectives on some of these topics.

[Amy Stamm]

Hi everyone, I am a special education teacher in institutional settings, which means working with incarcerated students, in Western Massachusetts. I love food so much and am so glad to be in the company of other lovers of eating, which is sometimes hard to come by in the U.S. with its crazy dieting culture. I love noodles of every kind. It's hard to say what my favorite foods are, but I also love tteokbokki and bibimbap, as well as ramen, sushi, curry, etc. I was part of a teachers' tour of Korea in 2019 (very lucky timing) and ate an array of wondrous food on that trip, from street food to green tea ice cream. I brought back Korean candies and snacks to share with my students, and they loved the unusual-to-them flavors. Food connects so deeply with our memories, families, sense of place, and histories, and food evokes such a sense of fun, connection, comfort, cross-cultural understanding, etc. that I think it's a great topic and way of accessing questions of history, power, and memory with students.

[Amy Stamm]

Bin He and Jennifer, thanks for your thoughts. Your idea that food changes the trajectory of human activities, Bin He, is important. Jennifer, thanks for your great ideas about student projects.

The readings and video pointed to so many ways that food touches other things to create meaning. The author Ken Hom’s point that “the Chinese are neither nationalistic nor xenophobic when it comes to food or techniques” made me think about how terms of insiderness and outsiderness shift as we talk about different aspects of culture and society. It could be a good project to think about what a particular society is xenophobic about and what it isn’t, and consider what those attitudes or fears say about where power derives and flows. At the same time, Q. Edward Wang shows us that the same objects, chopsticks, can indicate cultural sophistication, uncouthness or unhygienic communalism, backwardness, exemplariness, etc. as they meet different interlocutors. Hom’s characterization of different periods in China’s history in terms of their relationships to food and eating habits illustrated how different factors are conceptually brought together during different periods to create new possibilities. For example, he wrote about the Tang Dynasty as a period less of innovation than of “consolidation and integration of new foods into the culinary tradition,” and the work during the Song Dynasty to crystalize “Chinese cuisine” into its distinctive form. This is an interesting way of thinking about the lurch and chug of incorporating indigenous and foreign ingredients into food preparation and eating practices because it calls attention to the specific processes by which countries make use of new ingredients and, through practice, repetition, innovation, and recombination, form what become new dishes that take a central place within a given cuisine. Catherine Gao adds to this framework by describing the larger technological, political, and cultural developments of different dynasties in China, and how these developments asserted influences on the food, foods, and foodways that grew to prominence during different periods. Connected to these developments, Horn argued that ceating a national cuisine requires “applying a well—defined set of attitudes about food and its place in society to an abundant and varied supply of ingredients.” Asking students to draw a connection between what is considered a national cuisine and the set of attitudes that define it would point to some interesting revelations. Another interesting intersection that Hom points out is class – how Chinese national cuisine became defined along class lines, aligned with the elite classes who had access to a much wider variety of ingredients than the laboring classes. This seems to also point to the incorporation of foreign ingredients and influences into the cuisine, as elites would have been much more likely to travel and trade.

 

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