Not Just a Sandwich: A Cultural Perspective on Banh Mi

If you know anything about me, you know I make a lot of banh mis. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a Vietnamese sandwich. In my biracial household, it’s become the most-requested sandwich I make, more popular than the PB&J and BLT. It’s a taste of comfort and home that’s hyper-specific in its evocation. It always makes me think of Ba Le bakery, my favorite Vietnamese deli nestled in Falls Church, VA, a suburb of Washington, DC a nominally famous white influencer once called “a place where old people and pets go to die”.

I always hated that description. In a think piece that reads like A Separate Peace lamenting about her trials and tribulations as a NYU student, this influencer talks about growing up in Falls Church and hating its manicured “lime green lawns” to conjure the vision of an empty suburbia existing only as a stepping stone to bigger cities, yet she talks nothing of the Vietnamese shopping center of my youth, fittingly called Eden Center. It was a place of both ill repute and comfort; while it housed various Vietnamese businesses, groceries and restaurants, it was also a breeding ground for gang activity, illegal gambling and prostitution, which cultivated a sense that it was both glamorously dangerous and a strange safe haven (it was also a reflection of the school-to-deportation pipeline that exists in many Southeast Asian communities, but that’s a subject for another day).

She also mentions nothing about the literal and figurative interchange that happens at Seven Corners, a gloriously messy pocket of Falls Church where interstate routes, highways and people converge. The amount of immigrants from all over the world that live there is surprising and the indelible mark of their cultural influence is present in the diversity of minority-owned businesses and establishments there. Halal shops, hookah bars, South American pastelerías, pho restaurants and Korean churches all line the streets that branch off Route 50 which flows like a nervous system into the heart of DC.

She says nothing about how vibrant and interesting that is because affluent white people take this for granted. This kind of multiculturalism is considered standard in the allegedly egalitarian northeast and used to serve as evidence that we lived (pre-Trump) in a post-racial, Obamaesque paradise. Whatever that meant, it didn’t seem to make Falls Church and Northern Virginia more interesting to privileged white kids who had all kinds of access to drugs and excess, but no outlet for ennui.

All this to say, this is what happens when white people control the narrative. Colorful and compelling cultural stories are erased.

So back to banh mi. It’s essentially a taste memory of my childhood, so it’s very important to me. My perfect banh mi requires the standard sweet-and-sour daikon and carrot pickles, crisp and refreshing cucumber spears, thin-sliced jalapeno, copious amounts of cilantro, mayo (preferably eggy, umami-y Kewpie), pȃtė, Maggi (a European beef bouillon sauce akin to soy sauce) and some sort of protein. I prefer egg and Vietnamese pork roll.

It’s simple, unfussy and customizable, though it tastes astoundingly complex when done right. Literally anyone can make it.

So it’s funny that it’s been the topic of two recent conversations I’ve had regarding cultural appropriation.

On my social media, I’ve talked about the subject of culinary cultural appropriation to the point of exhaustion, but these recent dialogues made me think. What is really at the root of my revulsion when I see a deconstructed salad or a $12 offering with the banh mi moniker but little-to-none of the ingredients? And why do white folk, despite a surge in trying to understand social justice issues, consistently shrug off the subject of culinary cultural appropriation and minimize it? After all, it’s only “food”.

And aside from that, it should be noted that banh mi is one of the best culinary results of colonization there is, which is a complex subject unto itself. When the French colonized Vietnam in the 1800s, they brought over the crusty French baguettes, forcemeat spread and Maggi sauce that are so foundational to the dish (well, at least to me). In Hoi An, a central Vietnamese city with arguably some of the most famous banh mi shops in the world, the influence of French colonization is unmistakable, from the bustling fashion industry there to the provincial-style buildings you might find in some French coastal village.

In a climate where there’s a big push, especially with Indigenous, brown and Black people to “decolonize” yourself, where does something like the banh mi fit in?

Let’s get this out of the way: all traditional and contemporary cuisines are the result of trade, migration, colonization and globalization. The Chinese were reportedly the first to make pasta and the Romans fermented some of the world’s first fish sauce. Spices commonly associated with different regions of the world were only brought to those regions by way of the Silk Road and trade routes.

That means that food doesn’t inherently belong to one person or another. Tired myths of “authenticity” disregard how cultural synthesis works and how the best food was and is borne out of regional agriculture (which changes constantly), necessity and more than anything else, the ingenuity and creativity of individual cooks, whether they be mothers or executive chefs.

So why do we still persistently claim certain foods? What is continually missing from dialogue circling cultural appropriation?

Simply put: context.

All of these foods developed from cultural exchange tell a story, good or bad. The banh mi is a vestige of colonization, but it’s also an example of how the Vietnamese people made it quintessentially their own. Much in the same way the Cornish pasty served the British working class, the French baguette was the perfect vehicle to hold bright and undeniably Southeast Asian flavors like crisp vegetables, lemongrass-seasoned cured meats, zingy chilis, herbs and sauces for people on the go. Pick one up at a stall in the morning, it’d still be a perfectly crunchy hand-held lunch by mid-day. Its low price-point made it perfect for the workers and tradespeople in the bustling epicenters of Vietnamese urban life.

So when the first flood of Vietnamese refugees came to the U.S. during the 70s and 80s, so did businesses providing these dishes. Aside from the popularized pho restaurants, Vietnamese delis and bakeries sprung up rapidly, offering banh mi and other baked goods to refugees wanting some taste of home in a new, foreign and oftentimes hostile land.

These were the kind of businesses I grew up with in the suburbs of DC, home to one of the highest concentrations of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in the country. I’d never really seen banh mi served anywhere else until the turn of the century, when the pan-Asian “fusion” trend grew in popularity. At one of my first fine dining gigs at a certain celebrity chef’s Asian restaurant in DC, we served banh mi “sliders’’ that became the blueprint for what’s considered a banh mi sandwich at any hip and white-helmed gastropub: a pithy sprig of cilantro, some indiscriminate pickles and “sriracha aioli”, or rather just Hellman’s and sriracha mixed together. Once during a shift, I assembled one, put it in the window and called it out to a runner. I used the pronunciation I was raised with, which regrettably sounds like “bang me”. This resulted in my fellow non-Viet line cooks (I was one of two Asian chefs working the line at this Asian restaurant, imagine that) tittering with laughter and my executive chef walking over to give me an admonishing look.

“It’s pronounced ‘bon mi’,” he told me authoritatively.

“Oh it is?” I replied, feigning ignorance.

“Yes. I spent two weeks in Saigon studying under a master.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll just go ahead and tell my mother, my grandma and my entire nation that I was pronouncing it wrong the entire time, thank you!” I donned a sweet but challenging smile and my chef got the picture. The next time he picked an order up, he arched an eyebrow at me and pronounced it the right way.

This anecdote is used to illustrate the lack of knowledge and respect that white folks regularly hold for cultural foods, practices and traditions. No one says they can’t eat or make it. But would it kill them to understand where it comes from, and more than that, not equate a vacation to an upbringing?

This all might seem innocuous and certainly not malevolent, but I always encourage folks to think less incidentally and more about how the micro informs the macro. What essentially makes cultural appropriation of anything, whether it be food, clothing, a practice or tradition harmful is the erasure of cultural history coupled with an imbalanced power dynamic.

I’ve spoken thoroughly on what constitutes the former aspect of cultural appropriation, but what does the latter mean?

When white chefs emulate or copy recipes outside of their cultural framework and call it appreciation, we have to remember this “appreciation” does not exist in a vacuum. “Ethnic cuisines” (the problematic nature of calling anything outside of white American cuisine “ethnic” notwithstanding) have historically been offered by their originating communities for low price points. This is mostly due to the fact that these communities arrived in this country poor and made it for their own marginalized people. Even when cuisines like Chinese and Mexican rose in popularity among white folks, the expectation that it was low-cost fuel remained. There was none of the pomp and circumstance afforded to French cuisine, which says more about white-dominated culture than the actual nature of the food.

Non-European cuisines have only been given the admiration they deserve from white culture in the past few decades. The complexity of technique and flavor profiles in Asian cuisines have garnered more interest from white chefs, which led to “fusion” cooking and of course, much higher price points.

While it should be noted that Asian cuisines have always deserved recognition and higher value, white chefs endorsing these dishes with their own “interpretation” (which oftentimes neglects the roots of the dish) and larger price tags sends a clear message: this food required being subsumed by white culture to “elevate” it.

This problematic premise is further complicated by the fact that white chefs and self-purported “authorities” on Asian cooking feel the need to rate and criticize Asian chefs’ “authenticity” when the truth is, Asian restaurants have been forced to pander to white palates just to stay profitable. Not only that, the idea of authenticity treats communities as monoliths rather than people with a wide range of tastes, opinions, techniques and perspectives. This proclivity of treating Asian cuisines like an academic endeavor and one that requires “authorities” outside the realm of lived experiences amounts to little more than fetishization and othering, rather than acceptance and support.

Additionally, it is necessary to highlight that while Asian chefs are increasing in prominence, most minority-owned businesses in this country receive less funding and support than white ones. During the onset of COVID-19, experts predicted that 90% of minority-owned businesses would be shut out of relief resources and loans such as the PPP loans that were instead awarded to other “small” businesses such as Ruth Chris’s Steakhouse and certain dioceses of the Catholic Church. Let’s also not downplay how Asian restaurants across the country suffered from vehement xenophobia at start of the pandemic, which resulted in devastating losses in revenue. We cannot talk about cultural appreciation of another ethnicity’s food without talking about how these communities remain underappreciated in very practical and systemic ways.

Cultural appropriation happens when a dominant culture adopts the practices of another culture for monetary or societal gain. The marginalized culture however, remains stigmatized for maintaining their cultural practices and are constantly pressured to assimilate into the dominant culture.

It’s why Asian folks still feel bitterness about being shamed in the school cafeteria over their smelly lunches that they now can pay fourteen dollars for at fusion eateries. It’s why it’s infuriating to see twelve dollar banh mi sandwiches sell out at craft breweries while Vietnamese-owned delis get flack for raising their banh mi prices from four to five dollars.

As a small business owner myself, I have made and sold banh mi sandwiches at an $8 price point, one which reflected the labor and ingredients, but also my worry that anything beyond that would be construed as “too high” by my Vietnamese peers. Minorities are very used to underselling ourselves and our value as a result of assimilation. I doubt as many white chefs making these same dishes have this problem.

It’s also frustrating to witness white “experimentation” with cultural food result in completely different interpretations of a dish that has little to do with its point of origin. Case in point:

I recently had a sandwich that, to be fair, was marketed as a sandwich with “banh mi flavors” rather than a traditional offering. After eating it, I was dismayed to find that while some of the base ingredients were there (one-note sour pickles, cucumbers sliced far too thin to deliver textural interest, soggy bread and that ubiquitous sriracha mayo I’m sick of), it evoked nothing that I loved about the original sandwich. All of the components that not only told a story of colonization and migration, but also spoke to the perfectly balanced and vibrant flavor profile of my homeland’s cuisine were absent. If this was a person’s first taste of the banh mi, it sadly may have been the last as well if anyone felt the same way I did. It did not represent the sandwich or our cuisine at all, interpretative differences or not.

Also, it was thirteen dollars. I made up for it by getting one from my Asian grocery a few days later that was four dollars and fully satisfying.

Food is never just food. Food has sustained people and told the stories of their experiences, movements, resources and resilience. Anyone is welcome to share and appreciate those stories and flavors, but not to dismiss and cherry-pick away the pieces they refuse to understand. In this way, people are like food in that we deserve to have the wholeness of our being, our cultures, our histories and our identities respected and honored.