Food Politics — Territorial? An Omen?
shared by SGHolland March 2018
A spicy story that looks at the global effects of exotic food trends —
BELOW: A slice of the article from today’s The Long Read from The Guardian
“The story of curry in modern Britain raises a question about food and identity. Does a cuisine belong to the people who eat it or the ones who cook it? The accusation of in-authenticity went hand in hand with a broader issue of ownership: once people realized that what they were eating was not proper Indian food, it was a short step to feeling that perhaps they, and not the south Asian chefs who cooked and served it, were the ones who owned it. Curry houses were always places where some customers behaved with a shocking sense of entitlement, occasionally expressed as outright racism. (One industry insider also told me that a surprising number of diners feel that no tip is required at a curry house.)”
Along with the elegant descriptions of life and food, The Guardian’s article discusses how “foreign food” comes into the amalgam that is globalization. Or we can call it multiculturalism. Or efforts at embracing other cultures into a previously “pristine” culture by way of cuisine! Or embracing diversity.
This Guardian article is a “long read”, if you click the link above. Read it when you have time.
But I found it fascinating enough to share, and especially so because of my single visit to a Bloomsbury fish and chips joint on my way through London. The food was, famously, greasy, bland and blah. The draft beer was okay, but not special.
In 1995 or so, a dear, well-traveled British boarder arrived at my door from a distinguished career that took him from his high-end roots to Oxford and then into the worlds of India, Africa, and Pakistan, among others. He knew my English cousins very well, having worked with them in India.
He stayed in my home for years, and when I moved out of state, he “graduated” a few miles away into my daughter’s home where he lived until his death a few years ago.
To the relatively untraveled middle aged woman that I was, he was an encyclopaedia of riches! Not only did he know my European relatives quite well, but he had embedded himself in so many societies in mysterious places, deeply integrating himself into their worlds and language, he was a world of information! Not only could he bring the flavor of a place to me, but he also could tell me the history of that place, how the British Realm was involved, and the pluses and minuses of Colonialism! First hand! He could speak Hindi and Urdu and all sorts of languages. He wrote books!
Food was just one of the areas of discovery for me. My adopted grandfather loved curry.
As much as he enjoyed taking me to odd little local Washington State restaurants serving dishes representing the many countries he had lived in, it was an education of palate that I never really learned to savor. Hot foods are a challenge for me, no matter where the heat is grown! I love savoury, but hot — not.
One could certainly understand how Brits could find curried dishes to be pleasantly lively, given the famous boiled and bland nature of the English cuisine. A “waker-upper” in the rice, to be sure! Spices next to the Naan!
But the decline of curry in England? How is that possible?
Is this an omen?
Is the immigration issue coming around (as it is so inclined to do)to bite itself in the backside?
The article about the apparent die-out of curries implies that the ethnic experts in curried foods are being culled out of the cross section of the population — -are immigration issues eating into the restaurant business?
Business is for money, and money rules economies, and trade is what makes the world go round, as they say. And political infiltration and sleight of hand with wealth come into the picture of any “civilized” culture where the rich are destined to do anything to maintain the status quo. At least that is how I see it.
So if we see an extinction happen in a certain area of life, we can start looking for the greater cycles that rule our past(s) and our ongoing future(s), including who gets to live in whose country!
I find this concept is creepily familiar.Yesterday I look at the guileless face of the kind Mexican waiter who served my grandson and me a meal last night, and graced it with a surprise birthday dessert for my grandson. (It was a tiny sundae with a wafer on top set on a place of dry ice that steamed and fogged up the table and spilled over the side!)
It was such a fun thing, and we two diners and the waiter had the nicest time with it all. Will this jolly waiter lose his job? Does he have a family here in the US? He speaks American English very well — he’s been here a long time. And will he get ousted any moment? I did not ask if he was “legal.” I would like to adopt him to keep him in our country. I hope he is a US Citizen.
Enrichment is a sly so-and-so.
We enrich ourselves and are joyous about specialties of foreign cultures and then enterprise and profit comes into the picture. We turn into frightened wild things when the shift comes, and we are forced to decide who gets the spoils and who gets kicked out. We kill the joy with greed.
It seems to be a “natural” cycle; sort of like the Tower of Babel where the success of the tower builders created a desperate problem for them that ended up in the collapse of not only the tower but of the ethnology of the babbling and confused builders who were split off into the hinterlands.
SGHolland ©2018
