Food Studies and Asian Americans
The study of food, foodways, cuisine, and gastronomy has emerged as an important site of inquiry in fields ranging from literature to anthropology, from sociology to history, and from film studies to gender studies. Journals such as Food and Foodways and Gastronomica have helped disseminate and promote both discipline-centered and multidisciplinary scholarship on this subject. At the same time, Asian American studies has become an impor- tant presence in the academy, with intellectual projects that offer new ways of understanding the social, cultural, political, and economic realities of what it means to be an American and a citizen of the world. This anthology is a collec- tion of new scholarship in Asian American studies that examines the impor- tance of centering the study of culinary practices and theorizing the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. The twenty scholars represented here have inaugurated a new facet of food studies: the refusal to yield to a superfi- cial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation sim- ply or primarily through the pleasures of food and eating.
Asians in the United States have long been associated—often reluctantly or against their will, as well as voluntarily or with pleasure—with images of and practices regarding food. Starting in the days of the Gold Rush, Chinese
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Americans opened restaurants that catered to both Chinese and non-Chinese clientele. Asian Americans have been important workers in American food and agricultural industries: Japanese Americans and Filipino Americans, for example, played pivotal roles in the West Coast’s produce and cannery indus- try before World War II. Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Japanese restaurants can be found in both small towns and big cities across the country. Words like “chop suey,” “sushi,” “curry,” and “kimchi” have become part of the American popular imagination to the extent that contentious notions of ethnic authen- ticity and authority are marked by culinary and alimentary practices, images, and ideas. Dishes like General Tso’s chicken, California roll, SPAM musubi, tandoori chicken, and Korean tacos have come to signify the confused and ambivalent relationships between mainstream American consumptive desires and Asian American assimilative dreams.
Although the linkage of Asian Americans and food has been a dominant motif in both American materiality and imaginary, the academy has been slow to respond. In addition, despite the abundance of Asian-themed cook- books, the scholarly treatment of Asian—let alone Asian American—foods and food practices is relatively rare, at least compared with studies of Euro- pean food. Moreover, the studies that do exist usually focus on a specific Asian nation or ethnic group rather than the broader categories of regional Asia, pan-Asia, or Asian diaspora. Examples are Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors; E. N. Anderson’s The Food of China; Katarzyna Cwi- ertka’s Modern Japanese Cuisine; Emiko-Oknuki-Tierney’s Rice as Self: Jap- anese Identities through Time; Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World; Judith Farquhar’s Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-So- cialist China; and Mark Swislocki’s Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai. (The majority of these, furthermore, concern East Asian—principally Chinese or Japanese—gastronomy.) Most of the examples of diasporic or transnational food scholarship are edited vol- umes, such as David Y. H. Wu and Tan Chee-beng’s Changing Foodways in Asia; David Y. H. Wu and Sidney C. H. Cheung’s The Globalization of Chinese Food; Katarzyna Cwiertka and Boudewijn Walraven’s Asian Food: The Global and the Local; James Watson’s Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia; Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper’s Culinary Cultures of the Middle East; and Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas’s Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia.
Among the few scholarly treatments of Asian American food and food practices, the more notable include Krishnendu Ray’s The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households; Andrew Coe’s Chop
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Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States; Jennifer Ho’s Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels; Wenying Xu’s Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature; and Anita Mannur’s Culinary Fictions: Food in South Diasporic Culture. (While Jennifer 8. Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food is a valuable contribution to the study of Asian American food, its merits are more journalistic than scholarly.)
To date, this volume is the first book-length collection of scholarly essays to consider how Asian American immigrant histories are inscribed in the pro- duction and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways. Eating Asian America describes the cross-articulation of ethnic, racial, class, and gen- der concerns with the transnational and global circulation of peoples, technol- ogies, and ideas through food, cooking, and eating. We acknowledge the crit- ical work by Sidney Mintz on sugar, Gary Okihiro on pineapple, and Andrew Dalby on spices,5 noting the immense power food production, distribution, and consumption wields.
Food is intimately connected to the histories, cultures, and communities of Asian Americans. While it is true that Chinese food is the ultimate “eth- nic” American fast food, the juxtaposition of ethnic “otherness” with main- stream America’s “normalcy” in the figuration of Asian American gastronomy is a telling example of how difficult it is to overcome the marginalized image of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. One notable gap in the literature on food systems is the relationship of food to labor, especially as it relates to Asian Americans. While social and labor historians have long documented the movement of migrant labor from Asia to work in the agricultural fields in the United States as the beginning of Asian American immigration history, food studies scholars have often overlooked this crucial topic. Instead, Asian Amer- ican labor is related to food service more than to food production, dissemina- tion, and consumption in America. The banality attributed to such persons as “the cook,” “the dishwasher,” “the busboy,” and the “delivery boy” hides the racializing tendencies of such tropes and images. We argue that discussions about Asian American foodways and cuisine are undergirded by questions of power, race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
These questions in turn cut across the many approaches to theorizing food in a transnational and diasporic framework. The methods of inquiry into food have traditionally diverged along disciplinary lines. Scholarship in the human- ities and social sciences concentrates on the relationship of food, gender, and sexuality. Literary and film studies often analyze particular scenes, with little attention to the larger political or social factors shaping the food’s preparation,
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consumption, or production. In contrast, works from the social sciences, par- ticularly anthropology, center on the ritualized significance of food and what food can tell us about the power relations and organization of particular soci- eties, though without explaining how food entered the cultural or social imag- ination through film or literature. This book brings together food scholars in different fields in conversations about similar questions that arise in different types of texts; it celebrates the inter- and multidisciplinary nature of food stud- ies while at the same time examining its limits and possibilities.
We believe our anthology is the first to bridge the fields of food studies, cul- tural studies, area studies (Asian studies in particular), gender and sexuality studies, and Asian American studies (as part of the larger project of Ameri- can ethnic studies, which includes African American studies, Latina/o studies, and Native American studies). We consider and critique the ways in which the immigrant trope pervades and persists in the American imagination and rep- resentation of Asian Americans. The twenty chapters of this volume interrogate in various ways the image of Asian Americans as being from “elsewhere” and how, through culinary contexts, they have been assimilated into the national fabric of normality and whiteness. Accordingly, this anthology asserts that Asian American foodways are located not in the intersection of culinary tradi- tions alone but in the conjunctures of racial, gendered, sexualized, and classed hierarchies.