Devouring Asian and Pacific Cuisine during the Cold War
Mark Padoongpatt
Cold War “Oriental” Food
“Cooking is considered an art in the Orient,” Ruby Erskine explained to stu- dents in her cooking class at the Women’s Auxiliary to the Salt Lake Chap- ter of Life Underwriters in Utah. “And the food in the Orient,” Erskine added as she used chopsticks to stir-fry vegetables in an electric skillet, “is a happy combination of good eating and good health.” It was 1970, and Erskine had been teaching courses like these with “tremendous enthusiasm” for several years throughout Salt Lake City. She regularly spoke on the topic of “Oriental cookery” in front of church and civic groups, organized Oriental-themed ben- efit dinners, and once demonstrated the preparation of Oriental food at the Winder Stake House, where she served it for lunch.1 At one point, Erskine even flirted with the idea of publishing an Oriental cookbook. She treated the cui- sine as an art form, making sure to emphasize in teaching demonstrations how to delicately mince and julienne vegetables for stir-fry dishes. But Erskine also assured her students, almost all of whom were white housewives, that Oriental cooking was not simply the “most delicious in the world” but could also trans- form them into ideal, economically efficient, suburban homemakers. Or as she once told a local newspaper, “Oriental cooking is pleasing to the palate, the profile, and the pocketbook.”2
Erskine’s experiences as an expert on Asian culinary practices reveal quite a bit about race, gender, and class in Cold War U.S. society. First, the popularity of her cooking classes and banquets among white housewives, as well as the fact that Christian groups and church community centers such as the Winder Stake House sponsored such events, suggests that a number of white Ameri- cans had a deep interest in the cultural practices of Asia. While white Amer- icans’ fascination with the “Orient” is certainly not new, as it dates back to the Revolutionary period, what is significant is that the interest in Asian food practices occurred simultaneously with the formation of suburban whiteness,
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a cultural crackdown, in U.S. society.3 In addition, this fascination preceded the arrival of a large number of Asian immigrants, in places that were overwhelm- ingly white and, in many cases, historically hostile to Asians. Salt Lake City was roughly 90 percent white when Erskine spread the gospel about Oriental cooking.4 Indeed, locals described her as someone who held the “secrets of the Far East” based solely on her knowledge of Asian cooking practices. But for Erskine to operate as the authority on Asian cuisine meant that she either learned to cook Asian dishes from a member of the local Asian population— and thus committed an act of severe cultural and racial appropriation—or she learned the cooking practices on her own. But where did she learn? And how? Erskine’s experiences raise important questions about why U.S. citizens became fascinated with food culture from Asia and the Pacific more broadly, what enabled their access to Asian cuisine, how they introduced it to U.S. con- sumers, and the way in which food configured categories of race, gender, and class in the Cold War period.
The story of how and why a white suburban housewife from Utah like Ruby Erskine evolved into an Asian culinary expert and a vessel of Far East secrets— and why such “secrets” meant anything at all—is, at heart, a story of U.S. global expansion in Asia and the Pacific after World War II. Erskine traveled to Japan sometime in the 1950s to be with her husband, Jasper, who was stationed there after the war as a U.S. Army officer.5 The United States was strengthening its occupation of and influence over Japan while it was recovering from the effects of two U.S. atomic bomb attacks on both the natural and built environment and the psyche of Japanese people. The United States saw this devastation as an invitation. Accordingly, U.S. officials decided to restructure Japan’s postwar economy to become more like the United States, using it as a primary model for future American aspirations outside Europe.6 It was in this context that Erskine “fell in love” with Asian cuisine, learning how to prepare Japanese food from the couple’s domestic servant, whom she described as a “fantastic Japanese cook.”
In this chapter, I use Erskine’s story to show how white American women participated in the romance and tragedy of U.S. global expansion, by examin- ing the historical relationship of Asian/Pacific cuisine, politics, and identity formation during the Cold War, both “at home” and abroad. I argue that a his- tory of Asian/Pacific food culture uncovers the way in which after the war, the U.S. Empire turned foodways into a central site of identity formation for white American women, specifically suburban housewives. Most important, white American women’s fascination with Asian/Pacific cuisine sustained the empire by adapting local food cultures and systems to the taste and appetites of U.S.
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consumers. Their so-called discovery of new Asian/Pacific cooking practices, their role in transforming foods from sustenance to commodities, and the standardization of recipes in cookbooks certainly shaped attitudes and feelings that made U.S. citizens support U.S. intervention in the region. But the story I tell contends that these acts were also mechanisms of domination (not simply a justification), as food became linked to processes of U.S. global expansion that strengthened neocolonial relationships between the United States and the countries and peoples of Asia and the Pacific.
In recent years, a number of scholars have explored the significance, for both Asians and Asian Americans, of America’s postwar economic and mili- tary expansion into Asia and the Pacific. One topic that has received a great deal of attention is the Orientalist representations that emerged during Ameri- ca’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of Asian people. Scholars like Christina Klein and Naoko Shibusawa argue that liberal U.S. policymakers and cultural producers—novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, journalists—constructed and disseminated racialized and gendered images of Asia and the Pacific as Cold War allies as well as nations in need of American guidance on “modernization” and democracy.7 According to Jodi Kim, the Cold War in Asia must be consid- ered “at once a geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological project of imperial- ism and gendered racial formation undergirding U.S. global hegemony.”8 This project reconfigures Asian Americans from the yellow peril into ethnically assimilable model minorities.9
But these representations also have had a profound impact on the ground. For Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, images that depict them as assimilable “foreign friends” contradict their treatment in U.S. society. Despite the symbolic passage of the 1952 Immigration Act, which acknowledges the racism built into the 1924 Immigration Act, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans continue to fight racial and gender discrimination as they struggle to find a “feeling of belonging.”10 What these authors agree on is that Cold War cultural productions—and, to a lesser extent, immigration policy—racialized Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who remain outside the social, polit- ical, economic, and cultural boundaries of the United States.
Building on this scholarship on the history of Asian Americans and the Cold War, I use foodways—the production, representation, and consumption of a food—to understand how U.S. Cold War interventions in Asia and the Pacific played out in everyday life. Rather than add to the large body of work on cultural representations, I illustrate the everyday life of empire and how the political economy of food shapes race, gender, and class. I do so by extend- ing philosopher Lisa Heldke’s concept of “cultural food colonialism.” In Exotic
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Appetites, she defines cultural food colonialism as an “attitude problem” char- acterized by whites’ passion for cooking, eating, and appreciating food that is rooted in a European colonial thirst for authenticity, adventure, and novelty. They find and appropriate “exotic culture” in the cuisine of economically dom- inated or Third World people, which was used to justify, and was justified by, political and economic forms of U.S. colonialism and imperialism.11
I broaden and deepen Heldke’s concept in two ways: First, I place it in the historical context of the Cold War in order to claim that cultural food colo- nialism is more than just an “attitude” that works alongside and helps make more powerful political and economic forms of imperialism and colonialism. Instead, white women’s access to and consumption of Asian/Pacific cuisine is an actual colonial practice in and of itself. The goal is to shift attention away from debates over whether or not people like Ruby Erskine were “liberal multi- culturalists” or racists or imperialists or all of these. Focusing on the individual feelings of these women detracts from a much larger, more central issue: that culinary tourism fueled the rise of service-based economies in Asia and the Pacific. Second, Heldke does not adequately explain how and why an analysis of foodways can enrich our understanding of colonialism and imperialism in ways that an analysis of architecture, literature, art, or music have not or, per- haps, cannot. As each of the contributors to this book makes clear, one reason why foodways provides a unique framework is that it demonstrates how social hierarchies of power have been inscribed on bodies by categories created and maintained by other human senses besides sight, namely, taste and smell.