Spoonful Suppers

The past few weeks, I have been reflecting on my relationship to my ferments and the cultures from which they come. Cultural appropriation in the food space is a huge issue and one that has largely gone unaddressed. White cooks have a tendency to steal recipes and techniques from cooks or communities of color without giving credit or recognition. I have also noticed, personally, that many white cooks will say they “discovered” or “uncovered” a new ingredient or recipe when in reality, they discovered nothing because there are hundreds of thousands of people who are eating that ingredient or dish every day, but they are not white. Lisa Heldke in her 2001 article Let’s Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism, states, “in the past fifteen years, for example, mainstream America has “discovered” the cuisines of Southeast Asia,” and she describes “cultural food colonialism” as a predilection for the foods of economically dominated cultures and compares it to the “explorers who set out in search of ever ‘newer,’ ever more ‘remote’ cultures they could co-opt, borrow from freely and out of context, and use as the raw materials in their own efforts at creation and discovery.” The parallel here to my own fermentation efforts and cultural food colonialism is not lost on me, but I will speak more on that later. 

Cultural colonialism is particularly an issue for food practices from Asia. We often see chefs praising Asian cooking techniques without recognizing where they come from and their cultural significance. To take you back to an earlier moment of quarantine, think of Alison Roman and her Twitter drama. She uses a lot of Asian ingredients and recipes, does not support Asian cooks and people like Chrissy Teigan. Alison has since apologized and Chrissy has accepted. Alison, however, is not alone in not recognizing the origins of, and profiting off of, Asian food. In 2019 a New york restaurantwas opened by a white couple who claimed to make “clean” Chinese food that wouldn’t make people feel “bloated and icky the next day.” While this instance is tied to the racism that accompanies America’s history with MSG  (the claims of MSG making you sluggish are tied more closely to racism towards the Asian community than to science), it is also a unique scenario where white folks are both disparaging of and profiting from Asian food. These are just a few examples, however there are many instances of cultural appropriation and erasure that the Asian community suffers in the food space. I have been reminded this past month how important it is to support the Asian community around me, and I feel that one of the ways in which I can do that is make sure that the culture behind my ferments is not being erased.  

Each of the ferments that I am making is tied to a long history of people who have perfected this technique. Those are the people and cultures who deserve all the credit, I am just privileged enough to soak up some of their knowledge. Ultimately though, I am still stealing these recipes, ideas and practices from communities of color. Is there an ethical way for me to continue to ferment? Heldke says yes: “our only hope for becoming anticolonialists lies in our placing the colonizing relationship squarely in the center of the dining table; only by addressing colonialism directly through our cooking and eating can we possibly transform them into actives that resist exploitation.” So I am here, putting it on the dining table in hopes we can digest it together, and asking us to think about our own relationship to the foods we eat and where they come from.I am a visitor in the fermentation space, and I will never fully understand the cultural significance of the food I make, however I am dedicated to learning from those who do. Every ferment I make is the product of a lot of hard work from a community or culture and I am incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to learn from it.