This week’s readings were all about food and foodways. I enjoyed all the readings, though they left me hungry. Starting off with the Chipstone Foundation’s video “Do Objects Lie?” gives us as readings a good foundation for the rest of the readings, and a useful reminder for our object exercises and eventual final paper. Objects tell stories, and the stories that they tell may not be entirely accurate. Of course, this is true with documentary evidence as well – plenty of written sources lie, but historians are perhaps reluctant to admit that a teapot is as truthful as a ship’s manifest or someone’s diary. Using objects as evidence opens up entirely new worlds to explore- as our chopsticks article showed us.
It was a good pairing to return to the material culture of food. Eating and cooking food are such physical experiences which are ultimately quite ephemeral, but as Q. Edward Wang shows us in this chapter from his book on chopsticks, the materiality of the utensils lives on (for the disposable kind, usually in landfills). The fascination with cleanliness and hygiene plays out in Western attitudes towards Chinese food (and other kinds of Asian food, but Chinese most prominently) over the centuries. Fearmongering over the health and safety of Chinese food continues to this day; the MSG hullaballoo comes to mind. These fears about food translate to fears about people, and white chefs trafficking in stereotypes about Chinese food and Chinese immigrants often run successful fine-dining or fusion restaurants. But with his history of chopsticks, Wang gets at a desire for authenticity in food which is still true today– I think most people would agree that eating Chinese food with chopsticks is more “authentic,” and that asking for a fork amounts to a cop-out. I especially enjoyed Wang’s attention to the physical materials of disposable chopsticks: where the wood comes from, the chemicals involved in production, and where it ends up. That perspective has too often been missing in studies of a particular object.
Christine Guth’s “Food for Fantasy” takes us through the tangled web of identity and food. The two Eaton sisters, each having chosen a positionality which enabled authority over Chinese and Japanese food, simultaneously obscured their own racial heritage. Their cookbook allowed white middle class Americans to play in a culture different than their own in a way that was accessible and permissible. The inclusion of Japanese food elevated the cookbook, as Japanese culture at the turn of the century was associated with fine craftsmanship. Chinese food, though more accessible to middleclass Americans, was not considered fine dining. My only criticism of Guth’s article was that I wanted more recipes! I wanted more images of the cookbook too. The Eaton sisters’ complicated relationship to the food they were writing about is certainly worthy of study, but it left the actual food neglected in the article. I love to cook, and I love to cook Chinese food, and I was fascinated by the space for notes next to recipes, which allowed cooks to make their own changes to recipes (I am curious about measurements too- cooks used non-standard measurements until the end of the nineteenth century, but those often cropped up later). I have done a smattering of historical cooking and baking and would love to see the substitutions. As Guth mentions, many of the ingredients would have been inaccessible to the authors’ audience, and probably created some dishes which were not necessarily authentic.
Guth’s article led nicely into Psyche Williams-Forson article on Black women and the business of chicken. Unlike the Eaton sisters, who sold cookbooks but not the food within them, the Black women in this article made their livelihoods with chicken. Food is fulfilling, but it is also a business, and black women have a long history with chicken. It is sustenance, in more ways than one. I also thought of Burgers and Blackface, and Mammy’s Cupboard. Williams-Forson deconstructs the racist image that Mammy’s Cupboard puts forward, and instead she emphasizes the power that chicken gave black women to provide for themselves and their families.
Ending with Brett Williams’ “Why Migrant Women make their Husbands Tamales,” connects to Williams-Forson’s assertion of food as power within a community. Only women make tamales, but those tamales give them influence over a wide circle of kin and can serve as a strong cultural marker. Only Tejano women make tamales, and so to make a tamale is to be a Tejano woman. I wish that Williams had striven for perhaps more nuance in his final conclusion, to me, at least, I read his final assertion that tamales were symbols of power and not of oppression. Perhaps the layers of oppression run deeper than either or? I still enjoyed the article, and it makes a compelling case for food as not just nutrition but a deeper form of cultural survival.