Food Fight!

On identity and arguing over food on the internet

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Photo by Pille R. Priske on Unsplash

Though held together with shoestrings and bubblegum, Twitter still reliably produces what we generously refer to as “discourse.” Its user base bravely perseveres through regular outages and tweet limits to cook up spicy posts to satisfy our seemingly endless appetite for bad opinions to get mad at. One such hot take served up over the weekend touched on a notoriously sensitive topic: Food.

“White people,” it began (great start), “ordering butter chicken, garlic naan, and mango lassi at an Indian restaurant has the same energy as them ordering enchiladas, margaritas, and chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant.” 

The tweet, from a user I shall keep anonymous because he has since locked his account and being pilloried online is punishment enough, garnered significant attention from many corners of the platform. Racists, Indians, Mexicans, and lefties alike came together to boo this man for his bad post. “It’s so easy to swing at white people,” reads one popular quote-tweet, “so there’s no excuse for missing like this.”

I’m not interested in condemning this random Twitter user, whose life I know nothing about. What I am interested in, though, is food. More specifically, I’m interested in how we talk about food and identity on the internet, particularly as it applies to “ethnic food,” and how digital conversations around certain cuisines have become a radioactive wasteland. 

Let’s call the user behind The Bad Post™ “Cosmo.” Although Cosmo overshot his goal by a fair bit, possibly because he brought the beloved mango lassi into it (a perfect beverage free of the stain of man’s original sin), the sentiment behind his tweet is pretty common and regularly garners positive engagement. Who among us hasn’t seen or even dabbled in the “white people don’t eat spicy food” genre of post? 

Such humor stretches back centuries. “Those people do stuff like that, but we do stuff like this,” is a sturdy pillar upon which many of today’s internet comedians have built their careers. Ethnic stereotypes, after all, have long been the bread and butter for many genres of entertainment. A topic for another day. For now, I want to focus on how this kind of, let’s call it “observational humor,” specifically when deployed in conversations about food, became a stand-in for a specific brand of politics that is primarily interested in building individual ethnic credibility.

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In one of my past lives, I was a food writer. Back in 2019, when I was smarter, I wrote about the Authenticity Trap, or the expectation on restaurants, particularly those serving Mexican or Chinese cuisine, to meet the criteria for what constitutes an “authentically ethnic” experience. In the essay, I discussed how Mexican restaurants in the U.S. will be punished for daring to experiment with recipes, as in the case of a Kansas City eatery founded by an immigrant from Guadalajara that garnered negative reviews for frying taco shells with Parmesan cheese, an ingredient sourced from nearby Italian-American establishments. 

The point is, what’s seen as “authentic” and “exotic” in the U.S. is often based on pageantry. The workers should barely speak English. The menu should reflect the local imagination of what foreigners eat every day. Ideally, the restaurant itself is out of the way, hard to find, or is a “hole in the wall.” The customer, a tourist of sorts, derives satisfaction from feeling like they’ve had a rarefied experience. With any luck, they leave feeling as if they’ve been charged with keeping this hidden gem a secret from the less sophisticated masses who might ruin it. Gatekeeping, it must be said, feels good! 

But what I found so interesting about posts like Cosmo’s is that such demands for authenticity don’t always come from clumsy, clueless voyeurs. It seems that, particularly for people living in a diaspora of some kind in the U.S., gatekeeping cuisine is a way to assuage internal anxieties over ethnic identity. I think this is due to a host of factors worth looking into. 

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of seeking out cultural identity in traditional dishes. I’ve certainly done it with my grandmother’s tortillas and caldo de pollo. Again, I don’t know Cosmo, so I can only use his post as a springboard for my thoughts, and I’ll henceforth offer myself as the piñata to elaborate on what I once found so appealing about this kind of identity-building and why it likely appeals to others. 

For one, as I mentioned before, food has an accompanying element of theater. In an environment where many migrant families feel compelled to assimilate, language and customs often fritter away years before a curious grandchild comes onto the scene and starts asking questions. But even children raised speaking only English might recall their grandmother hunched over a stove, making magic out of sparse ingredients, and bringing everyone around the table to enjoy a meal together. 

During these mealtime scenes the nebulous concept of “culture” becomes more legible and, for a child with an identity crisis, offers to all five senses tangible hints at a family history, at a relationship with a foreign place that feels altogether more alluring and more romantic than a Dallas suburb or a small town in Oklahoma. Eating food has a much lower barrier to entry than learning a language, and even if a family is bereft of heirloom recipes, there will likely be some restaurant in the vicinity where one can experience “our food.” 

This ease of access means that outsiders can also partake. The authentic, ethnic eatery, for a person insecure about their identity, now becomes a site of expertise. There is pride to be taken when a dish is too spicy for a white friend, too weird, too unfamiliar. It creates the feeling of an out-group, a category of people who find such cuisine inaccessible because they lack the cultural context that you, the expert, holds. The more arcane the dish, the better. Even I, someone who knows better, still draw a certain satisfaction from eating chapulines in front of people who’ve never tried grasshoppers. 

For some diasporic individuals, I imagine the tucked-away restaurant with more “challenging” dishes mirrors their relationship to the country of their grandparents—a place that’s difficult to get to, where people do things more confidently, more casually, and with covetable aplomb. A place where what’s seen as strange and exotic to some (including the individual in question) is quotidian. The legitimate, ethnic restaurant in the U.S. (it should go without saying I use those words loosely) becomes a place where a person with an identity crisis can mime out nonchalance in the face of intimidating otherness, fetish of a fetish.

Nowadays, this idea makes me a bit sad. It tells me that many people experience a feeling of non-belonging and are seeking out validation in ethnic performance. Of course, social media amplifies such things, which is how we end up with fifty different flavors of “white people will say they know a great Mexican spot and take you to Chipotle” jokes on Twitter.

I know what some might be thinking. This is all a bit much for an offhand joke about butter chicken. And anyway, it’s not like people with family ties to the global south, in particular, don’t have ample reason to be wary of interlopers into their culture, people who will denigrate their cuisine one day and be celebrated the next for adding peas to it in a recipe for the New York Times or something. 

But that’s what drew me to food writing in the first place. It’s always about much more than the ingredients. Food, the way we fight over it, the way we are precious about it, the way we hold it so close to our hearts, is fascinating to me. Organized religion is really onto something basing sacred rites on birth, bread, and death. That’s all culture is.

And I think that in picking apart the way people communicate about food over the internet, we can learn a lot about how contemporary individuals see themselves. What I get from posts like Cosmo’s, what I get from the flippant jokes and the fighting and the accusations of Bon Appétit gentrifying saltine crackers (?) is the suspicion that many people are unable to shore up a satisfying sense of self in our modern age and so they go looking for it in something older, nobler, and less accessible in a thoroughly commodified world where absolutely everything has become too accessible.

Speaking only from my experience of culture in the U.S., there is nothing more important than the individual. This worship of the solitary self has led to a nebulous definition of community where one can identify with a community not because they necessarily share material conditions with a group, but because that group lends them context, makes them more interesting, and gives them lore. To say “I identify with this community,” especially on the internet, is to communicate the individual’s politics and sensibilities, even if that community has no such political coherence amongst themselves.  

That might sound a bit cynical, and there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m not trying to write off the importance of heritage in anyone’s life, but I do think that when one sources identity wholly from social constructs like race or ethnicity, it becomes appealing to imagine them as immutable and innate, reducing peoples and their histories to monolithic groups living in total adherence to a singular way of life. A people’s culinary tradition, for example, is here sentimentalized in such a way that it becomes an ancient and holy relic to be brandished, evidence of the wielder’s worthiness to do so, granted by birthright. 

This ignores that cuisine is more often than not a miscegenistic project, and recipes that feel like they sprang forth from the earth along with the mountains and rivers can, in fact, be traced back to “some guy not that long ago.” Sure, it falls under the category of “basic menu items,” but it’s still wild that the alleged, and contested, inventor of chicken tikka masala, Ali Ahmed Aslam, died just a year ago (I have erected several monuments to this man in my brain palace). 

True inventor or no, the fact that recipes can become national dishes in the span of just a few decades is a bit mind boggling. It isn’t just food, either. I was shocked, shocked, I tell you, when I discovered that alebrijes, the chimeric Mexican folk creatures that are sold in many gift shops, don’t date back to pre-Columbian times, but instead can be traced back to a single artist in the 1930s who was suffering from hallucinations. 

Photo by analuisa gamboa on Unsplash

Of course, even centuries-old recipes were once newfangled. In the span of human history, 500 years isn’t really so long, and that’s how long Italy has had their hands on tomatoes. This is how you end up with lovely essays featuring shocked Italians uncovering the recent origins of tiramisu. This is to say, I think the art of cuisine, so intrinsic to human heritage, looks a lot like an immigrant from Guadalajara frying taco shells with parmesan cheese.

I know that was still way too many words for a simple Twitter joke. But the depths of my passion for butter chicken are fathomless. And as I said before, when we talk about food, we’re never just talking about food.

In my eyes, this constant jockeying for cultural credibility speaks to a general dissatisfaction with identity in our present day, an age of unfettered commercialism where absolutely nothing is sacred, where finding material community is difficult between grueling work hours and the destruction of hubs for leisure, and where identity has become a branding exercise. 

It can make people want to cling even harder to the things they view as authentic. It can make them protective and precious. Even if, paradoxically, the authentic item in question is little more than a symbol. 

I also love garlic naan. I never shouted out the garlic naan.