old ways, new ways, and foodways

why your grandmother’s kitchen is better than any restaurant

“Where do you want to go for dinner?” 

We all dread this question, unless we are one of those TLC Freaky Eaters whose diet consists only of mac and cheese. The options are endless, and nowadays we also feel compelled to check the Yelp reviews of each one. Mexican, Indian, Japanese? What about that place that only serves miniscule vegan burgers with lettuce instead of buns for $13 apiece? It wasn’t always so difficult (hashtag first world problems). 

We think of America as a melting pot (and Canada, alternatively, as a mosaic, though the end result has largely been the same). This mentality as well as related ideas about assimilation resulted in enormous culinary adaptations by the earliest immigrants to America. Faced with the need to survive on new and different ingredients, a larger bounty than was available to the poorest back home, the ingenuity needed to make food attractive to new people, and even industrialization — food evolved. 

Italians, for whom meat was a luxury and tomatoes were stigmatized (their high acidity leached lead from pewter dishes, and the resulting affliction was wrongly attributed to the fruit), were able to serve meat with every meal and developed the iconic spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce. Germans were the source of the all-American hamburger and hot dog, both of which became so ingrained in our culture that they no longer hold any connection in our minds to Germany (except maybe when we remember the city of Hamburg). General Tso’s and kung pao chicken are purely Chinese-American in origin, the latter based on the illegality of Sichuan pepper imports into the United States until 2005. Sushi is a Japanese fixture, but the California roll was invented in either Los Angeles or Vancouver and is now a standard offering. Chicken tikka masala, a British invention, is now one of the most recognizable “Indian” dishes in North America. American hard-shell tacos stuffed full of meat, veggies, sour cream, and shredded cheese bear little resemblance to the Mexican original, and Greek diners were unlikely to serve only familiar fares like dolmades and spanakopitas for a long while in this country. Many people back home turned their noses up at this new food, considering any variation to be nothing short of bastardization. 

Some foods got away relatively unscathed and unadulterated, like the ever-popular Jewish bagel or French croissant — suffering only being stuffed full of new ingredients, sweet and savory alike, but able to be enjoyed in their original form. Besides the collegiate proliferation of instant noodles, ramen is currently enjoyed largely the way it is properly prepared in Japan, as is boba (or bubble tea for you Canadians), the milk tea full of squishy tapioca balls that themselves would not exist without the South American cassava root.  

Not all evolutions were so steeped in free and creative inspiration, nor were all traditions able to be preserved. There’s no such thing as soul food in any African country — but ingredients like pork, okra, rice, and beans have strong ties to Africa. Still, it is unlikely that the entire diaspora would be referred to with such a vague term as African-American without the transatlantic slave trade; we also wouldn’t have Cajun gumbo and jambalaya without it. The forced displacement of Native American and Indigenous peoples from their habitancy on this continent is what gave rise to fry bread, a dish which remains controversial within Indigenous communities — some consider it an authentic element of Native cuisine, while others consider it a symbol of the displacement from traditional lands and resources inflicted on Indigenous peoples by European colonizers.

But in recent years, things have been changing. While these adaptations are still a large part of what is considered either American or Somewhere-American fare, consumers have been looking for more authentic and diverse meals and begun to learn about the subtleties and variations in cuisine that used to be thought of as just “African” or “Indian.” Mongolian mutton and Korean kimchi; Brazilian feijoada and Peruvian ceviche; Ethiopian injera and Maghrebi shakshuka; Bangladeshi kebabs and Nepalese momo. New formulations like Korean barbeque and poke bowls with local ingredients are popping up with ravenous reception by the American public. 

Food trucks have been a large part of this phenomenon; once thought of as the poor man’s restaurant, American opinions of food trucks have evolved as quickly as the food itself. Along with taco trucks and gyro trucks, we now see young ambitious chefs using trucks to serve at farmer’s markets and festivals, easily cater large events, or test the consumer interest before investing in a restaurant. While a food truck has yet to make the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, twenty-one on that list are located outside Europe (Tokyo and Lima being especially well-represented). It’s not much, but it’s a good start. And to be fair, fine dining is not the only place for good food; you won’t see the little Ramen Danbo on West 4th Ave in Vancouver make the list, but damn if they don’t make a great broth. 

Not only that, but important questions about sustainability are being raised, and they go beyond Beyond Burgers. We are beginning to understand that the way things used to be done, the way that preceded our meat-forward tendencies because of the expense, may have been better. It began with the idolization of the Mediterranean diet and has recently come upon something actually American: Indigenous food.

Slowly but surely, across North America people have started to understand Native cuisine; not only how it used to be (taking cues from natural resource availability rather than changing nature), but what was lost, what has evolved, and how the old attitudes can take us into the future. Modern mass farming practices are universally known to be detrimental to the environment and inefficient in the long run; when you plant crops that are not native to a particular place with no regard for soil nutrient loss, deforestation, seasonality, and the like, you set yourself and your society up for myriad future problems. The sheer quantity of the current human population has been no help, and nor has our insistence on meat with every meal. 

Indigenous tribes varied in their culinary traditions, but they were generally united in their respect for the plant and animal species that existed in their environment. Whether salmon and seal in the Pacific Northwest, rabbit and turkey in the Southeast, or elk and bison in the Plains, people relied upon that which was native to the region. Indigenous restaurants (in North Vancouver, Berkeley, Denver, Minneapolis, Bangor, and more) are now trying to preserve native foodways by using largely or entirely precolonial ingredients. They’re bringing back acorns, cranberries, chanterelles, and the “three sisters” (corn, beans, and squash). Specialty butchers are offering a diverse selection of meats — in our rudimentary search, we’ve come across goose, bison, elk, boar, caribou, kangaroo, hare, emu, ostrich, camel, seal, crocodile, alligator (though of course, some of these are not culturally significant and are merely novelties). New respect for native foodways has also been renewed elsewhere, including Hawai’i and Singapore. In other sustainability news, we the writers have encountered crickets (sold as snacks in the university bookstore) and catfish jerky (to rid the seas of an invasive species). The foundation for this emerging cultural addition is that the return to the old ways, with a continued respect for new local availability that is compatible with the native environment, is a sustainable way to move forward. With this also comes the idea that authenticity is not a quality inherent to food, but a construct; perhaps it does not mean enjoying only replicas of how a dish was once made in a different land, but knowing the old and new ways, and appreciating both in their respective contexts.

Moral questions around food go beyond symbols of Indigenous repression. There has been much discussion in recent years of cultural appropriation in the culinary industry: white chefs take dishes brought to the US by immigrants, modify them to better suit American tastes, then sell them at outrageous prices in chic, Instagram-friendly urban restaurants. Members of immigrant communities are, understandably, not always thrilled. While few first-generation immigrants are unhappy to see others enjoying the food of their homeland, second-generationers with existing identity crises (one of us included) are understandably irked by those who would peddle these foods without any knowledge or respect for the food’s history or the bullying suffered by many who had to bring foreign foods for lunch at school. At the very least, proper linguistic and culinary training and an attempt at broader cultural understanding would go a long way in giving credibility and curbing defensiveness. 

The North American culinary landscape has been blending influences from around the globe for nearly six hundred years, when European settlers first imported their native cuisines and began to adopt foods native to their new continent. But European settlers were also famous for raping nations in the quest to acquire their foods, flavors, and lands — and the attitude of greed and gluttony should not continue. This tradition of integrating and adapting foreign influences continues today, with a slowly growing focus on health, sustainability, societal impacts, and past harms that echo today. While nobody can predict with any certainty where we’ll go from here, it seems clear that an interesting future and many future debates lie ahead for North American food.

So next time you’re despairing about where to go for dinner, despair more: there’s no such thing as just Indian food.