Taking a Stab at Authenticity

So the street fesitval for the celebration of San Gennaro is happening now in NYC, and for a month vendors are set up in Manhattans Little Italy (or what's left of it), spreading cheer, raising money for charities, and selling a whole lot of food. Pizzas, meatballs, cannoli dominate, but last year sparked a minor contraversey when the organization handling the Manhattan Festival of San Gennaro invited a number of high-end Italian chefs -- Mario Batali, the boys who run Torrisi Italian Specialties, Donatella Arapia, among others -- to participate in the festival, brining "gourmet" versions of the same foods that many vendors had been producing for years. This, along with a couple of traditional neighborhood ribbings, did launch into an argument over the "authenticity" of the San Gennaro festival. Class issues! Ethnic imperialism! Everything the culinary world likes to slave attention over got to be front and center, and then whispered away without ever being answered. 

And the issue does keep bubbling up. Mission Chinese Food and Andy Richter's Pok Pok ignited the debate about whether or not non-ethnic people could serve up "authentic" interpretations of "ethnic cuisines". And the latest salvo comes from Aunty Beeb, where the BBC1 Nigella Lawson Italian special has ignited a bit of a stir as to whether or not the talented Nigella could be considered Italian, or if Italian has just become another theme in the food carnival that is modern day food fetishism. The article does an awesome job of breaking down some of the more important things to note about foodways in historical context: most are recent (as of the Columbian Exchange, no more than 100-200 years ago recent) phenomenons, and in the last 100 or so, many of those "traditions" have become marketed as "authentic" to outside worlds (French paysan and bourgeoise fare? Pasta and sauces? All pretty recent, and many of them pushed by food companies trying to break out. Think its limited to Europe? The Thai government has been using institutionalized menus as public diplomacy for nearly two decades). 

This plays into the push and pull of the authentic, as argued as a notion. See, from the purvey of food anthropology, "traditional' can be anything done between two or more generations (so for some, eating at McDonald's IS traditional foodways) and authenticity is built from the stones of what is contextual. Someone having cacio e pepe in Northern Italy is having something that is as authentic as someone having blue-box mac n' cheese as someone having dan dan mein in Sichuan. Any of these foods, while "pasta" or "noodles" under a general banner, also have a vertical basis -- "upscale" mac n' cheese, "cheaters" dan dan mein using peanut butter, the "appropriated" cacio e pepe someone had at some nonna's cucina in Umbria. All of these can fit into the vetting of authentic, depending entirely on ones circusmtances, context, and in the multi-culti interconnected (and frankly, novelty-starved) world in which we live, those lines can get blurry, fast, especially once we consider the class issues and the general knowledge of where foodstuffs originate, or where even those foods got their beginnings. 

Some places look to the ideas of a thing. Case in point: I grew up eating a doctored up form of Kraft Mac n Cheese. My father made "white sauce" -- basically a bechemel by another name -- with flour, butter, and a bit of milk, added some Tilamook sharp cheddar, the contents of the blue box, and whatever leftovers (peas! carrots! turkey! schnitzel!) we had in the fridge and made one-pot meals from it. This recipe became the inspiration for one of the many mac n' cheeses at the Oakland restaurant Homeroom, which my sister co-owns. The variation she makes there is delicious, tastes damn close to the real thing (if a little more consistent), and sends me back to a childhood place (in the way that umami* -- the real goddamn meaning of the word -- sends you back there). The only difference, in my mind, is the sense of place of both dishes. My fathers mac n cheese was one of stretching a product, making it economical and palateable.  My sisters is economical in a different way -- she uses farmers market produce, artisan cheeses and organic milk to make her mac, because part of the belief system of the restaurant is doing well by awesome producers. Both are authentic to the idea of a food, but belie that authenticity can be rooted in different ideas. 

(Less iffy here -- that of botanical varieties used in certain recipes. This bit of kitchen literacy is one of the harder things in today's world to argue for, seeing as so many recipes call on "substitutions". As I mention in my last post, substitutions are usually a lie, at least where flavor comes into the picture. You cannot get the sensations from Sichuan peppercorn from any other item. Same way  that certain tomatoes are made for pasting, others for sauce, and others eat well right out of hand. Most of this fits into the regional/geographic/botantical authenticity of a dish, or series of traditions, like rice noodles versus egg noodles in N/W China versus E/S China. Most would not only consider it inauthentic to sub one for the other, but also highly offensive. Talked to folks in New Orleans about their foodways? You get a good idea there about what the significance is from those folks. And they're awesome.)

So when we talk authenticity, we're talking about something that simultaneously is and is not in the eye of the beholder. It's something that we need to be open to, and something that we need to be aware of, in terms of class, ethnicities, and personal histories. There are traditions that don't change over time -- and there are people who update traditions to keep them relevant (as Leslie Marmon Silko reminded up so many times in Ceremony). That said, I also have the feeling that inauthenticity is easy to spot. It's an empty, hollow thing, and like communist countries, you know it when you see it. 

Like cupcakes. Those folks can suck it.