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. 

Where Policy Meets the Kitchen

As a member of the NYU Food Studies program, people oftentimes wonder what it is "i do". It's not an easy question to answer. As with any interdisciplinary program, Food Studies draws from a number of different studies -- anthropology, economics, botany, agronomy, sociology, marketing and cognitive science, to name but a few -- to both draw together the various elements that make the food system a system, and to inform, depending on your focus, the ways in which we can change or adapt those things. As with any sort of study, there are a number of different angles and agencies: the student trying to figure out how school food purchasing works as to better include regional farmers; the public health official looking at the best way to create alternatives to bad food habits and how to shift them; the person figuring out how to best assist businesses navigate through the various food-based regulations that can stymie smaller businesses. The person studying the evolution of Chinese-American foodways. And the list can go on. 

For me, the course of study I follow has been evolving for a coupld of years; from studying farmers markets and specialty coffee supply chains, the US Farm bill and regulatory regimes related to geographic-indicators (i.e. France's AOC system) I've been focusing on diversity. Not only in the realm of crops, tho, but biodiveristy as part and parcel to cultural and culinary diversity. To me, these topics are not that far apart; being a student of Fernand Braudel while at Berkeley, the intersection between geography, environment, and cultural/political/economic development are very closely linked. Certain foodways spawned out of the conditions that people found themselves surrounded by and existed in. Salami? The evolution of needing to preserve boar meat. Fish sauce & liquamen? The need to provide salts and flavor in spaces where salt production was not easily had. Rye bread? Because when you tried to grow wheat in those climes it died. Cholent, pot roast, brisket were all foods of poverty that evolved as dishes that met the Sabbath need to be cooked only in radiant heat left over because you technically couldn't cook it on the Sabbath. 

So too it happens with botanicals. The wines of the Rhone would not be the same if they were tempranillo and blaufrankisch grapes. The holy basil and fish peppers that flavor pho would not be replaced by jalapenos and Basilicata basil. Cuisine is filled with such things (and hence my ire when in cookbooks there is always the reference of "substitutions". You ever wonder why mom's apple pie never tastes the same when you do? it's because of the substitutions you make), and the cultural connection to the making of dishes and what grows in the ground does, in fact, matter. Nowhere is it more clear than in this recent piece in the NY Times food section, looking at the attempts to continue the foodways of second- and third-generation immigrant households in the US. 

Now you might wonder, where does food systems or food policy fit into this, and the article half-answers this. Political missions have always infringed upon cultural agency -- turn of the century firms that attempted to integrate new immigrants found spicy foods distasteful, and therefore dissuaded their production by new immigrants. Certain crops could not be found in this country, so some were grown by family gardeners, others found suitable substitutions in American produce. The American post-ww2 policies where agricultural production are concerned have had, across the board, great impacts on what is grow, and in turn, the bulk of what is considered "food" in the American cultural context. 

A friend of mine in high school told me how "he had no culture -- he was just a white kid". Nevermind that his background was Italian-Jewish, and his parents, while divorced, had each brought to the table specific memories and foodways that he could recall, but had no connectivity to. This doesn't have to be the case. And every case that is like it is a loss of cultural agency, a loss of power, one more thing that we accept as acceptable -- and that is one step away from generic products and the futuristic (as in the Italian futurist) way of looking at food merely as a bodily imput, and not as a form of sustenance in both the nutriative and vaguely spiritual way that sometimes talking about culture can be. This is not some waxing poetic for a idealized past; it is the focus on foods that bring with them a specific type of literacy -- a cultural or kitchen literacy -- that is part and parcel to the types of cultural agency that keeps people from being simply cogs in a machine, but very active agents of our own lives and societies (this argument is best laid out in the book "Kitchen Literacy" by Anne Vileisis).

Ultimately, my work is about stemming such a tide, and more particularly, doing so at mutliple levels. It's about working on agricultural diversity as to preserve and encourage cultural diversity in the kitchen. It's about economic development as part and parcel to cultural development. Doing so in places where policies can be changed that ultimately come to effect the home environment, to afford people the space to be able to do more and, as one of Burning Man's many valuable lessons come in, encourage a form of radical self-reliance, not in the sense of living off the land and off the grid, but in the sense of taking ownership in one of the most important spaces one can -- the privacy of the home and the convivium of the hearth and table.