This brief essay considers varied and often contradictory developments in order to explore the many understandings of the “authentic” and of “fusion” – as well as to question the authenticity of the authentic and the newness of “fusion” — by pointing to food as a result of the confection of the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”.
Behind the assiduous documentation and defense of the authentic lies an unarticulated anxiety of losing the subject.
-Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity (10)
But what does authenticity really mean? And is authenticity really the right yardstick by which to judge an Indian meal?
Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2)
Travel these days, commented a colleague with mirth and gloom, is measured by what you eat and where rather than what you visit and see. The exponential increase in consumption has brought in its trail food tourism, an upsurge in food shows, gourmet channels, and food competitions on television, and a surfeit of food bloggers and culinary groups in the social media along with the numerous food columns in newspapers and journals. Food and cuisine have suddenly emerged as vital elements of identity and personhood, being and belonging, nation and culture, desire and affect. Unsurprisingly, national governments and indigenous, “ethnic” and marginal groups now compete with each other to project food either as a key element of national culture, or to get “heritage status” in order to conserve the “authenticity” of “ethnic” cuisine.
In tune with this, a recent line of high-range “ethnic” restaurants abroad, the USA in particular, pride themselves on providing “authentic” fare of a particular region of say China or India as opposed to their run-of-the-mill cheap counterparts that serve homogenised “inauthentic” pan-national “Chinese” or “Indian” food. Despite this disdain for the “inauthentic”, food served in cheaper restaurants has been the result of innovative blends and adaptation. Such innovations and adaptations, however, are not unique to restaurants in foreign countries; they are integral to cooking and cuisine and hence, happen in the home country at all times. In addition, there is a growing emphasis on “fusion” food within these countries, a tendency that reflects the desire of upwardly mobile social groups to belong to the global and the cosmopolitan.
This brief essay takes into consideration these varied and often contradictory developments in order to explore the many understandings of the “authentic” and the “fusion”, and to question the authenticity of the authentic and the newness of the “fusion” by pointing to food as the result of confection of the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”. A quick look at the history of food and cooking opens a rich scenario of species migration and cross-cultural flows, colonial encounters and power-play, allowing an interrogation of essentialisms that often result in intolerance and the construction of rigid frontiers.
[ms-protect-content id=”3162″]In an incisive critique of notions of “indegeneity” and “alienness” tied to debates around the “trout” as an invasive species in South Africa, Duncan Brown argues that plant and animal species move, not just on account of human intervention such as transportation, planting and stocking, but also on account of habitat and climate change, a fact that upsets simple notions of indigeneity, endemicity and the right to belong (Brown 2016: 22-23). He advocates an understanding of biodiversity and belonging not in terms of simple origin or autochthony, which is “deeply problematic”, but in terms of (biological) interdependence and accommodation (Ibid: 35).
A simple fact illustrates Brown’s point: it is possible to think of Italian food without tomatoes that came from the New world, or overlook the significance of potatoes, also from the New world, in the diet of the English, in particular, the working classes? From where does chingri (prawn/shrimp) malaikari, proudly projected as a “signature” dish of Bengal, eastern India, by food writers, derive its name? From the thick coconut-milk gravy (malai) or from Malaysia (Malay in Bengali), with which Bengal has had long trade and other connections? What is typical or endemic or natural in this case?
The second part of the name of the dish, kari (curry) brings us possibly to the most significant creation in India during British rule. Curry, has no counterpart in any of the several Indian languages, and yet is emblematic of Indian food in most of the world. While one can argue that the case of India is particular and echo Collingham’s statement that authenticity is not the real yardstick to judge an Indian meal, is it correct to say that “authenticity” applies to Chinese or French or Italian food? How is it that Chop suey, an (ill)famous invention of Chinese immigrants to the United States, caused a craze in the US in the late-nineteenth century and has now become a “relic”, a “food fad that has ended up in the rubbish heap of culinary history”? (Coe 2009:160) It bears pointing out in this connection that chop sue or “za sui” (Mandarin) or “sap sui” (Cantonese) refers to “odds and ends” or a hash, a “hodgepodge stew” similar to the Indian “curry”, often defined as a “hot stew” with different ingredients and spices. While the thrashing of “Chop suey” has come in the wake of its categorisation as a “flavourless” hash, the ubiquity of curry rests on its constantly changing yet perennial blends.
During its heyday moreover, the “Chop suey” was far from standardised: its definition was anything but fixed, a fact that made it attractive and appetising. If we pick up the story of Chinese food in the US at the end of the twentieth century, we see the same process of adaptation and innovation through which restaurateurs who run “consumption oriented” and “connoisseur oriented” restaurants, “fit Chinese food into market niches.” Such strategies highlight that “authenticity is not an objective criterion”; it is “socially constructed and linked to expectations” (Shun Lu and Fine 1995: 335). Hence, before we sneer at the Americans of the nineteenth century who identified Chinese food with Chop suey, we might pause to think that the “authentic ethnic” food of high-range Chinese restaurants of today might be despised by “connoisseurs” of a later generation, another testimony to changing notions of food, identity and authenticity.
Arguably, these examples indicate adaptation and combination through active human intervention in settings abroad. If we turn our attention back to China, a country notorious for its zeal to guard itself from the onslaught of foreigners till the seventeenth century, we can gainfully ask how the “traditions” of “regional” or “ethnic” cuisine (caixi) – categorised differently into five, eight or 10 – were the results solely of innovative processing of “indigenous” ingredients or were affected by species migration and climate change in addition to human intervention.
Xu Wu’s works on local and “ethnic” food of the Enshi prefecture in southwest Hubei, central China, has demonstrated how the food of this relatively young “ethnic” prefecture has undergone transformations in meanings and symbolism as well as standardisation as it has been incorporated in urban restaurant chains (Xu Wu 2016). Now well-known to urban consumers and “foreigners” as “hezha” food, a name derived from a common local dish, a soup with bean dregs and soybean liquid and vegetables, hezha food has effectively repositioned its symbolic status as coarse yet tasty and healthy ethnic food, including finding its way to the dinner table of the “foreigner” as a “delicacy” (Ibid: 151). The changing status and contradictory meanings of hezha food acquire particular significance if we remember that it did not exist in the early-eighteenth century. Several factors contributed to the creation of this new “ethnic” food tradition: here, migration and change in taste, as well as the state’s effort to control mountain regions by introducing maize and other coarse crops from the mid-eighteenth century played vital roles.
It does not require pointing out that state strategies play an important role in the shaping of food cultures. To take a recent example, we are yet to see the full impact of the urban and rural Chinese consumers’ change from a “grain-based” to a “nutrition-based” diet that has not only resulted in a phenomenal increase in the intake of animal-protein but has also made marine fishery products compose a third of this protein intake. The average animal-protein intake in China is much higher than the global average (Zhang Hongzhou 2016). This change, of course, has been actively encouraged by the Chinese state and local governments: the “blue granary” concept or a “marine-based food security” proposed since 2007 has been accompanied by the official addition of fish to the “vegetable basket” in 2011 (Ibid). Together, state initiative and people’s change in taste and ideas of nutrition will make marine fish a major part Chinese diet and cuisine, slowly replacing pork and other forms of animal protein. If the trend continues, fish-based diet will stand for “typical” Chinese food in a decade or two.
In sum, explorations of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures allow for a re-thinking of the “authentic” and the “ethnic” by underscoring the inherently mixed nature of food and cuisine, and the constructed and contingent nature of identities. A result of the “fusion” of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination, inflected by relations of power and creative experiments, food and cuisine open spaces to think of “identities” as posited on the “inauthentic”, unsettling thereby the construction of an essential “other”.
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About the Author
Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Professor of History at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico City. Her research interests include religion, law and power; language and identity; caste and politics; food, gender and nation, and postcolonial studies, with special focus on eastern India over the 19th and 20th centuries. The most recent of her four authored books is: A History of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Among her 10 edited volumes feature: Cooking Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Caste in History (Oxford University Press, 2008).
References
1. Brown, Duncan. 2016. “Indigeneity, Alienness and Cuisine: Are Trout South African”, in Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling, edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube, 21-28. Cambridge and New Delhi, Cambridge University Press.
2. Coe, Andrew. 2009. Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, New York, Oxford University Press.
3. Collingham, Lizzie. 2006. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
4. Shun Lu and Gary Alan Fine. 1995. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as Social Accomplishment”, The Sociological Quarterly, 35, 3: 335-353.
5. Xu Wu. 2016. “Local Foods and Meanings in Contemporary China. The Case of Southwest Hubei”, in Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling, edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube, 139-157. Cambridge and New Delhi, Cambridge University Press.
6. Zhang Hongzhou. 2016. “China’s Growing Appetite for Fish and Fishing Disputes in the South China Sea”, All China Review, November.
