"Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go."
- Anthony Bourdain
I love food. I always cringe and hesitate to use the word, “foodie,” but for lack of a better word, you could say that I’m a “foodie.” I’m that person who looks up what to eat and where to eat before traveling to a place. It doesn’t matter if it’s fine dining or a stand on the side of the street; if it’s good, you better believe I’m checking it out. It’s part of what I miss most about not traveling right now – the ability to experience another culture through food. I love – LOVE – being able to sit down for a great meal in a place that is foreign to me, and I miss that connection deeply.
Throughout quarantine, I surprisingly haven’t found myself watching that much TV, but there are a few shows that I’ve gotten really gotten into, including food shows. In fact, I recently finished binge watching one of my new favorite food shows, Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, on Hulu. Though, to say that Taste the Nation is just a food show diminishes what the show is really about. Rather, it’s a docuseries about many immigrants’ journeys to and experiences in America through food. It is a fascinating, educational, delicious and relatable look at cultural identity and the effects of colonialism through different cuisines.
In the show, Padma touches on how the gateway to learning about someone else’s culture is through their food, and I could not agree with this statement more. As the quote from Anthony Bourdain states above: “Food is everything we are.” I think about how food is so important to my family, such as our tradition of the Jamaican Sunday family meal, where there will always be Jamaican staples like rice and peas. I also think about the many cooking classes I’ve taken around the world, during which food is not just presented as something good to eat but also as a representation of a culture and of its people. It’s historical, political and, often times, deeply personal.
Not to make this post about just one show, but, well, I feel it’s an important show so I guess this blog post will be all about one show. In Taste the Nation, Padma looks at how America has either embraced a culture’s cuisine, to the point of adopting and diluting it (Insert: Mexico. Also, fun fact: Americans eat more salsa than they do ketchup!). Or, America has rejected a culture’s cuisine for political reasons (Insert: Iran).
What is constant across almost all of the cultures highlighted in the show is the lack of care for the people who make the food (e.g., Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, Persians, Gullah Geechee, and so on). This isn’t specific to America, of course. We see the same thing in other countries, where its inhabitants will accept the food but not the people who make the food (Insert: England). This is why food is political; it’s never just about the food itself.
The docu-series comes at a very relevant time for the world, when it feels like we’re unearthing all the ugliness that comes with being an “other” in a place where one is a minority. It shows the hypocrisy of our country, where people freely tell others to “go back to where they came from” while simultaneously embracing a variation of that person’s cuisine (e.g., let’s build a wall but let’s also eat their salsa).
It’s angering and frustrating to think about. It’s also partly why I feel travel is so important, and by travel I don’t mean going all the way around the world. As the show highlights, in America, one can travel from one part of the country to another and experience a different culture that very much makes up the fabric of the United States.
For me, I always have a greater appreciation and understanding of so many cultures after immersing myself in that culture, often times through its food. If we all took the time to not only taste a people’s cuisine but also understand, respect and appreciate them, we would be so much better off as a society.
All this to say, give Taste the Nation a watch. You’ll quickly find it’s more than just a good show; it’s a reflection of both the good and bad of America.
