Dissing people because they cannot appreciate authentic foreign food is so 2012
No, I’m not Ms. International and ~please~ don’t put that sour-smelling cheese in my pasta
Have you ever been that person donning a cape of smugness about food and its authenticity in foreign cuisine restaurants? I have, too. Deriving a sense of superiority over knowledge of obscure subjects is my favorite thing to do. Look at all these regulars and uncultured people and LOOK AT ME I know the names of eleven different shapes of pasta.
The self-approval is cringeworthy but that’s the thing about the graceless rich and the uncouth educated folks hailing from civilizations that boast of being ahead of the others.
I’m not even going to get started on the obnoxiousness that accompanies liquor, we will save that rant for later.
I write this out of a prominent self-serving need because ever since I turned vegan, everything I eat and cook flies right into the face of authenticity and while I get a lot of dissension for being vegan, I have lately received plenty of remarks about how I am missing on the authentic flavours of all kinds of cuisines which brought me to the very important question of what authentic really means in the language of food.
Simply put, authenticity is purely subjective, a snobbish judgement on one the most important things in life, which should be free from such petty concerns — food.
Authentic is nothing but a crutch word for braggarts who want to douse themselves in the glitter of western supremacy and who would know that better than me?
There are only two imperatives when it comes to food — taste, and nutrition. Everything else is secondary and authenticity is completely irrelevant.
The usage of ‘authentic’ as an adjective for food is highly obnoxious and subsequently meaningless because authenticity is deeply personal to each one of us. It is constructed by our unique childhood and family history.
To allow authenticity to dictate the quality of food is a downright insult to the evolution of that cuisine and the subtle differences that exist in what is assumed to be one population. No two Indians will ever concur to one authentic recipe of jeera aloo — everyone’s grandmother does it differently and each recipe is equally important and rich.
The quest for authenticity damages the idea that all food lovers should aspire to — tasty and nutritious food that continues to evolve and up the culinary ante.
And to all the people who rest their horrendous food on the crutch of authenticity, you may think you got it, but you’ll never be good as that mother who has that soul. You’re better off improving the taste of your food.
Inauthenticity is a power, a refusal of someone else’s expectations and tastes.
We are driven by food. People stop at Murthal for the parathas, make trips to Ambala for some chaat, put their alimentary canals at some serious risk for the savour. The lengths that people are willing to travel to eat their food, the hours they are willing to wait in queue for a golgappa, may dramatize a desire to return, impossibly, to something unrecoverable — the “flavour memory” of childhood, the simple joy of eating lunch with my sibling after school, a transformative steel plate with some yellow daal and bhindi. Sometimes it has nothing to do with taste at all, but instead is about the chain of associations triggered when you hear the cooker’s whistle blow — it’s time for dinner! and it’s green daal and you hate it but you love it.
Your means to the end tell a story, and it is useful and heart-warming for meals to have narratives, but when all is said and done, that end better be damn delicious.
If the pursuit of authenticity overrides the imperative of taste, there’s a problem. The whole incentive system gets warped. Suddenly we’re stuck with restaurants that are underwhelming expressions of cultural purity and obnoxiousness, and I’m stuck with some bullshit noodles that are testing my oesophagus.
Cuisine has never been ‘static’, and that authenticity is a ‘moving target’.
Wanting authentic cuisine became an easy punchline to a joke about millennial foodies and their Instagram accounts, and diners and chefs alike backed down from using the word, understanding that it played into stereotypes and assumptions that could be more harmful than good
Like gender, race, and all other buzzwords we use these days, authenticity is a social construct — something that we’ve given a certain amount of weightage to as a society. It doesn’t have to be the benchmark against which we measure cuisine, but for it not to be, other major shifts are still necessary. People of color and immigrants would need the space to experiment without their identities getting called into question. White chefs and diners would have to stop fetishizing immigrants just for their food. We’d have to accept that there may not actually be a battle between protecting tradition and valuing change, that these concepts could coexist. We have a long way to go toward supporting non-white chefs, undoing white assumptions about “ethnic” cuisine, and valuing thoughtful innovation over the novelty of a white chef making a sushi burrito.
Authenticity will always mean different things to different people.
Shut up, Sunvi. Not everything is about imperialism and race and geographic endowment.
But it is.
