National cuisines under globalisation

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a group of food studies students from New York Uni on visits to sites of food production and distribution in Sydney. This was part of their study of foodways under globalisation with New York and Sydney as the sites of inquiry. At the end of each day the students had a 'reflection' session where they commented on what they had seen and experienced that day. I found their comments stimulating. so much so that I have been spurred on to writing up some reflections myself. This is the first of them.

National cuisines under globalisation:

Reflection 1# from three days immersion in foodways of Sydney

Posing the question

Thanks to all of you for allowing me the opportunity to see my city and its foodways through other eyes and from different perspectives. I thought you might like to read some of my responses to your reflections and comments.

I apologise profusely for not noting who said it, but in the session post our visit to Cabramatta one of commented that before coming you hadn’t expected to be eating a Vietnamese pork roll in Australia because that wasn’t what you’d thought of as Australian food, but that later you thought, well, everyone is eating it, and it’s in Australia, so I guess it is Australian food.

That set me thinking about how you characterise a national cuisine under globalisation. And coincidentally enough just this week I read a post in David Leibowitz’s blog Living the Sweet Life in Paris, where he asks this question of French cuisine. (Some Thoughts on French Cuisine) 

In the blog he says:

‘Many of the foods in America have been brought by immigrants and are now considered part of our culture and cuisine. Some foods we enjoyed abroad (and through cookbooks), have become popular in America because they fit our lifestyle and taste. Today in Paris, and across France, restaurants – and tastes – reflect a similar mix. There are sushi bars, French bakeries, Chinese take-outs, bistros, American fast food restaurants, bento boxes, Michelin three-star restaurants, couscous restaurants, burger joints, and in almost any neighborhood or village, you’ll find meat spinning on a broche, carved up to make le sandwich Grec (gyro). While they may not sound like “French cuisine,” they are among the foods that the French eat today. The reality is that France is experiencing (and, in many instances, resisting) globalization, evolving as cities, and the world, invariably do....

... So maybe it’s time to stop striving so much to classify foods according to which country it’s cooked in, and just say that they’re making good food. And maybe it’s just becoming less and less possible to define a cuisine by the country where it’s being cooked.’

An Australian cuisine

This is even more particularly the situation in Australia as I think the trips through Newtown, Cabramatta and Ashfield I think showed. It’s hard to pin down what Australia’s national cuisine is outside of a relatively short period of dominance of British food (not more than a hundred and fifty years I would argue) or Indigenous food which actually remains well outside the common enough experience of Australians generally (including most Indigenous Australians) to be really validly claimed as the national cuisine.

Recall the discussion about the entrenchment of first the Chinese restaurants in the Australian landscape and then the Greek managed American-style milk bars.  Ask older Australians in particular and they will invariably include these along with the scones and jams of the Country Women’s Association at the table of Australian food. I doubt that anyone considers Chinese food ‘ethnic’ anymore. I think that’s true for food that is generally defined as Italian also; I would bet that pasta and some tomato based sauce appears on the table of a majority of Australian households several times a year.

It’s also true of South Asian food – curry and rice in all its guises. I have begun putting together a history of curry in Australia and it’s clear that as with Britain curry appeared regularly on middle class tables within a few decades of the colonisation of India. Many former employees of the British East India Company and the British colonial forces also spent some time in Australia usually post their time in India, and curry came with them.

But it’s also true of the more recent large scale migrations. You experienced it with the pork roll, but pho is as much a part of the Australian foodscape these days. ‘Lebanese’ bread is a staple at parties to accompany dips, and the dips themselves will very often include humus and/or babaganoush. My eldest son and his multi-ethnic peer group often end up getting a kebab roll after a night at the pub; it is not ‘ethnic’ food for them any more than chicken tiki masala is to British post rubbers.

The origins of the food are not lost in this process; Chinese meals are still Chinese meals, tabouleh is still a Lebanese salad, baklava is still a Greek sweet. But they become what Australian’s eat and so arguably a part of our national cuisine.

The parallels with multiculturalism versus assimilation are obvious.  Under the former, cultures maintain degrees of integrity and autonomy within a more encompassing cultural frame; under the latter the migrant/minority culture must give way to the dominant culture.

The making of a national cuisine (with apologies to Appudurai)

The interesting question I think is at what point can you say this transition is complete for a particular dish?

I think one measure is when recipes for the food appear in community cookbooks. Not in foodie magazines which I think still marginalises them.  I mean when they turn up in cookbooks schools or local charities put together to raise funds, and especially when they are not assigned to an ‘ethnic’ or ‘food from foreign countries’ section of these books.  One of these days I will trace the introduction of eggplant/aubergine onto the national domestic table as an example of this process.

A second measure, I think, is when the ingredients for making the dishes – the vegetables, the cuts of meat, the spices and herbs – appear on supermarket shelves, particularly those in suburbs that are not heavily identified with a particular migrant community. Curry powder was a common import in the mid – late 1800s in Australia and not long after the first Australian produced curry powder – Keens – became a staple in the larder. Tomato paste is another example, olive oil also. It’s the point at which people expect them to be on the shelf that is when the transition happens I think.

A third is related to the second measure and that is when the vegetable, fruit meat or fish that is the basis of the dish is farmed/gathered by producers outside of the ethnic community from which the dish originates. We saws an example of this when we visited Riverview Produce at Richmond, where David Grima, Australian Maltese whose family has for forty odd years grown European/ Mediterranean vegetables now hydroponically grows three types of Asian leafy greens - bok choy, choy sum and pak choy - alongside his lettuce varietals as stir fried and steamed Asian greens have left the Asian restaurant for the home table.