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.
