When I arrived in NYC in 1993, Manhattan was a very different place than it is today.
The taxi drivers were Russian, Greek, and some even Irish. But this was rapidly changing. More and more frequently I encountered Haitian, Dominican, Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi drivers. With this demographic change, there was a burgeoning of restaurants that catered to the culinary proclivities of these men—and also some women—on the move.
Read this piece I wrote for the Economic Times here. Or continue below
The changing nationalities of taxi drivers is a fascinating barometer of the immigration waves that hit a city. Especially in American cities, the taxi drivers mimic the story of immigration in the nation as a whole. All taxi drivers are people, at least until we have self-driven cars. All people come from someplace and belong to some race. No human can claim being race-less and without an ethnic identity, however mixed it might be.
It is this identity we have as humans that makes each one of us fall into some loose grouping of people, however flawed such a criterion might be. “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” so the song goes, and so even in the most ecumenical of minds and times, people are divided into isms. It is the most natural thing to have happen. It is hard to keep it from happening.
The word ethnic is associated with the traits exhibited by a group of people with a common ism of ancestry and culture. It speaks of kindred spirits. It creates, rather loosely, large swaths of people familial in ways that might not even make sense to themselves. It sorts people into groups whose members have racial, cultural, linguistic, tribal, national, or religious bases in common. It divides neighborhoods. It divides people - no matter if they come from the same country or even from the same town.
The chauvinism that comes with the word is nothing new. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “These are ancient ethnic revels, …Of a faith long since forsaken.” With those words he assigned “ethnic” to that world which was not converted to Christianity.
This colonizing mindset might be nothing respected or celebrated today, at least in places of public domain, but it has a deeply rooted influence on our way of thinking and our way of living. Colonists may have long left many ashore, but their prejudices, their opinions of those they colonized, and their dehumanizing attitudes towards those they oppressed live and thrive yet today.
Longfellow long gone, the word ethnic continues to define nationalism, jingoism, and superior-ism ever more freely and with nary a care given to its egregious, divisive history and discordant essence. How can civil societies be so uncivil as to use a word that stereotypes and divides? How can superpatriotic citizens of a nation get away with the use of a word with this stealth history of dangerous profiling to further their agendas?
Take, for example, the United States, where 98 percent of the citizens are people of a racial and cultural makeup entirely different from the natives. Yet, in the US, “ethnic” has been used with derision to label those people who are something other than Northern European. In Longfellow’s time, the word was used to single out the Jewish populace and thus came with baggage similar to what it carries today when it is used to marginalize the newer waves of immigrants coming across borders. Post-World War II, the Jewish and Christian immigrants of Northern European descent—as well as those considered Caucasian by mere coloring of skin, with no distinction given to racial origins or geography—have lived happily for the most part as a majority, having had their status magically changed to “native,” while those immigrants who arrived with darker skin, speaking another language, and from places other than Northern Europe, have been determined “ethnic.” Did each of those Northern European immigrants somehow arrive here from some extraterrestrial planet with no existing culture, no language, no race of their own?
In NYC and most of the US even today, non-Northern European foods are termed “ethnic.” This epithet is a kiss of death; a poison ivy that looks beautiful but stings viscerally, and damns for life. Food is something we have to indulge in to survive - all of us. We each have our comfort foods. Then there is Gourmet Food, the Aspirational Cuisines, the Fine Cuisines, the Classy Cuisines, the Expensive Cuisines, the Fancy ones, the Premium ones… “Ethnic” food falls into none of these categories.
It was in the mid 1990’s that my friend Ed Schoenfeld took the New York Times food critic, Ruth Reichl, and I to Pings in Queens for what he promised would be the best Chinese meal in town. It was a given that the restaurant wouldn’t get 2 Stars. Just the fact that we would leave Manhattan meant the loss of one of those rarefied stars. And then there was the “ethnic” element. The food was, after all, Chinese. Nothing was said, nothing was overt, but the word hung in the air. Ruth couldn’t have been more gracious, more in awe, more inclusive, more forward in her thinking and appreciation, in her celebration, and in her review. Pings got 1 Star, the first serious review for an “ethnic restaurant” in a borough. It also made Queens look good at a time when it was even more marginalized than it is now as a not-so-gentile part of the city.
Two and a half decades have passed since I first became aware of the restaurant scene in New York and started paying attention to the word ethnic and its baggage. The word has only gotten dirtier and more muddied in jingoism. I am still most often introduced as an “ethnic chef,” my cookbooks characterized as “ethnic cookbooks,” my food called “ethnic food.” This, when I have been one of the lucky few who have achieved the heights that one can reach in the annals of culinaria. How can I dare complain? I have no reason to—I am a lucky exception.
But even I, in my day-to-day life, when I am not the lucky “ethnic boy” whose “ethnic food” gets rave reviews in the papers and magazines, quickly become the other. Called slurs that are too dirty and hateful to mention, even shaken up physically, and profiled at airports in cities where I go to be feted on local television and to speak at forums of great repute. My success in certain circles can’t alter the established mindset. My legend is too small to impact the nation as a whole, my story too insignificant to change the thinking of the majority towards the “ethnic” other.
At the Culinary Institute of America, where I chair the Asian Studies Center, every care is being taken to educate a new cadre of chefs and operators who think of cuisine as a world of diverse flavors, and not in the archaic chauvinistic manner. They are making every effort to lose the term “ethnic cuisine” and instead talk about “world cuisine.” In fact, the cuisines of the non-Northern European nations are getting a lot of play in their corridors and in their thought leadership conferences. Sometimes I feel badly for the old guard when I see them on the sidelines, feeling as neglected as we “ethnic” types once did.
What I have not yet seen is a bold and daring change in most culinary institutes elsewhere—including in the nations that were once colonized and marginalized—where native foodways and culinary traditions are given any place of pride in education or even in societal acceptance. The colonized, now free, are colonizing their own landscape through a post-colonized mindscape. “Conti Cuisine” is what the food of Northern Europe is called across India at the institutes of culinary education. More emphasis is given to this cuisine—a bastardized version of the original—than the incredible cuisines of the regions of India. The mindset that perpetuates, the Colonizers’ Superiority, is in many ways even more flawed than that of the colonizers themselves. Until the nations of the world that are not part of the Northern European geography wake up to find pride in their own cultures and cuisines and start collecting, celebrating, and sharing recipes from their own nations, the world that is beyond their shores will certainly find them other, lesser, and poorer in more ways than one. We ought to all celebrate a world of flavors, not just a region of flavors.
Is it possible to use the word ethnic to simply connect us to a race and geography, and let go of its use in a deeper cultural context? Is it not preferable to have the food of the people of France be called French and that of the people of India be called Indian, and of the people of China, Chinese, and so on? Why should cuisine from America, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, and other nations big and small that we consider part of Northern Europe thrive in privileged entitlement and be considered “high end”, even if not called as such, while the cuisines of the rest of the world are labeled “ethnic” and as a result languish in the hidden nuances that deem them strange, unequal, dirty, cheap, other, and worse?
We must all rise, as civilized people, and make this world that “one world, one people, one global village” that we all hoped we could become with the dawning of the internet age.
Is that too much to ask? Am I speaking of Utopia? Does “ethnic food” - the food most often associated with deeply deliciously comforting flavors eaten by the majority of the world, food that is often rooted in spiritual, seasonal, and local context - not have any chance of being given the respect that is afforded to the foods that had the good luck of arriving with the colonists?
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