The Authentic and the Inauthentic

 Much has been said of “authentic” foods in Euro-America. Terms that were once confined to the realm of academia, such as “appropriation” and “power relation,” have now found lodging in the mouths and minds of the common folk. Much of the topic has been exhausted, yet its vitality has scarcely dimmed. One need not drift far from the alleys of an American downtown to see voiced and unvoiced complaints, and fears, of the lack of “authenticity” exhibited by its foods.

For those that watched Marvel Studios’ recent Ms. Marvel likely did not miss the snarky derision one of the Pakistani characters launched towards Chinese food in America, casting doubt as to whether it has been “white-washed.” The countless Chinese immigrants and visitors of America are equally unreserved in their chary consumption of locally made “Chinese cuisine,” though at times overwhelmed by similar criticisms launched by Americans themselves, especially from the left. “Fusion” cuisine can be as much of an effective label in attracting diners as it is a dirty word that elevates into relief the profound confusion over the served food’s authenticity. 

Yet what is American Chinese food? As “white-washed” as they are often portrayed to be, a criticism that is not without merits, the ultimate progenitor of this bastard-seeming cuisine were, more often than not, Chinese chefs and immigrants. The somewhat uncomfortable truth is that, as different as they may be from the cuisines back in China, the quick and angsty dismissal of American Chinese food that decries the white American corruption of them erases the very agency and subjectivity that such dismissals sought to recover in the first place. This is not to mention the very complicated history of how “China” was recovered in the twentieth century and the very evolution of Chinese cuisines.

It is undeniable that Chinese chefs, from the aftermath of the Opium Wars to the present day, catered to various Euro-American palates in their gastronomic pursuits, and that such pursuits were, and continued to be, made in environments of palpable power imbalance. Yet to frame this as a purely Western phenomenon betrays the profuse occurence of it, a phenomenon central to the emergence and development of every cultural system on the face of this planet. The much beloved Japanese ramen was itself a “corruption” of a kind of Chinese noodle bearing the same and original name (or lamian). Indeed, what is perceived to be Japanese outside of Japan, and usually even inside Japan, also carried a second name of chuka men, literally “Chinese noodle.” Similar transportations and transformations of foods were no less the norm in what is China today (ponder for a moment the use of items such as potatoes and tomatoes in Chinese cuisines, ones not native to China, or the consumption of noodles and dumplings across its various axes…). This is not to say similar power relations do not exist, much less similar colonial dynamics. Yet what needs stressing is that, the processes that begotten said and similar foods rarely receive similar scrutiny, if at all. Who is to say Japanese ramen is merely “inauthentic Chinese food”?

Perhaps, it is not so much the content as it is the spirit that dictates authenticity. A kind of “aura” that Walter Benjamin once yearned so wholeheartedly. The spirit is by nature burdened with tradition, entwined in the streams of history that resist the a-geographical globalizing forces of today. But the spirit is not physically confined, of course, rather its path follows the increasingly mobile people carrying this spirit, or spirits. It is something that transcends tradition in its materiality, and stuffs within its interior a kind of reverence in osmosis with its material and ideal surroundings. Authenticity needs not a fixed people or material culture, but a kind of attention to the possibilities that unfold within the apparent mold of tradition. What this means is then a revision to the current use of “authenticity” in that while I welcome the stay of concepts such as “power” and “appropriation,” I challenge the material conditions often assumed in the production and authorization of authenticity. 

That said, when it comes to food, just eat what tastes good. What the hell, right?