"My hunger for my family’s food was overpowered by my desire to fit in, so I minimized Chinese food’s role in my life and learned to make pasta instead. Little did I know that Americans would come to embrace the dishes and cooking styles that once mortified me. The Cantonese foods of my childhood have reappeared in trendy restaurants that fill their menus with perfectly plated fine-dining versions of our traditional cuisine. In some cases, this shift has been heartening. But in too many others, the trend has reduced staples of our culture to fleeting fetishes...
Gravitating toward “new” cuisines is understandable, and when done well, immigrant food can provoke discussions about personal history and shared diasporas. I’ve seen this happen at restaurants such as China Chilcano, which describes the history of Chinese and Peruvian fusion that influences its menu, a bare minimum that many restaurants ignore...
In the United States, immigrant food is often treated like discount tourism — a cheap means for foodies to feel worldly without leaving the comfort of their neighborhood — or high-minded fusion — a stylish way for American chefs to use other cultures’ cuisines to reap profit. The dishes of America’s recent immigrants have become check marks on a cultural scavenger hunt for society’s elite."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/31/childhood-friends-called-my-food-chinese-grossness-how-did-it-become-americas-hottest-food-trend/
I took a class on the history of drugs in America; we started with the ways that tea, coffee, and chocolate entered Europe (and then the United States). I ended up writing my first paper on an inconsistency I noticed: it was explained that these goods became popular with the nascent middle class because the elite were enjoying them, but the packaging used to sell them tended to feature images of exoticized jungle scenes and wild animals and "natives", instead of images of the elites (which were usually used to sell other goods). I argued in my paper that these exotic images were used because the lure of these goods was not just that they could make the 17th/18th century European feel more elite, but the idea that this was how the average person was getting their piece of the land being colonized by their monarchs.
Since writing that paper, I keep on noticing how true this continues to be with goods we get from non-Western countries. It's a little bit of buying some of that country or that culture. That's the experience being sold. It's still icky. We never stopped.
(and it's weird, me saying 'we', because like 3/4 of my ancestors were the ones being featured on those packages and violently exploited in order to process those goods; but now, I am a member of that Global North consumption class).
Related: Parents not seeing as cultural appropriation; comic on "authentic" food
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