Food and Racism

There have been some interesting posts on this topic at Racialicious and at Zuky (quoted below). These posts are sparked by a resurgence of the typical stuff: "flied lice" jokes, cat eating and so on.

What I find rather amazing is that so many non-Asians continue to find these moronic clichés funny and/or fascinating, to the point that lurid stories about tainted Chinese food have been at or near the top of corporate fake-news for weeks.

I suppose part of it is that eating is among our most primeval physical activities, along with having sex; so it's easy for lizard-brained racists to focus their disgust and derision on those two basic areas: both emasculating and hypersexualizing our bodies, both grossed out and intrigued by our food, repulsed yet attracted by our exoticized ways. I think Tony Bourdain was on the money when he connected fear of dirty food with fear of dirty people.

This is especially interesting to me because a) I've held a lot of food service jobs when I was young, some of them in quite filthy locations b) I've encountered food-based racism.

I remember in 5th grade, I was having lunch in our portable with the rest of my class. I went to one of those schools so overpopulated that half the classes were held in rickety trailers, called "portables". My mother had fixed me a nice obento with fried noodles. As I was eating my noodles a boy at the other end of table yelled "They're worms! she's eating WORMS! GROSS! WORMS!"

I didn't take this sitting down. In fact, I stuffed as many of the noodles as I could into my mouth, got up, and started chewing on them as I walked over to his end of the table. Then I spit them out all over the top of his head. Then he threw up. The teacher had to call a "code red" over the intercom for an emergency janitorial visit. We both got in trouble -- and I almost never got in trouble at school -- but boy was it worth it!

I think the Zuky post really gets to the root of the issue, so I don't have much else to add other than that anecdote. Maybe I'll continue this post later and talk about the weird racial dynamics of the restaurant industry in Miami.