A personal history of cultural tourism through food. . .

When I was young, ethnic cuisine included spaghetti and meat sauce. French food, with its talk of snails, was just too, oh, frenchy, and you could forget sushi. Yuck.

Spring 1990. I am just about to turn 16 and am laid up with mono. I read Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and crave chicken chow mein (I liked the bamboo shoots best). I was not aware then how my literary consumption of China (via a western pen) was connected to my craving to consume the food, or even that there was an ethical component to my desire. I had, through Buck, romanticized a time now past in a place beyond my experience. The connection to the land, the strong family unit, the degree to which these were connected to health had me unconsciously believing that if I could tap into that ethic (through cabbage, bamboo shoots, white meat and crunchy noodles) I could tap into its model of health, of vigor, a model that not even Buck's characters could recover.

Summer 1992. I am working at Ann Marie's Italian Seafood Restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Across the street was Chez la Mer, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in town, right next door to Ground Zero, which, if memories serves me, was one of several bars/restaurants that catered priamrily to Rehoboth's financially comfortable gay clientele. In one fell swoop, French food (and french culture) was consolidated for me as feminized, queer, other, and across the street. Curiously, this association was also connected to upward mobility--that to be able to afford French food was to depart from a heterosexist masculinity. I happily ate linguine and clam sauce as part of my free shift meal. And of course, I couldn't afford Chez la Mer.

August 1992. My first week at American University in DC. An older friend (a junior) I know from home was at school at Maryland, and her boyfriend's brother was also a freshman at AU. I was invited to join them for Ethiopian cuisine at Meskerem in Adams Morgan. After reciting all of the "Do I get more than one grain of rice" jokes, and hearing them from family and friends alike, I got in the car with Lisa, Chris, and Chris' older brother and sped off towards Adams Morgan. It was my first eating adventure.

I was of course intrigued by the food and the decor (poufs instead of chairs), and took a certain peasure in my vague distaste for the food, which seemed primal (we ate with our hands) and impoverished (everything seemed to be disguised porridge). The colors of the restaurant were browns and creams, connecting it with something of a bleak earthiness that particpated in my ill-formed stereotypes of what East Africa must be like.

I have since come to love Ethiopian and Eritrean food for different reasons. three years later as an RA, I found myself in an international cuisine potluck among residence hall staff. The staff of each hall was to bring a food from some international locale. My Resident Director, Liza, had the summer before been to East Africa, and gave us a recipe for Doro Wat, a braised chicken dish in a spiced butter sauce with hard-boiled eggs. It was delicious and rich, and at that point I knew that I had more than simply experienced Ethiopian cuisine, I felt a special entitlement to it, since I had mastered the art of preparing it. Lisa Heldke argues that this is itself a sort of colonialism, that in cooking another culture (especially without appropriate context), I (we) had coopted it for our own self-congratualtory motives--Look how adventurous and cosmopolitan we are. We cooked Ethiopian food. What did you cook? Curry? Ooh, how original.

A later trip to Red Sea in Adams Morgan with friends found one of my dinner companions characterizing her sense of the bread's "creepiness" as reminding her of "human skin." Now, perhaps it does remind her of skin, but I am to this day struck with the degree to which this characterization, consciously or unconsciously participates in a reading of Africa as cannibalistic, as tabboo, as creepy.

I still love Ethiopian food, and still eat it on occasion. Indeed, I am glad that Lisa invited me to Meskerem 12 years ago, and that it wasn't just a single grain of rice that I was served. I am sad that it's taken me most of those 12 years, and a lot of education in critical thinking to just begin to understand the ethics of my relationship with a corner of the world (or the center of the world, if you live there) that I will probably never visit.

More later, including Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Morroccan, Brazilian, and Japanese food!