The most recent unit in my class has been one on the idea of the food adventurer, that category of diner who visits ethnic restaurants to have a side dish of culture with their meal. Using Lisa Heldke's Exotic Appetites as a central text, and supplementing with selections from bell hooks' "Eating the Other" and David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire we have tried to go through and examine how various tropes of exoticism play out in the exchange between anglo-american diner (in most cases) and Othered restarateur.

As a group, we visted Zed's Ethiopian in Georgetown, and then students wrote down their reactions. The following class period, we looked at Spurr's 11 tropes of exoticism to see how they applied, and I was incredibly impressed to find each student able to articulate ways that their dining pratcices had helped reify the essentially, yet subtly, racist impulses behind a whole range of reactions.

We followed this up with a discussion of the mertis and problems of food authenticity, centered around the idea that the western impulse to seek out authenticity aestheticizes the everyday as a way of allowing "us" to find a sort of beauty in objects that are considered mundane by the home culture. Students have engaged in this in a variety of ways, but engage they have.

What was interesting was the smattering of conversations I was able to pick up during a drafting exercise last Friday. Within moments, I heard the phrases , "Well, you're really trying to figure out what counts as 'Other,'" and "We're working with different ideas of authenticity," and "But isn't that just another form of cultural capital?" All this from freshmen.

Say what you will about composition, and I'm admittedly working with a sharp bunch, but still, Give them something to actually think about, and give them permission (indeed, force them) to actually have an idea, and the results can be amazing.

One student has (debatably, but persuasively) identified a process whereby the ethnic restaurant becomes a site of reciprocal stereotyping--White diners are stereotyped as ignorant and incapable of cultural subtlety, and therefore sold a set of images that themselves encourage stereotyping of the Other's culture.

Another student tries to articulate his outrage at finding Old-Bay-seasoned crab cakes at a tapas restaurant, and ends up arguing that this need to classify cuisines as discrete is a way of keeping "Us" separate from "Them."

In office hours, a third student suggested the idea that the peddling of inauthentic cuisine and culture is not selling out a culture, but rather a means of protecting cultural artifacts and practices from a gradual colonization.

Lovely. Just lovely.