Hello! Thank you so much for subscribing to Justsomefoodiethings. That was a fun newsletter! I’ve launched a new newsletter, Central Texas Dish, and I hope you’ll join me over there. Here’s my first post.
It was never my intention for this to be a monthly newsletter, I promise. My plan was for it to be biweekly, if not weekly. But back in May, a few days after my last post, my friend gave me a hard deadline to finish the shitty first draft of my novel, which I had been working on since September 2015. She cruelly gave me a 3.75-week deadline to finish, which meant that any and all other writing took a backseat. I put myself on a 1,000-words/day schedule and on the first day of that plan, I wrote -43 words. Don’t ask me how I did that kind of dark magic, but it happened. There were other days when I wrote more than 3,000 words (which is low-key exhausting and I don’t recommend it). But I finished the first draft and sent her a PDF as proof with four hours to spare before my deadline. I know that it needs significant revision and I’m trying not to lose sleep over all the ways it needs improvement, but I finished it. And now it’s in a (virtual) drawer being studiously ignored by me until the end of July.
Also! I’ve landed on the idea for my next novel and can’t wait to get started on it! It involves whiskey bootlegging and stabbing and covered wagons and stealing pigs and there will be period-specific names like Etha Pearl and Eula and Charlotta! Stay tuned.
Over the past month, though, I’ve also read and watched and listened to a lot of things that have opened my eyes and my heart and sparked my curiosity and made me laugh and cry.
Read: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. I actually bought this book when it came out in late April, but I put off reading it for a few weeks because I didn’t want to read a memoir about a mother dying of cancer on or near Mother’s Day. I got off to a slow start on this one, and Zauner’s descriptions of her mother’s decline were pretty difficult to read. I haven’t read a ton of grief memoirs (for obvious reasons) but I appreciated that she didn’t shy away from the ugliness and messiness of losing a loved one, including the loved one’s ugliness and messiness. I don’t want to read a hagiography of someone else’s dead mother, and I’m glad that this one wasn’t.
I’m not super familiar with Korean food, so I didn’t have much of a hook to hang her descriptions on, but I could definitely relate to her how she went through an obsessive phase of making kimchi of all sorts in the wake of her mother’s death. I can identify with that kind of dissociation after trauma (as I’m sure we all can in 2021). This book is very, very, very raw, and I strongly suggest that if you think you might be triggered by reading an account of watching a parent die of cancer and the emotional aftermath, you should proceed with caution.
Listen: The Recipe Club podcast. I’m always looking for new podcasts, particularly because the political ones I’ve been listening to for the past few years are just stressing me out and filling me with rage (looking at you, Pod Save America). The premise of the podcast is that three chefs (Chris Ying, David Chang, and a rotating third, but often Priya Krishna) take a randomly selected ingredient (spaghetti, SPAM, canned tuna), select an online recipe using that ingredient, share it with the other chefs, and all three of them make all three recipes. Then they discuss their experiences with each one and decide, collectively, which chef’s chosen recipe was the most successful. It can be a little bro-y, but I really like the concept. It’s also made me more adventurous in both my cooking and my shopping. The Pillsbury tube dough episode inspired me to try making croissants for the first time ever. (I’ll let you know how they turn out.)
The canned tuna episode inspired me to purchase a can of Dong Won double hot pepper tuna, which Dave Chang says is perfect as-is served with some rice. I haven’t worked up the nerve to eat it, yet, though. And I’m even a little curious about making SPAM musubi, even though literally no one in my house will eat it, probably. (They might surprise me.)
(Also, if you have any non-politics and non-true crime podcasts to recommend, I’m all ears.)
Watch: High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. It’s contemplative, powerful, heartbreaking, joyful, and endlessly fascinating. It moves through time, telling the story of African American food starting in Africa, moving to the Carolinas, New York, and beyond. Alongside stories of how okra and yams came with enslaved people to North America are stories of gentrification, community, and entrepreneurship.
The last episode takes place in Texas, including at the now-shuttered Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church bbq in Huntsville, which I was privileged enough to visit as part of an oral history project in graduate school.
I loved this show so much, I’ll probably watch it again and again.
Bonus watch: Physical on Apple+ TV. Hooboy. I’ve only watched the first three episodes (because that’s all that’s available), and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. But I couldn’t stop watching, so I guess that’s something. If you’ve seen it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Now then, I’m off to start drafting my research plan for novel #2, working title Trinity Station.
"Diet Pepsi, SPAM, and Wonder bread"
What are the parameters of government's responsibility for public health?
At the end of 2017, we took a family trip to the Grand Canyon. The drive from Flagstaff to the South Rim took us through a sliver of the Navajo Nation. We stopped for snacks and gas at a tiny convenience store on the reservation. While I was grabbing a Diet Coke to go along with my peanut M&Ms, I noticed that there were flavors of Pepsi in the soda cabinet that I’d never seen before. Specifically, there was a salted caramel flavor that, had I not been scrupulously Weight Watching at the time, I would have sampled. I was intrigued.
But I was also bothered because, here we were, on this gigantic, desolate swath of land with no grocery stores or cropland to be found. The only food available for purchase that I could see was packaged snack food and sugary sodas in this little gas station. Now, I’m not trying to position myself as some sort of white savior, but I couldn’t help but notice that I was in a literal food desert.
I thought about that salted caramel Pepsi again recently when the FDA announced it would be banning menthol cigarettes, specifically because menthol cigarettes are particularly harmful to Black folks. That issue hadn’t even been on my radar until someone tweeted about it. My initial response was, “hmm, that seems a little paternalistic.” But my interlocutor pointed out that the tobacco companies had actively cultivated the market, and he’s not wrong.
But! I find it ironic that the government is regulating marketing of cigarettes to Black people when that same government literally created the conditions in which Indigenous people live today, complete with terrible commodity food and the health problems those foods engender. (Note: The U.S. government isn’t the only one that used food as a way to torment Native people.)
Thomas smiled and walked into the Trading Post, one of the few lucrative businesses on the reservation. Its shelves were stocked with reservation staples: Diet Pepsi, Spam, Wonder bread, and a cornucopia of various carbohydrates, none of them complex. — Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
American colonizers, in the form of the U.S. government, completely disrupted Native foodways with the Federal Indian Removal Act of 1830, which saw forced relocation of countless Indigenous people from their lands to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma and beyond. The government supplied rations of coffee, lard, flour, sugar, and canned meat twice a month as an interim solution to feed these displaced peoples until they were able to reestablish their agriculture and hunting practices. But, as this TikTok video demonstrates, the government didn’t exactly remove Natives to fertile land.
This, of course, is how frybread became a staple food on reservations and beyond, and is how the Indian taco was the avatar of Native cuisine for generations, as described in There There by Tommy Orange.
They only knew about Indian tacos because their grandma made them for their birthdays. It was one of the few Indian things she did. And she was always sure to remind them that it’s not traditional, and that it comes from lacking resources and wanting comfort food.
There’s a well-established movement for Native food sovereignty these days, along with programs dedicated to helping Indigenous people maximize the nutritional value of their government-provided food boxes with recipes and techniques rooted in culturally relevant practices. But if tobacco is a racial justice issue that the Biden administration feels compelled to take action on, shouldn’t the government also be cleaning up its own mess in terms of the public health crisis created by the entire reservation system?
As I’ve mentioned several times over the past year, the depth and breadth of both racial injustice and food insecurity have been brought into stark relief as a result of this pandemic. For example, staple foods are more expensive on-reservation than they are off-reservation, and when you’re isolating or on lockdown during a pandemic and also short on funds and/or lack transportation, the deck is already stacked against you.
For Black, Latinx, and Native American communities, food insecurity is experienced at a much higher proportion due to discimination and structural racism. The disproportionate impact is evident when only 1 in 12 white individuals inhabit a food-insecure environment, while 1 in 4 Native American, 1 in 5 Black, and 1 in 6 Latinx individuals live in a food-insecure household. — LiveKindly
To that end, I am hopeful (and, to be honest, pretty skeptical) that banning menthol cigarettes is just the first of many steps the Biden administration will take to address the institutional barriers to address other public health issues affecting BIPOC folk, particularly the lack of access to fresh, affordable food our Indigenous people face and have faced for generations.
Recommended reading:
Food as Medicine on the Navajo Nation (Civil Eats)
History on a Plate: How Native American Diets Shifted After European Colonization (History.com)
There There and Indian Tacos (The Hungry Bookworm)
The Oscars are this Sunday and, while I’ve given it the old college try in terms of watching as many of the nominated films as I can, as in previous years I have run out of steam. There are still a few I’m going to try and watch this week, but I’ll probably wait until most of them are available on HBO Max or Hulu or whatever. My willingness to pay $20 (or more) to watch a movie by myself at home has its limits.
But one movie I splurged on because I’d heard so many good things about it was Minari. If you know anything about me, you know I’m a sucker for stories that center immigrants’ pursuit of the American dream. Minari is the story, set in the 1980s, of a Korean family who moves from California to Arkansas to start a farm. Specifically, the father wants to grow Korean vegetables in anticipation of a sustained influx of Korean immigrants to the American south. While this dream is what animates Jacob, the rest of the family is simply along for the ride, with varying degrees of buy-in.
Jacob’s argument, as he woos potential clients in Oklahoma and Dallas, is that they don’t want to get their produce all the way from California when his fresh vegetables are less than a day’s drive away. He is confident both in his product and the market demand. And Jacob, the avatar for filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s own father, isn’t wrong.
I haven’t done the research about the United States as a whole, but the history of Koreans in Texas is fairly short. In 1970, there were 2,090 Koreans in the state (which had a population of 11.2 million), and those can be attributed primarily to war brides and a slow trickle of immigrants resulting from the liberal Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which lifted restrictive quotas that had depressed Asian migration to the states for decades. In 2016, there were nearly 71,000 Koreans residing in Texas (out of a population of 27.91 million), with the highest concentration located in Harris County (Houston).
A good chunk of my dissertation research centered on migrant Asian women in fiction and how they used food and cooking to negotiate their identities in a new country. As we see in Minari, the food of home signifies the absence created by migration, and a bag of impossible-to-get beans or anchovies can inspire big feelings. I wrote about how women in novels like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake “author a diasporic cuisine as [they] negotiate the trauma of migration via the kitchen.” That authoring is dependent upon substitutions and shortcuts in order to replicate the foods of home as closely as possible. But the dish with something missing ends up being a viable substitute within the migrant context, creating what Salman Rushdie has termed an “imaginary homeland” from their kitchens.
But one thing that didn’t occur to me was the role of Asian groceries and what that authoring looked like once stores like 99 Ranch, which opened in California in 1984, and H Mart, which opened in New York in 1980, were more accessible. Is it possible to recreate the dishes of home more accurately when you have the right ingredients, and if so, how does that inform one’s migrant or first-generation identity? Is the homeland less imaginary, are the connections stronger? If so, for whom are they stronger — the migrant or her children?
All that being said, Minari isn’t a story about navigating the pitfalls of migrant identity; indeed only two very brief scenes hint at the tension of being Other in the Ozarks in the 1980s, but they are benign and remarkably un-fraught. While it speaks to the isolation of being an immigrant, it also underscores the hope baked in to building a bridge out of that lonely state of being.
Recommended reading:
What Minari Means to Me (Medium)
The Specificity of Minari (The Ringer)
The Story Behind the Vegetable that Gave Minari Its Name (Slate)
All Hail the Asian Supermarket: An All-American Institution (Taste)
I’ve been thinking about donuts a lot lately.
As a food, I’m ambivalent about them. There aren’t many donuts that get me excited, excepting when we visit Welcome Chicken + Donuts in Phoenix. As breakfast pastries go, I’d much rather have a buttery biscuit or a gooey cinnamon roll or a kolache. Plus, my whole life I’ve been trained to see donut as the enemy, too full of sugar and fat to be worth the calories. They’re dietary napalm and best avoided.
Donuts have a long history in the United States, and historians have traced what we recognize as donuts back to Dutch olykoeks (“oily cakes”) or oliebollen (“oily balls”), brought over by immigrants in the 17th century. (The movie First Cow features oily cakes fairly prominently; look for a post on the movie, something I’ve planned to write for almost a year now!) And, of course, we’re all familiar with the story of how women would make donuts for soldiers in the trenches of WWI, giving them a comforting taste of home during a harrowing time.
In addition to being a comfort food, donuts are also a ritual food. Anyone who’s ever attended a church in America at any point in the 20th or 21st century has had a donut in the fellowship hall before or after worship, or during Sunday school. Sufganiyot are a staple at Hanukkah. Pączki are a Polish jelly donut eaten on Fat Tuesday to mark the beginning of the Lenten season. And, of course, the office donuts, making staff meetings palatable since the beginning of office work.
Despite their ritual function and commensal significance, at some point in the 20th century, donuts became a site of moral panic. They are associated with sloth and obesity, and the visual shorthand for that association is, of course:
Indeed, if there’s an exemplar of the slothful, obese, working-class American male, it’s Homer Simpson, and his talisman is the pink-glazed donut with sprinkles.
The mechanization of the donut-making process in 1920 made donuts cheap and easy fuel for the working class, which likely informs the scapegoating of donuts as a prime contributor to the “obesity epidemic.” It’s understood that cheap food is often associated with obesity, and that obesity correlates pretty strongly with poverty. It’s pretty easy to connect the dots in the moral panic around donuts as culinary villain. It’s impossible, in the discourse of food and wellness, for a food to be morally neutral if it is both cheap and fattening.
And I think that donuts are particularly susceptible to class-based rhetorical sneering, which is perfectly and hilariously demonstrated in this Saturday Night Live sketch from 2016:
(I acknowledge that this is a very very very Boston portrayal, but Casey Affleck is playing a very specific kind of working-class man for whom there is a variant across American regions.)
Which is why I found the panic and controversy around Krispy Kreme’s COVID vaccine free-donut promotion so compelling. The offer for one free donut when you show your vaccine card is good for the rest of the year.
Taken at face value, this suggests that even if you get your vaccine in November, you will still be able to get your free vaccine donut. But some people interpreted that as, “you can get a free donut every single day for the rest of the year,” and they were triggered.
Here’s a high-profile MD (who was a very successful public health commissioner in Baltimore before being tapped to head Planned Parenthood Federation of America; her progressive bona fides are legit) spinning out in a moral panic tizzy, saying that she can’t endorse a daily diet of donuts (it’s worth reading her whole thread). But I think it’s pretty obvious (isn’t it?) that just because the offer is good for the rest of the year doesn’t mean that people are going to be stampeding to Krispy Kreme every blessed day.
Some might, but the three Krispy Kremes in Austin are extremely suburban and really only available on a daily basis to commuters or folx who live along or near the major traffic arteries where they’re situated. And who’s commuting daily during the pandemic? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not white-collar office workers who are ordering their groceries online and anxiously posting memes about fitting back into their pre-pandemic work clothes.
BUT ALSO: Who has had easier access to vaccinations to date?
Note:
In 2019, the share of Blacks in poverty was 1.8 times greater than their share among the general population. Blacks represented 13.2% of the total population in the United States, but 23.8% of the poverty population.
The share of Hispanics in poverty was 1.5 times more than their share in the general population. Hispanics comprised 18.7% of the total population, but 28.1% of the population in poverty. — Census.gov
And:
Non-Hispanic Black adults (49.6%) had the highest age-adjusted prevalence of obesity, followed by Hispanic adults (44.8%), non-Hispanic White adults (42.2%) and non-Hispanic Asian adults (17.4%). — CDC.gov
What does the moral panic, rooted in an assumption that people are going to be hitting that KK drive-through every day for a single free donut, tell us about our cultural attitudes around “junk” food, wellness, and who “deserves” a treat? When we lose our minds over offering free donuts to a vaccinated population, when more wealthy white people are vaccinated than poor BIPOC, and BIPOC are more likely to be obese than white folks (albeit very slightly), what are we *really* losing our minds about?
I think we want to project our anxieties over our pandemic-enfluffened bodies onto a foodstuff that has been the standard-bearer of junk food for more than half a century. But I also think that the moral panic over this particular promotion glosses over yet again the root causes of obesity in the United States, which is that cheap fuel for poor bodies is the same fuel that causes fat bodies (and poor and fat bodies are sus!). To reckon honestly with this issue is to reckon with the systemic inequities that lead to the poor health outcomes that have ravaged marginalized communities before and during this pandemic. To argue otherwise is simply disingenuous.
But also, just let people enjoy a damn donut if they want to.
Further reading:
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