On Food & Identity: The Cultural Omnivore’s Dilemma
By Christine Ma-Kellam, Ph.D.
Image source: Michael Pollan, "The omnivore's dilemma," 2006.
Growing up Asian in predominantly White small towns across America, I remember a time when exactly three types of ethnic food existed: Chinese, Mexican, and sushi. These days, even the casual foodie knows the impossibility of getting real Sichuan cooking in the same establishment as xiaolongbaos, or equating Sonoran tacos with Sinaloan ones, or finding a California roll in a yakitori bar. The repertoire of "ethnic" cuisine has also exploded: I can get Salvadoran pupusas at either my local farmer's market or at a sit-down restaurant on the other side of town; I can find aji amarillo for Peruvian chicken stew at—if not my local grocer—then Instacart. If I don't mind the gas mileage, I can go to little Ethiopia to satisfy my injera craving or my favorite Persian chain for shawarma. We're all cultural omnivores now--we can eat almost any culture's food that we want to (at least if we're willing to travel and/or order stuff online).
Here's the problem: almost two decades ago, food writer Michael Pollan changed the way we think about eating when he came out with his bestselling manifesto, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and asked, in a world where you can eat anything, what do you choose? He was concerned with the choice of animal vs. plant, or processed vs. farm-to-table, but these days, we have a much more nuanced dilemma: when you can eat cuisine from any country in the world, the question is not so much what you choose, but how, and why?
Whenever we get into a fight, my (white) husband always reminds me that he never says no when we go out to eat with my folks and invariably end up in the kind of Chinese establishment where children fight over who gets to eat the fish eyes and the wait staff doesn't speak English. He never questions what gets scooped on his plate and whether it had parents because the way he sees it, embracing a culture's food is the first step to embracing its people. It's absolutely necessary—but is it sufficient?
It's true that when I meet someone and they refuse to eat an entire country's cuisine, that's the ultimate red flag for close-mindedness or worse. But equating liking their food with embracing their culture is equally dangerous. Once I was at a Trader Joe's in one of Southern California’s more ethnically homogenous neighborhoods (Goleta, in the outskirts of Santa Barbara), and a (white) woman approached me in the frozen food aisle, declaring her love of orange chicken and inquiring about my opinion on TJ's version. I smiled and admitted I had never eaten orange chicken in my life, and so could not speak on the matter. She probably thought she was embracing my culture. I took the opposite to be true, and therein lies the cultural omnivore's dilemma.
My favorite part about this orange chicken incident at Trader Joe’s is that whenever I share this story, I get a different reaction. I came home that day and told my (also Asian) roommate what happened. Her response was swift and furious: “So racist!” She cried with an eye roll. She chalked it up as one of the liabilities to living in a place like Santa Barbara, whose claim to fame as the “American Riviera” meant that it had about as much ethnic diversity (at least of the Asian variety) as the actual Ligurian one. Years later, I retold it during an upper-division psychology course on culture and prejudice. Some kids immediately labeled it as a classic case of microaggression—just one more example of the psychological hazards of being an immigrant while going to the grocery store. Others stayed quiet and withheld their judgment/ Maybe they couldn’t pinpoint what exactly wrong with one shopper asking another for a review of an exceedingly popular dish almost as universally beloved in this country as fortune cookies or tacos.
In fact, the more I think about it in the years since the more I’m inclined to give this woman the benefit of the doubt. At least she was trying to venture beyond the bagel seasoning and dark chocolate peanut butter cups that everyone else at TJ’s had in their shopping carts—which, delicious as they are, attempt no shout-outs to anybody’s else culture but our own. Even as far as we’ve come when it comes to keeping an open mind about food, it’s also easy to take it for granted and assume everybody is on the same page when they may not be. Last summer I took a group of 16 undergraduates in a different cultural psychology class to South Korea to study the many ways Americans are weird and human nature might look different when we look beyond the masses of highly educated, middle-class, Judeo-Christian European Americans between the ages of 18-22 that so many psychological studies are based on. On our first night there, our local host—an exceedingly well-traveled and spectacularly nice man by the name of Euisoo—took us to a traditional restaurant replete with a private dining room and many, many courses that involved a variety of fish and fowl and other hard-to-identify creatures in between. I watched the faces of the others at my table as the waitresses brought meticulous plates of unfamiliar seafood in various states of pickling, brining or stewing and my heart broke a little seeing the anxiety mingled with fear in some of my fellow travelers’ faces as they picked up their chopsticks and stabbed at their portion rather than take a bite. I could not understand why someone would travel halfway around the world to peer at, rather than taste, a different country’s most beloved dishes. Yet that remains the dilemma we face every time we travel or venture inside another culture’s grocery store or diner: when do we open our mouths—and I’d argue, by extension our hearts—and when is it OK to decline? My general policy is to eat first and ask questions later. But not everyone agrees.
Despite this—or perhaps because of it—I obsess about food and what it says about our identities everywhere I go. When I’m not talking about it in class or dragging kids across the Pacific to try it out for themselves or picking travel destination solely based on what I want to eat, I write stories that centers around the way food defines us. This last spring, I released a debut novel—The Band—whose entire plot was inspired by a lesser-known Korean dish called tteokbokki. My favorite way to consume it is the way the Korean Fried Chicken joint in my hometown does it: fried and crispy, doused in gochujang and honey. As I’ve discovered quickly in Seoul, that is about the whitest way a person can eat rice cake. But no matter: tensions like that stand at the center of The Band, when one type of Asian meets another in an ethnic grocery store and a debate over the proper way to cook tteokbokki unravels a spiral of confrontations involving bombs and boy bands and yes, even food and the tools we use to make them. In a world where what do eat for dinner can seem like an existential question for which there are no right answers but plenty of wrong ones, this made total sense.
Christine Ma-Kellams is an associate professor of psychology at San Jose State University and the author of The Band (Atria, 2024). Born in China, she moved to Puerto Rico as a child when her father mistook it for the 51st state (it said "U.S. Territory" on the atlas!). Since then, she has lived in the Midwest, South, and both coasts, but currently resides in Southern California.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this blog post are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions or views of Immigrantly.