This is an essay on one aspect of the politics of food, a topic most people probably are not even aware of. In this case, it is a reaction to the recent trend of some politicians to restrict the free movement of people across national borders. In other words, anti-immigration politics. Food can sometimes have a political element to it, the most obvious and common examples being choosing foods and brands to eat or not eat based on the politics of the parties involved. Two examples I most vividly recall are the long time efforts of the United Farm Workers Union in America to improve the lot of mostly Hispanic farm workers by boycotting California grapes and the more recent instance of consumers either supporting or protesting the conservative religious politics of the American fast food chain Chik-fil-A’s management. The food celebrity Anthony Bourdain often added a political element to his TV show by featuring third world foods and cultures in an effort to let his viewers know there was more to gastronomy than Euro-centric cuisines (note: I never saw is show and only know this from reading things after his 2018 suicide).
No matter where in the world we are, the food we eat today would be much less interesting and less varied without a long history of people traveling, whether from one valley to the next long ago or from country to country today. It has been “globalization” in the classic meaning of the word that has made for much richer, diverse and delicious choices in the food we eat. One definition of globalization I found says globalization is “the process of interaction and integration among people.” The definition goes on to include “companies and governments worldwide,” things that for most of human history did not exist and which to me are more about the spread of corporatized fast food (Mac and KFC), international beverage brands (Coke and Bud) and the like, the things that in recent years have helped tarnish the meaning of the word globalization.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest trends in international politics over the past several years has been the resurgence of ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, a trend that when it comes down to it is really about some peoples’ fear of “the other,” of people that are different, as well as against the tides of globalization. The most visible manifestation of this has been more and more restrictions on the movement of people across borders, whether for the purpose of emigration/immigration, employment, or just tourism and recreational travel. The Trump administration’s efforts to keep Muslims and “brown” people from south of the US border out of the country has been much in the news. His administration has even suggested limiting new immigration only to Europeans. But that is by no means the only place where it is happening. The original Brexit vote was really all about closing borders, a vote to keep new immigrants out and force many of those already in Britain—mostly eastern Europeans—to leave. Anti-immigrant political parties have become major players in much of Europe, especially in France, Austria, and Italy, but also in places with images of more tolerance such as Sweden and Denmark. In India Prime Minister Narendra Modi has built his politics around Hindu superiority at the expense of Muslims and other people of other religions, going so far as to try to separate and isolate non-Hindus from his Hindu base. President Recep Edogan of Turkey shows similar signs of ethnic nationalism, although not to the extent of Modi. Australia as well has many hurdles for potential immigrants to jump, even for someone with a PhD with a teaching position at a leading university awaiting.
While there are plenty of arguments that can be made against the recent efforts to restrict the free movement of people, including humanitarian reasons as well as the fact that more and more people are leaving their home countries because environmentally related reasons such as drought or flooding—things likely caused in part due to climate change brought on by the economies of western countries—there is one argument I have never heard about: The food argument.
Thanks to centuries of travel, trade and the sharing of knowledge, world food culture has already to a great extent been globalized. Most foods of the world can now be found in any large city in the West, although often at prices beyond the means of many people to afford. It has taken many centuries to get to this point, and there is no way to know what sorts of things will not happen in the future because people were not able to travel. The large scale globalization of food began over 4,000 years ago with the movement of salt and spices over long distances, much of it on a route from Asia to the Middle East and on to Europe known as the Silk Road. Small scale movements of foods, mostly undocumented, had been going on for millennium before then. And it was the pursuit of spices that took food globalization to an entirely new level.
By far the biggest and most important single event in the history of the globalization of food came with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new food stuffs suddenly spread from the Americas to the rest of the world in what was a culinary paradigm shift. Among the most important of the new foods were potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, quinine (for treating malaria), corn, the turkey, and cacao, the main ingredient in chocolate. With the exception of cacao, very few recipes using the new ingredients lasted long outside of the Americas, although the word barbeque is believed to have come from the Arawak people of the Caribbean. Europe’s discovery of the Americas truly was a major disruption of the world history of food up to that time. Unfortunately, the resulting cultural exchange was far from equal: Europe was able to enjoy the fruits of its discovery while the Americas suffered a genocide from the diseases the explorers introduced. And all of this happened by accident in the hunt for shorter routes to the spice producing regions of Asia.
Practically overnight the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by the Europeans changed what was available to eat in Europe. Change would come at more of a trickle for the rest of the world. Chili peppers found their way to Asia, including Japan, sometime in the early 16th century, probably carried over the Silk Road before European explorers set foot in Japan.
During the Age of Exploration (roughly from the early 15th until the mid-17th century), European explorers were interested in finding treasure, not in trading. They pretty much ate whatever was available wherever they were. They were much more likely to carry potentially lucrative new foods back to Europe than the other way around. And because the concept of national cuisines and colonialistic cultural superiority did not yet exist, they were very open to eating pretty much anything. It was a matter of survival in an era with only very primitive methods to preserve food. The result was a rapid hybridization of foods in Europe.
Japan was different. There was no single event that remade Japanese cuisine and food culture. Rather there were several episodes which can be broken down into quite definitive events involving globalization, or the movement of people between lands, broken up by extended periods of internal hybridization and refinement. The first of these events occurred some 3,000 years ago when wet rice cultivation came to Japan, most likely via the Korean peninsula from China where it had been domesticated 12-15,000 years ago. Eventually rice would become the most important food in the Japan diet, just as it did in other Asian lands as well. The next big event period was during the 12th and 13th centuries when Buddhist monks traveled to and lived in China to study, returning with knowledge of Buddhist as well as food knowledge. Among the more important food related things introduced during this era were noodle making and various ways to process soy beans using fermentation, what led to today’s miso and shōyu. The next big event in Japanese food history was the arrival of the Spanish and especially the Portuguese in the 16th century. Of lasting importance were the introduction of kastella, a type of cake whose recipe was hybridized to allow it to be made without ovens. Although many people credit the Portuguese with bring tenpura to Japan, in all likelihood they only gave the dish its name as fried foods had been introduced to Japan from China much earlier, although due to a scarcity of cooking oils, it was rarely found outside of temples.
The Edo period (normally defined as the years from1600 to 1868, but here only until 1853, as will soon be explained), a time of very limited interaction with the world outside of Japan, was a time of refining the foods and recipes that were already present in Japan. The most important transnational culinary activities were probably the introduction of shōyu to Europe and later to the American colonies and wine given as tribute by the Dutch to the Shogan every year. Wine never became popular outside of Edo Castle until much later, but the demand for shōyu, carried in Dutch ships from Nagasaki back to Europe and then re-exported to other lands, including the American colonies, did. Even King Louis XIV of France regularly added a bit to his foods.
Although the arrival of Commodore Mathew Perry in 1853 did not introduce any new foods to Japan (besides a couple bottles of whiskey he gave as gifts), his arrival did open the door for many things that soon followed. The most important new foods mostly came by way of the British, including things carried by the servants they brought from their colonies in China and India, most notably curry, today a favorite food in Japan where it is known as kare raisu (curry rice). Although it has been called different names over the years and the date and place of its origination is still unresolved, ramen also has its roots in China. Western vegetables, bread, meat eating and beer—BEER!—were all introduced to Japan by visiting westerners in the waning years of the 19th century. Can you imagine what Japanese food would be like today without the contributions of foreigners?
Not all new, western foods were brought to Japan by foreigners. Many things were learned by Japanese living or travelling abroad. French restaurants came to Japan thanks to the son of a Kyoto noble family who had gone to Paris to study. But rather than spend his time studying the French language or the sciences, the young man instead spent his hours eating and drinking in Parisian restaurants, soon running out of money. Returning home to Kyoto in shame, he soon realized that he had indeed learned something worthwhile: knowledge of French food and hospitality. He soon opened a “French” restaurant in the family home, with tables and chairs (something new at the time) on top of rugs covering tatami mats. No records remain of what was served, but French dining is still an important part of Japan’s culinary scene. Western candy and confections also came via a Japanese living abroad, in this case by Taichiro Morinaga. Morinaga was a failed small businessman in Yokohama before setting off for the U.S. to if not get rich at least come up with the money to pay off his debts in Japan. While living in San Francisco Morinaga ate some marshmallows, a candy then unknown in Japan. He returned to Japan, then again to America where he worked in a candy factory where he learned enough about western sweets to be able to return again to Japan and open a shop making and selling western candies. That business has grown into one Japan’s biggest food companies, Morinaga & Co., the company that came up with the idea of women giving men chocolates on Valentine’s Day. Where would Japan be today without people like these in its past?
Despite a shrinking and rapidly aging population, post-war Japan has been reluctant to accept more than a relatively small number of immigrants, and of those allowed in, most are professionals, not the type of person likely to start a new life by opening a restaurant as is the case in the U.S. Historically, the United States was a nation of wide open spaces and an attractive destination for people seeking a new life. The same cannot be said about Japan, a physically small country of limited—and expensive—land and many cultural barriers, including language and diet. The low level of immigration has not, however, led to a lack of most of the better known world cuisines. But instead of relying on immigrants to being new foods and cuisines to the country as happens elsewhere, new cuisines have for the most part been introduced by Japanese people after spending time abroad, the foods in many if not most instance being hybridized to better suit Japanese tastes before they even arrive. This includes the previously mentioned French food and western candy, but also Italian—especially pizza—Spanish cuisines, as well as whiskey and even the Fuji apple.
This type of culinary ‘exchange’ continues today, with many chefs spending time in Michelin starred kitchens in France, Italy and other European countries before returning to Japan to open their own restaurants (although it may seem as though this is a one way street where foreign foods are introduced to Japan by Japanese chefs, it seems highly unlikely that the Japanese did not also introduce some things to foreign kitchens as well). The result has been a unique sort of international hybridized cuisines made by Japanese people for Japanese customers in ways non-Japanese chefs likely would never consider.
I heard recently that lately the top source of immigration into Japan is Thailand. Judging by the increasing number of Thai restaurants I see, I have no reason to doubt it. When I first moved to Japan I knew of only one Thai restaurant close to where I lived, a place in Jinbōchō with two buildings next to each other serving different types of Thai food (Thailand has many different regional cuisines). Now there are many, and even a couple of Vietnamese places. But with the government’s policy of limited immigration, there just are not a lot of choices when it comes to international cuisines prepared by immigrants other than Indian, Nepali, and of course, Chinese. Despite its size, Tokyo boasts no more than a couple each of such cuisines as Turkish and South American. Even Mexican, so ubiquitous in the US, is scarce.
AMERICA
The culinary history of the United States and the resulting food culture that exists today is much different than that of Japan. For one thing, the U.S. has for hundreds of years been a country of immigrants who brought their own food traditions with them. Also, there never has been one staple food such as rice in Japan. Geography has played a roll as well; America, or at least the U.S. (Canada and Mexico have their own unique culinary histories of which I am not expert on), spans an entire continent, a size that dwarfs Japan and that includes many regional climates and geographies that contributed to different regional foodways in the Pre-Columbian period (before 1492) as well as later. There was seafood in what is today New England; oysters in what became the New York City region; corn in the southwest; bison in the Great Plains; and salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Each region also had its own species of wild game and plant foods. It was diverse and bountiful. And then came the Europeans. Not, as in the case of Japan to trade or evangelize, but with the intent of conquering a new world and making fortunes. And later on, to settle in and live in a land where there was no lack of space.
The early immigrants arrived in a new world where survival was by no means guaranteed. At first they had to eat more or less the same foods as the indigenous population as that was all there was, only prepared as they would have before in Europe. They brought with them four things that helped shape modern American cuisine: cooking pots, guns, grains (wheat, barley, etc.), and alcohol. Metal cooking pots allowed the newly arrived Europeans to cook as they had before. Guns, primitive as they were at the time, allowed them to eat as much meat as they wanted, providing someone amongst them was a good shot. Grains could be grown in nearly limitless quantities on land that seemed to have no western limit, as long as there was labor to work the fields. Knowing how to distill alcohol allowed the farmers to convert grain, a bulky commodity, into alcohol, a much more valuable product by weight and easier to transport and store. Things would remain this way until the industrial revolution impacted the land, especially the arrival of the railroad.
As more immigrants settled in the United States during the 19th century distinct regional food cultures developed. Much of this was due to immigrants from one country settling alongside fellow countrymen with common food cultures brought from their former lands. For example, Irish in Boston and New York, Italians in New York and later San Francisco, Poles in Chicago, Scots along the Eastern seaboard and Appalachia, and African slaves in the southern states. The British, Dutch and Germans had mostly arrived earlier and had already more or less homogenized their diets.
The famous Cajun and Creole cuisines of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana in general developed thanks to a long history of people from different cultures mixing together as well as a very openminded, somewhat libertine ethos among the population. There were Native Americans, then French and later Spanish colonists, as well as slaves from West African and Creole groups from Haiti and other Caribbean islands, all which had their own food traditions. More recently, immigrants from Vietnam and Guatemala have further contributed to the city’s food scene. The city’s location at the mouth of the Mississippi River also played a role, its proximity to the seafood of the Gulf of Mexico being important for what ingredients were available and even more so for being the port through which the agricultural and industrial products of the Mississippi River and Ohio River basins passed. Of course, the ships sailing out had to have come from somewhere else first, which meant new foodstuffs and people constantly coming in. It was tis history as an international port that helped make New Orleans one of the great food cities of the world today.
It may seem difficult to believe today, or at least thirty years ago or so, back before the scene really started to diversify and improve, but up until 1942, when the U.S. entered WWII, the food and cuisines available in America was quite varied and interesting, not to mention available to most people in copious amounts. This regional diversity was well documented in the early 1930s thanks to a Depression Era public works project called “America Eats,” a program which employed otherwise out of work writers to document regional food diversity across the country. Unfortunately, due to the war that was looming on the horizon the project was never completed; the manuscripts sat unedited and un-collated in a Maryland warehouse until fairly recently.
WWII
This culinary diversity posed a problem for the War Department (today’s Department of Defense): What sort of food do you feed to an army composed of men from all over the country and from different food backgrounds? Garlic was still not eaten by everyone, nor were spicy foods. The solution was to design meals that were as un-offensive to as many people as possible. In other words, as bland as possible. And easy to prepare. After the war the returning soldiers had lost their taste for the more exotic flavors they had known in their youth, flavor now replaced by their experiences with convenience. And so was born the era of boring food, often canned or frozen, that I grew up eating.
The United States entered the post-WWII period as by far the best fed country on earth. The war years were actually not a bad time for eating in the US; America was the only major country that saw its average daily caloric consumption increase, thanks in part to people growing Victory Gardens—home vegetable plots that were meant to foster a sense of being part of the war effort but were more often than not grown out of economic necessity—and people eating locally produced foods, all this despite millions of males being away from home in the military overseas. But the country had also started on its path towards the culinary nadir of 20th century American cuisine. The regional and cultural difference in food that existed before the war were being replaced by easy to prepare industrialized foods lacking in flavor but packed with convenience. Minute Rice and Rice-A-Roni (“The San Francisco treat,” as it was billed), Wonder Bread (what’s so wonderful about snow-white with the texture and density of cotton?) come to mind, as well as snack foods and deserts such as Twinkies and Tang, the orange flavored drink from a powder that “went to the moon.”
POST WAR BLANDNESS
In any large American city, these days anyone with the money can eat pretty much any type of food or cuisine, often prepared by someone from the country of the food’s origin. Besides various Asian and European cuisines, as well as Mexican and Indian foods, there are now restaurants serving Lebanese and other Middle Eastern dishes, places specializing in South American cuisines (Peru, Brazil), African foods (Ethiopia, Somalia). And that is just in my home city of Portland, Oregon, a place not known for being very cosmopolitan. I am sure New York would have many times more types of food. But it was not always like this, not even during my own lifetime.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon, in the 1960s and 70s. The diet I ate, which I think was a fairly typical American diet, was quite bland, although part of that may have been because Portland was a very white city without much racial diversity. Bread was usually white, with whole wheat or whole grain coming along maybe only in the mid-70s; there was no artisanal bread. And no craft beer, although there were still many regional breweries. Too bad they all tasted pretty much the same: weak and watery. “Ethnic” food (that’s what it was called back then, a term that seems old-fashioned and dated if not even a bit racist today) was pretty much limited to Italian, French, and Chinese, although Chinese restaurants usually had signs saying “Chinese and American” and served dishes invented in America such as chow mien or chop suey. Italian food at home was spaghetti with meatballs in tomato sauce; going out for Italian usually meant pizza, and even that was somewhat exotic in the ‘60s. There were Japanese restaurants, places owned and operated by Japanese, usually second generation nissei who born in America. But they mostly served Japanese visiting on business. Although ubiquitous today, I do not recall there being any Mexican restaurants, let alone Indian or Indonesian or any place serving Middle Eastern or African foods. Being made mostly by people two or three generations remove from their original lands the food was very hybridized, very Americanized.
By the mid-1960s American food culture had started changing for the better, although being in my early elementary school years I was barely aware of it. “Barely aware” of changes in food culture refers to having seen Julia Child’s cooking show The French Chef on public television. My mother sometimes watched the program, although I do not recall her ever trying to make any of what were quite elaborate dishes herself. But the show’s ten year run on TV did contribute to a growing interest in actual cooking, as opposed to merely opening cans and heating food.
Then something happened that would start the US on a path to a more diverse and interesting food culture; passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Its passage was, in my opinion, the single biggest and most important event contributing to bettering American cuisine. The act opened immigration to people from the world over, not primarily from northern Europe and Canada as it had been before. Before its passage immigration from Asian countries was essentially banned, the biggest exception being Japanese women who married American servicemen after the war and two one-time-only exceptions for 5,000 Chinese to enter (the Statue of Liberty may welcome people from Europe, but she has always had her back turned to Asia). Suddenly people from all over the world were allowed to enter the US. And when they did they brought with them their native cuisines, recipes, and ingredients.
It took a few years for food to diversify, and not all of the change can be accredited to the new immigration law. The counter-culture movement helped spread things such as organic farming, vegetarianism, and the macrobiotic diet, something that originated in Japanese Zen Buddhism. People such as Alice Waters, through her Chez Panise restaurant in Berkeley, California, helped spread the idea of small batch, craft production of foods that could be combined in new and innovative ways. By the late 1960s San Francisco based Sunset Magazine, a lifestyle publication mostly for and about the western United States, was occasionally featuring recipes for Japanese dishes, although usually “safe for Americans” dishes such as sukiyaki or tenpura. Sushi and other raw fish dishes would have to wait a bit longer.
By 1975 or so Portland had at least a couple of Mexican restaurants, although Tex-Mex (Mexican-American) would be a better descriptor for what was on the menu. There were new Japanese restaurants owned by second generation Japanese-Americans as well as a Benihana, the teppanyaki chain that introduced many Americans to a style of Japanese food that was familiar to westerners (grilled meats and vegetables). As I recall from the one time I ate there, the chef-performers appeared to be from Japan, which in my eyes made the food “authentic.” Interestingly, the original Benihana, the restaurant owned by the father of the Benihana chain’s founder, is in my neighborhood in Tokyo). There were new types of Chinese restaurants, including spicy Szechuan and Cantonese, not just Chinese-American. By 1970 or ‘71 my family even had a Japanese hibachi barbeque we cooked on at picnics. We had been using soy sauce for as long as I can remember (it was most likely not true Japanese shōyu but instead a locally made non-aged product which people, including Japanese Americans, used to call “bug juice”).
While by the mid-seventies or so things had improved food-wise in the US, or at least in Portland, there was one event in 1975 that really impacted things that would not have mattered without the 1965 immigration law: the end of the Vietnam War. It was not so much the end of the war itself, but the subsequent arrival of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the turmoil and danger of their home countries, 1980 being the peak year with over 200,000 people arriving in the U.S. from war torn countries in Southeast Asia Like with previous generations of immigrants from European countries such as Italy and Greece, many of the new arrivals opened restaurants serving what they knew best, Vietnamese food, or in the case of people who had spent time in refugee camps in Thailand, Thai food. It was a new cuisine, healthy, cheap and easy to prepare at home, something which was possible because other refugees opened markets selling the ingredients needed for cooking.
It took a few years for the impact of the new immigration law and ending the war to really be noticeable on Portland’s dining scene. But soon most people had become familiar with the new Southeast Asian dishes and flavors, and ingredients, including lemon grass, red and green curry, cooking with coconut milk, pad Thai noodles, spring rolls, tom yum soup, and so much more. And later, the beef noodle soup dish known as Pho.
OTHER FACTORS
All the credit for a better, more diverse food culture in America cannot be credited to the change in immigration law alone. And improvements in other countries have their own unique set of circumstances. Joining the European Union led to a much better and diverse food culture in Britain. The increase in international travel that became happened in the 1980s and ‘90s surely played a part. After all, traveling to the country of a cuisine’s origin is a great way to be introduced to new foods, especially unfamiliar foods made from who knows what ingredients. More recently the internet and TV food and travel programs have played a part But again, it all does come down to people traveling across international borders to experience new and often unfamiliar cultures that makes this all possible. All this really comes down to the ability to travel and interact with other people.
THE FUJI APPLE
I briefly mentioned the fuji apple earlier in this essay. Probably because I like eating crisp Fujis most every morning, but also because it has a relevant story behind it. The Fuji owes its very existence to immigration and the flow of goods—including foods—across borders. The roots of the Fuji’s birth go back to the cross breeding of two apple varieties from Europe and America, the Red Delicious and the Ralls Genet. The Red Delicious was native to America, while the Ralls Genet came from France, given to President Thomas Jefferson by Edmund Charles Genet, French minister to the United States from 1793-1794. Jefferson in turn gave the cutting to a Virginia nurseryman, Caleb Ralls, from where it eventually spread to Ohio (apple trees are propagated by grafting cuttings, not by seed). In 1939 Japanese breeders cuttings from the two varieties to Japan where the Fuji was hybridized. It made it to market in 1962 in Japan and also the U.S. A former director of gardens at Monticello (Jefferson’s former home and farm estate), considered Jefferson to be the “grandfather of the Fuji apple” (no word if his slave/mistress Sally Hemmings was its grandmother).