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Bringing the immigrant back into the sociology of taste
Accepted Manuscript Bringing the immigrant back into the sociology of taste Krishnendu Ray PII:
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DOI:
10.1016/j.appet.2016.10.013
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Appetite
Received Date: 12 August 2016 Accepted Date: 10 October 2016
Please cite this article as: Ray K., Bringing the immigrant back into the sociology of taste, Appetite (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2016.10.013. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
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Bringing the Immigrant Back Into the Sociology of Taste Keywords: immigration, ethnicity, cultural sociology, taste
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Krishnendu Ray Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Nutrition and Food Studies New York University 411 Lafayette Str. 5th Floor New York 10003 Email: [email protected] Tel: 212-998-5530
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Introduction United States Census data on occupations and birthplace, which we have since 1850 (Ruggles et. al. 2004), show that the foreign-born have dominated food-related occupations such
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as baker, butcher, brewer, saloon keeper, and restaurateur. Although the source of migration has changed from Northern Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, to the Mediterranean at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, then to Asia, Latin America and the
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Caribbean in the second half of the twentieth century, migrants continue to dominate food-
making occupations. On the eve of the Civil War, for instance, seventy percent of bakers in NYC
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were immigrants, often German and Irish. At that time fifty percent of butchers nationally, and seventy percent in NYC, were foreign-born. And those ratios stay in place, with some variation, through numerous Census, which is taken every ten years in the case of the USA. That is in contrast to lawyers and school-teachers, who among all the occupations had the least number of
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foreign-born, only five to ten percent, understandably as language-dependent professions. By 2010 seventy-five percent of chefs and head cooks in NYC were foreign born, while thirty-five percent were so nationally. Feeding occupations have been dominated by the foreign-born, by
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the Irish, German, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, El Salvadorans and Bangladeshis. Nearly one-half of all small business owners in New York City today are immigrants, including 69
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percent of restaurant owners, and 84 percent of small grocery store owners (Foner 2013: 21, Kallick in Foner 2013: 80). Given this kind of data it would be perverse to be interested in immigrant lives and uninterested in food. Yet that has been the norm.
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The Historiography of Labor and Immigration Although the journalistic material is replete with stories of immigrant restaurateurs there is surprisingly little scholarly work of greater duration that theoretically engages with taste in the
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metropolis from the point of view of the foreign-born. Among scholars, historians have been better at recording the doings of immigrant shopkeepers and grocers, because, often literate, they keep records. Labor and immigration historians are particularly good at picking up the scent of
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food in poor peoples’ records (Levenstein 1988, 1993, Gabaccia 1998, Diner 2003, Pilcher
2012). Of course the task is easier said than done, especially in history, both due to attitudes and
working on the non-literate poor.
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sources, or lack of it. Sometimes, the archives do not collaborate with good intentions of scholars
In sociology there is a robust literature on ethnic entrepreneurship with a number of strong claims: Low capital requirements make it relatively easier for foreign-born entrepreneurs
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to enter into the highly competitive business of feeding others that most native-born do not find desirable. Niche cultural knowledge gives them a competitive edge over better-capitalized mainstream entrepreneurs. Kin or fictive kin networks of loyalty allow the lending of money on a
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rotating basis without collateral. Self-exploitation—long hours of work and unpaid labor of kin and fictive kin—permits these enterprises to compete with better-capitalized businesses. Large
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corporations often cannot respond quickly to fickle changes in fashion but small enterprises can adapt with speed, thus thrive. Finally, both migration and entrepreneurship exhibit serial patterns. People who know each other, typically migrate from the same regions, and work in and own similar enterprises built with money and expertise borrowed from co-ethnics. They effectively develop an informal, intra-ethnic, consulting and banking system. Co-ethnicity is also a powerful labor recruitment and management system that also allows quiescence and exploitation (see
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Zhou 2004; Foner et al. 2000; Granovetter 1985, 1995; Portes 1995; Rogers and Vertovec 1995; Sassen 1995; Bailey and Waldinger 1991; Westwood and Bhachu 1988; Light and Bonacich 1988; Waldinger 1986, 1990, 1992; Bailey 1985; Landa 1981; Light 1972).
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This, of course, is a broad prototype of an explanation, and a structural one, that needs to be fleshed out with the activity of real, everyday people. The structural model cannot explain, for instance, why and how the first Bangladeshi or Pakistani entered the Indian restaurant business
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in New York City. That demands biographies and micro-histories. In Bengali Harlem (2013) Vivek Bald reveals those potentialities in his finely drawn portraiture of about two dozen
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itinerant Bengali peddlers of chikan (a textile) circulating from Hoogly through London, Durban, New York, to New Orleans in fin de siècle nineteenth century, sliding into the interstices between the dying throes of the British Empire and the birth of American emporium.1 As these men left some of their compatriots behind to keep the tethering posts of their networks in place
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in distant cities, they in turn, out of pure necessity and unrestrained desire, built some of the earliest South Asian boarding houses, coffee shops, eateries and restaurants in their places of inhabitance, occupying the “thin edge between Indophilia and xenophobia” (Bald 2013: 46). A
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compelling case is made here for immigrant insertion in metropolitan tastes at the intersection of micro-history and structural sociology.
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Much of the ethnicity and entrepreneurship literature attends to economics and politics,
but only to that, as if immigrants are creatures only of political-economy, who never think about taste, beauty, and how such things might intersect with their practical-moral universe. A recent illustration is Roger Waldinger’s The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands (2015) which is an attempt to update Oscar Handlin’s view of the suffering, 1
According to Claude Markovits (2008) these peddlers may add up to a quarter million merchants and financiers operating outside the subcontinent, mostly in the Indian Ocean world, between 1830 and 1930. Caroline Adams (1987) provides us with an analogous handful of Bengali pioneers in UK.
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oppressed, immigrant in The Uprooted (1951). Handlin was part of the generation of scholars who re-focused the locus of American history from the frontier to the immigrant experience. Handlin famously wrote in the opening lines of his book, “Once I thought to write a history of
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the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history” (1951: 3). Waldinger’s thesis isn’t equal to Handlin’s in terms of drama, but he makes an
important point nevertheless. Instead of suffering and loss, Waldinger turns to migrant agency.
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As a result his focus is on migrant access to resources in the USA (high-wage labor market) and back home (property, kith and kin), the persistence of trans-national connections (instead of
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uprooting), and the extension of societies and cultures of the global south into territories of the north. Nevertheless, while Handlin devoted a whole chapter to “The Daily Bread” and such mundane materialities of immigrant life, Waldinger’s migrants do not eat, drink, sleep, dance or sing. The index does not list food, shelter, or culture.2 Waldinger’s immigrants do remit money
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home, they do talk on the phone, and face the big challenges of law and policy. He makes many interesting points about remittances, telephony, laws and transnationalism (with pointed arguments against nationalist and globalists), but his migrants are purely political-economic
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ideas without bodies and hence innocent of the challenges of nursing them with materials and memories that matter affectively. Waldinger’s migrant is a peculiar inversion of the soulful,
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suffering, uprooted, subject of Handlin. Migrants, of course, do not just labor and suffer, which is often the only way of accounting for them in the socio-cultural sciences, they are also filled with joy and pleasure, and much of that has to do with good food and music. The propensity to ignore immigrant bodies in the broader disciplinary discussion of taste
may be a product of the tendency to see discussions of taste as marginal to the real lives of 2
Combining macro and micro-level analysis Nancy Foner’s edited volume (2013) allows richer attention to material and affective worlds of music, worship and food in sections such as “Eating, Drinking and Acculturation” (pp. 108112) and “Korean Enclaves in New York City” (pp. 155-159), etc.
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marginal peoples. In this conception, poor, hard-working people can teach us about poverty and suffering, hierarchy and symbolic violence, but never about taste. That might be one of the unfortunate consequences of the over-whelming dominance of Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of
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analysis in sociology.
A number of technical and conceptual reasons can be attributed to the blindness about the
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ethnic provider of good food. Low prestige of care-work, unheroic labor of micro
entrepreneurship, the inability to articulate in language the taste of the tongue, limited language
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skills of scholars working with the metropolitan material (especially in the languages of recent migrants), the over-worked migrant without the time to write, and the illiteracy of many immigrants, have compounded our access to that perspective. One example that brings together a number of these reasons should suffice here: although the Chinese have dominated the feeding and cleaning occupations in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century, we do
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not get a book length treatment of their perspective in establishing and running the quintessential American ethnic restaurant until the twenty-first century (J. 8. Lee 2009, Cho 2010). That is an extraordinary deferral. The reason is both the theoretical problem with cooked food in the
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modern Western imagination, especially within academic scholarship, and the subordination of
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the cooking subject. Little else can explain such a notable and durable silence. The Sociology of Taste
In American Sociology – one of the disciplines where urban immigrant communities
have figured prominently -- taste has been studied most extensively over the last decade in the sub-field of “cultures of consumption,” which builds on Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984).3 The 3
Other recent directions of research have focused on practice theory (Warde 2016), organization theory (Rao et al. 2003, 2005), small-group interaction, workplace dynamics and aesthetics of work (Fine 1996), field theory (Ferguson 1998, 2004) and nutrition-related science-and-technological studies (Schleifer 2012, 2013).
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latest iteration of such disciplinary attention in North America is of course, your very local, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann’s Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (2010). Johnston and Baumann argue that in spite of broadening palates, the gastronomic
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discussion in representative newspapers and food magazines is burdened with the quest for class distinctions. This, they contend, is happening despite the decline of old-fashioned snobbery.4 Their book confirms Tony Bennett et al.’s (2009) detailed empirical work on the United
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Kingdom in arguing that taste hierarchies exist, culture irrevocably marks class, and
omnivorousness is a rarefied (but not rare) phenomenon where the rich and the better educated
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devour even working class subcultures, while the working classes (especially men) do not consume highbrow genres such as avant-garde art, classical music, art cinema, or exotic cuisines in restaurants. They corroborate Warde and Lydia Marten’s conclusion that “Familiarity with ethnic cuisine is a mark of refinement” (2000: 226).5
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It would appear from the discussion on good taste in sociology that only the rich and powerful eat well, while the rest mimic and follow, transforming good taste into bad, over time. Tastes flow from the top to the bottom, along inclines of nation, class, race and ethnicity,
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tightening the vice of capital, cultural capital, and culinary capital as symbolic power. Of course that happens, and happens often enough, but not everywhere and not all the time, partly because
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inter-class, inter-racial, and inter-ethnic communication is inadequate, and social values are often incommensurate between groups. I think our research agendas could be strengthened to pay as
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They base their theoretical contention of omnivorousness on van Eijck (2001); Peterson (1997); Peterson and Kern (1996); Peterson and Simkus (1992); Zavisca (2005); DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004); Fisher and Preece (2003); Lopez Sintas and Garcia Álvarez (2004); and Vander Stichele and Laermans (2006). 5 They also show that “Frequent eating out on commercial premises is associated positively with having high household income, being highly educated, being younger and being single, and negatively with being a housewife” (2000: 226).
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much attention to the good taste of poor people, especially immigrants, as we have done to the tastes of the rich and powerful. Current concerns in cultural sociology are shaped by strong theories of closure and
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containment, allowing little room for disruption. I think we could use some newer questions in the domain of taste, such as those posed by Pascale Casanova (2005) in the domain of literature. I think sociological theories of taste posit too direct a political connection between literal taste
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and social hierarchy, reducing the gustatory merely to the political, and passing in silence the actual aesthetic and stylistic characteristics that make food edible and the center of peoples’
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investment in good taste (see Casanova 2005). This is opposite to the error committed by connoisseurs and pursuers of pure taste who cannot see any connection between the real political world riven by race, class, gender and nationality, and the world of good taste. It is possible, I think, to re-establish the link between literal taste and politics while maintaining the relative
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autonomy of good food. It will be productive to navigate between those short-circuits of pure politics and pure literal taste, so that the objects and the subjects acquire their legitimate location. Most social theorists see it fit to exclude immigrant food producers from their analysis of
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the cultural politics of taste, because they cannot hear them in the gastronomic discourse they analyze. In my mind the analogy is this: it is as if we were to write about American music while
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ignoring African-American voices and communities that are central to the production of many of its dominant genres. There is an implication in this work on cultural consumption that immigrant concerns relate exclusively to the labor process and the law, which is to create a peculiarly constricted notion of immigrant selves as only laboring, and to be blind to the role of immigrants in the culture of consumption and the aesthetics of work.
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There are two theoretical transformations proposed here. The first, develops the increasingly potent insight that the difference between palatal taste and aesthetic taste is a theoretical subterfuge that does not account for taste fully in either of those domains. The
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second, confounds post-Bourdieu works that dominate urban sociological analyses. Many
analysts, I think, followed too closely with the presumption, which does not follow, that in every sub-cultural field, the taste of the dominant class is dominant, and the subaltern classes have no
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role in producing culture. The matter is more contested and it changes over time. That is an empirical question that needs open-minded and imaginative investigation and analysis.
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In the American context, I find that just as popular music slipped out of the control of elites in the second half of the twentieth century, so did palatal taste at the end of the twentieth century. The habits of chopsticks and hip-hop music, for instance, are not something that wellbred, traditional, Western elites are trained in. Of course, elite omnivorousness can cover a lot of
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ground (as Johnston and Baumann show), and money and degrees help in making cultural claims, but elites do not always set the standard for culinary taste, which is a clear measure of class hegemony. And let us be specific here, it is about hegemony not just dominance.
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Hegemony, according to Antonio Gramsci, its pre-eminent theorist, is the result of a combination of violence, bribery and consent from the bottom up. That of course does not mean it is a level
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playing field. But our work has to reflect the real democratic openings in spite of the closure of the field of culinary culture.
There is a long-term pattern of ethnic succession in the United States both in terms of
labor and of taste. Food-work done by German and Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century was carried out by Italians and eastern Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century, who in turn were replaced by Latinos and Asians at the end of the twentieth century. Tastes have
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changed too. French cuisine gave way to New American, Japanese and Italian cuisine in America’s most expensive restaurants, which were accented by Asian and Latin American ingredients at the end of the last century. There is a two-fold ethnic succession here: one in the
each other in counter-intuitive ways. Three Great Transformations in American Taste
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ethnicity of the labor force; and the other in the sphere of food served. The two are shaped by
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If we paint with a broad brush (and ignore some of the regional nuances) we see three great transformations in American taste. The first wave of 20 million or so Germanic, Northern
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European settlers and migrants, from England, Scotland, Germany and Ireland, developed the basic frame of the American meat-and-potatoes-cuisine of sausage, hamburger, potatoes (mashed, boiled and fried), cabbage, apples, peaches, butter, cheese, beer and whiskey, pork and chicken, with flavoring herbs such dill, caraway, celery, chives, sorrel, horseradish, and
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watercress. This is the base of the American palate built on Native American produce such as corn, beans and squash (and often written out of the cultural script especially in the case of Native-Americans and African-Americans -- hence the degree of discursive acknowledgement is
1998).
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important to study). Of course, eventually produce and people cross new thresholds (Gabaccia
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With some qualifications, America’s first regional food, Southern Cuisine, can also be
accommodated in this broad picture. What is crucially different about the South is that the 400,000 or so West African slaves brought their own palates, techniques and ingredients to wrestle down the Northern European frame, adding Carolina rice, okra, and smoked ham (in lieu of the fermented oysters, snails and fish one finds in West Africa) to the rich regional repertoire. That would expand with the cooking of 4 million or so enslaved African Americans on the eve of
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the Civil War, who were over-represented among American cooks, and who would eventually disperse across the country, especially into Northern cities by the Great Migration in the early twentieth century. That would hasten what Donna Gabaccia sees as the essential creolization of
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American tastes (1998).
Although the German migration continued late into the nineteenth century, adding to the first layer of American cookery, the next great transformation of the American palate happened
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with the shift in the center of gravity of out-migrating peoples from the Mediterranean and
Eastern European cities, between 1880 and 1924, that brought Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and
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Russian Jews. It is the food of these groups that many Americans first considered different, and retrospectively thought as ethnic, although the word “ethnic” was not used until the 1950s. This is the taste of olive oil, garlic, rosemary, schmaltz, bagels, pizza, olives, pasta, sardines, artichokes, broccoli, anise, coriander, fennel, cumin, thyme, and wine.
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In 1889 when Alessandro Filippini, the chef at Delmonico’s, America’s leading haute cuisine restaurant for over a century, published his cookbook called The Table there were no distinctively Italian recipes in it. Half a century later, in 1955, James Beard – often considered
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the father of the New American cooking and gastronomy – listed Quo Vadis in New York and Perino’s in Los Angeles, as his two favorite restaurants that were owned by Italians but didn’t
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offer much of their cooking. Beard could dismiss Italian cooking with the following words: “My opinion of Italian cookery is not too high,” he wrote from France in 1955. “And getting my first piece of French bread on the train yesterday made me realize again what masters the French are at the art. It seems to me that even the food on the wagon-lit restaurant was better than all the food of Italy” (quoted in Kuh 2001: 61). Addressing what appears today to be the inexplicable disrepute of Italian cuisine Patric Kuh notes:
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The tenets of haute cuisine of limpidity, distillation, and smoothness stand in direct opposition of those of Italian cucina. Where the Italians might grill a whole fish over dry vine shoots, the French must pass a fish mousse twice through
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a tamis. Where the French must chop their parsley to its finest consistency, the
Italians might add their herbs whole or cut fairly large… The problem for Italians was precisely that their best food stood in direct contrast to the aesthetic of
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refinement that was the ideal throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (Kuh 2001: 180).
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Sometimes aesthetic evaluations of food have nothing to do with the nature of the food or the skill involved in producing it. The Italian misfortune -- at least in American eyes -- may have been that Italian-Americans were poor and derided, and hence their food was dismissed for those reasons, rather than for any substantive evaluation of their cuisine. When American Italians
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climbed out of the ghetto and into sports arenas, corporate offices, governor’s mansions, city halls and movie studios, Italian food was re-assessed in the American imagination. The story of Italian food in America gets even more complicated if we get closer to the
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material and expand our time horizon. There are cycles of rise and fall within longer cycles. Paul Freedman shows in his detailed study of menus of elite restaurants in the middle of the
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nineteenth century, how versions of macaroni and cheese (such as “macaroni au gratin,” and “macaroni au Parmesan”) were the most commonly found, along with Escalloped Oysters, Baked Beans and Pork, Oyster Patties ˋa la Béchamel, and Fricassee of Chicken (Freedman 2011; Clarkson 2009). Thomas Jefferson had already popularized macaroni and cheese at the end of the eighteenth century. From that high perch in prestige where northern Italian regional foods were seen as analogues to the Grand Tour, Italian food would be dislodged by the entry of new
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southern Italian immigrants between 1880 and 1924 who were numerous and mostly poor, hence derided by the taste-making elite. That kind of disdain spread down the class hierarchy. An Irish woman conceded that although she had no prejudices against her Italian neighbors, the smell of
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garlic made proximity difficult (Cinotto 2013: 85). Italian Harlem carried the stench of poverty for middle-class visitors. By the end of the nineteenth century Northern Italians had already played a part in racially denigrating the diet of their southern compatriots. In one of the earliest
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references to Sicilian pizza, Carlo Lorenzini (pen name Collodi), the Tuscan author of Pinocchio wrote in 1886, “The blackened aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish sheen of garlic and
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anchovy, the greenish-yellow tint of the oil and fried herbs, and those red bits of tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of complicated filth that matches the dirt of the vendor” (Capatti and Montanari 2003: 27). The reputation of Italian food recovered a little in 1930s NYC with the furious ascent of Italians into white racism as they sought to distance themselves from Blacks
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and Puerto Ricans in East Harlem, with their rhetorical embrace of la famiglia to stem the tide of imagined normlessness among underemployed colored households (Cinotto 2013: 76-86). Yet that kind of rhetoric did not vaunt them into the elite; it just kept them treading water above the
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color line.
Nothing devalues a cuisine more than proximity to subordinate others. That explains not
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only the rise, fall, and rise again of Italian cuisine in America, but also the difficulty of Chinese, Mexican and Soul food to break away, in dominant American eyes, from the contamination effect of low class association. Poor, mobile people are rarely accorded cultural capital. The circulation of taste through the social architecture allows for the creation of a sub-cultural niche, say for the best taco, genuine dim-sum, or the most authentic fried chicken, yet rarely assures a
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position among elite food cultures. Here, many of the claims of Pierre Bourdieu and his American epigones, such as Johnston and Baumann, are correct. It is also a matter of timing. The prestige of Italian food could fully recover only by the
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1980s, after the bulge of poor immigrants had dissipated over three generations. Per capita
income among Italians in NYC as the last white group, below English, German, Russian, French, Irish and Polish ancestry, in that order, and above Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, etc., places
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them just as the right spot to both supply entrepreneurial sweat capital today and shape taste via demand and commentary (Ray 2016: 110). Italians also belong to a very large demographic
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group that carries substantial weight in the marketplace of commodities and commentary. Nevertheless expensive Italian restaurants and high-end chefs had to position themselves rhetorically against what they disdainfully identified as Italian-American, checkered-tablecloth, red-sauce institutions in the 1970s and the 1980s (Leschziner 2012). The rising prestige of Italian
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food in American might show us patterns of upwards mobility among other ethnics. Analogously, in twenty years from now Chinese food may be able to climb in American estimation, but that depends on a lot, including the continuing economic rise of China and the
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decline in the flow of poor Chinese immigrants into the United States. Setting his sights on the role of race in the evaluation of taste, Simone Cinotto
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demonstrates how color was the single most important factor in the consecration of Italian tastes in America (2013). He bleeds the story of the self-congratulation of an upwardly mobile group. He does that by taking a scalpel to an industry -- the Napa valley wine -- that Italians are credited to have almost single-handedly transformed “from a reserve of immigrant groups and urban Europhile elites into a mass national market.” In the process he illustrates how the work of David Roediger (2007), Matthew Frye Jacobson (1999), and Michael Omni and Howard Winant (1994)
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can be deployed with empirical and conceptual subtlety to explain both the centrality of the wages of whiteness in the story of Italian winemaking, and the apparently contradictory power of the margins to explain the remarkable successes of Piedmontese wine-makers.
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Just as the Chinese laundryman or cook did not learn his trade in China to then specialize in cooking and cleaning in California, the successes of Italian wine-makers had very little to do with the so-called Mediterranean ecology of California. Here he deals a devastating blow to the
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historiographical and popular claims of the successful transplantation of an Old World culture and practical expertise to the New World. That sentimental comparison he shows is the product
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of a fallacious touristic gaze on a landscape that hides the labor of Asian, Latino and poor Italian co-ethnics in the laborious transformation of the soil, water, hills and valleys that made the topography fit for the vine.
What is fascinating, in retrospect, is that Italian foods were not embraced as particularly
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flavorful by rest of Americans until the 1970s. American nutritionists, home economists, social reformers, and school teachers, were recorded complaining, especially in the Progressive Era, about how terrible all this food and flavoring was, how dreadful the hygiene of these peoples
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were, and how it provoked the craving for alcohol (Levenstein 1993). They tried to cure Italians and Jews of their food habits. Thankfully the reformers failed.
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Since 1965, Americans have been undergoing the Third Great Transformation in their
taste, when about another 30 million or so immigrants have entered from the vast expanse of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, adding avocados, cilantro, ironically chilies (because chili peppers are originally a New World cultivar), mangoes, jicama, curries, moles, noodles, tacos, soy, sushi, fish sauce, and Siracha. Through these renovations American food culture has become a dynamic domain, analogous to what happened to popular music in the 1960s. The
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medium of TV and new social media have played a crucial role in that transformation, which includes some degree of democratization. Almost no other national food culture is comparable in absorbing alien influences in reshaping itself as American culture. Here American culture may
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be different in reconsidering itself as a nation of immigrants. That realignment happened, as noted earlier, in American history-writing with Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted. I would postulate that American cuisine changes about every forty years, which makes the American palate quite
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interesting and it is a sign of economic and cultural integration of its migrant populations (unlike for instance in Europe). Dynamic and changing tastes may be a good thing for political
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integration. As a result, the virtue of long-standing and unchanging tastes, may appear less beneficial.
Nevertheless, the American world hasn’t become flat and not everything and everyone is equally valued. American taste-makers, that is, journalists, restaurant critics and professional
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chefs, have framed their appropriation of twentieth century culinary cultures in two divergent ways: first, as high-status foreign foods, initially limited to Continental and French cuisines, eventually consecrating Italian and Japanese cookery at the end of the century. Second, as the
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low-status product of the labor and implicit knowledge of the immigrant poor classified as ethnic fare. The appropriation of the first sort is understood primarily in aesthetic terms of taste and
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notions of skill, while the latter is understood as a matter of necessity, primarily in terms of undifferentiated toil.
We have data on price per meal in New York restaurants over the last thirty years that
shows a clear hierarchy of taste that is complicated in terms of race and ethnicity (Ray 2016). Japanese climbs high, along with French, Italian and New American, while Soul, Mexican and Chinese, stays at the bottom of the pile in terms of price they can demand, while other Asian
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cuisines such as Indian, Thai and Vietnamese hover between the two poles. In contrast Spanish, Greek and Korean are climbing in terms of prestige. Figure 1: Zagat: Rank by Average Price of a Meal at a NYC Restaurant for One
Rank in 1986
Rank in 1990
0
Rank in 2010
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[Selected Years: earliest available 1986 to latest 2016]
Rank in 2016
Japanese
2
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French
4
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6 8 10
14 16
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American Continental Italian Spanish Greek Korean Vietnamese Mexican Indian Chinese Southern Thai
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This is where we see the structural difference between haute cuisine and ethnic food. Low respect for one in linked to high hopes for the other. Professionalization of one domain of
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cooking is what makes the field of American cuisine unequal. Most famous American chefs are either white or Asian and overwhelmingly male, although most of everyday cooking is done by women and people of color. So color and gender are not peripheral to the production of the profession of chefs. I cannot think of a field of knowledge that was professionalized in American history without making it more male and white in the first phase of professionalization (medicine, law, dentistry, journalism, and college teaching, come to mind). Cooking is following that pattern with some important difference (for details see Ray 2016). 17
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Can we hear the Immigrant Speak? My broadest argument here is pre-figured in Simon Gikandi’s recovery of sullied blackness at the heart of eighteenth century aesthetic in Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011).
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First, his deliberate and detailed elaboration of how Western culture, even high culture, was never a white, Anglo, monologue is crucial. Subordinated subjects such as slaves, women and ethnics could not be properly excluded, even from the second order pleasure of art (in Gikandi’s
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work), which was in itself a desperate attempt to return sensuousness to life in the first order pleasures of food, shelter, and everyday decoration. Second, we continue to find in the twentieth
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century what Gikandi shows in the eighteenth, the adamant “desire to quarantine one aspect of social life – the tasteful, the beautiful, and the civil – from a public domain saturated by diverse forms of commerce” (Gikandi 2011: 6-7). The ethnic entrepreneur of taste plays an essential and constitutive role in urban, North American, consumer culture, where commerce and culture meet.
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Nevertheless, Gikandi’s reconstruction is inadequate because he never enters the domain of everyday cooking (unlike say Nettles-Barcelon, Clark, Thorsson, Walker, and WilliamsForson 2015) where he could have recovered the depth of the activities of the enslaved than he
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could ever find in oil on canvas. In the twentieth century, working class immigrants, in the cook-
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shop and at home, could develop a counter-poetics of personhood outside the authorized idiom of taste. Just as the black body had to develop a double-consciousness of highest joy and deepest sadness in speech and song, bodily pleasure and literal taste, the subordinate immigrant body had to find its place in a hierarchy of sensuousness and reason (sometimes placing himself in virulent opposition to that very black body that had provided the openings for his emplacement). By the 1970s, at the latest, immigrant entrepreneurs had turned their familiar foreignness into an object of taste. Food, language and everyday decorative arts such as housekeeping 18
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practices, home-building, furniture-making, religious iconography, attire, pots, pans and kitchen tools, those very things exiled from the universe of art in the temple of reason by the dominant (and gendered) classes, would come to represent not only beauty and pleasure, but also secure a
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measure of reflection, be connected to cosmologies and genealogies, and carry the mark of the immigrant as a modern, urban, subordinate, subject. They would undertake concerted attempts to deploy the fragments of everyday life – chopsticks, the wok, the karai (South Asian wok), the
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steamer, the idli maker, the rice cooker, the coconut grater, the boti (squatting Bengali floor knife), and un-interrogated motions of the body -- for an affective possession of alien spaces
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such as the restaurant, the home and the city. Astonishingly, by the twenty-first century, by their durable resistance to measuring themselves in dominant academic eyes, ethnics had turned the table on the everyday aesthetic of the governing classes and races, with their ideologies of mannered order, restraint, segregation, essential racial difference, and the fear of the sensual --
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elements that the culture of taste had tried to control.
The containment of culture in cold and distant spaces of display, reflection and cogitation – museums, classrooms, and libraries – could not match its real implication in the kitchen, the
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home, and the street corner. It is in everyday life, not in museums, where the mundane becomes
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marvelous. Museums are just beginning to catch up to that truth. Enlightenment culture of modernity was articulated in soaring rhetoric as liberation from
tradition, religion and habit, which are all essential to the domain of food. Betraying the nation for good food (which every historian of immigration has shown to be true) could not be accounted for in the high-mindedness of patriotism and freedom. The modern project of freeing men and women from bodily and emotional dependence on others, where individuals were supposedly trapped in un-interrogated communities of faith, habit, and everyday practice, is an 19
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inadequate elaboration of human subjectivity. In the eyes of its central theorists, the culture of modernity was premised on full and singular national belonging. Within that frame, emigration is a betrayal of the nation, and ethnicity a residue of un-meltable difference. That is why the
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rhetoric of choice and freedom had to be inflated. That was not true of most migrants, which is precisely why the migrant had the resources to turn the table on the dominant culture of taste. Literal taste was subordinated to aesthetic taste, but the former has always carried the trace of the
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subordinate, which is precisely why it has been subordinated in the temples of high culture – museums, libraries, academies. That consensus is falling apart today and the air is rife with
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possibilities. Disputing taste has become a legitimate and popular activity, some of which is the doing of the immigrant restaurateur, playing with the presumed triviality of literal taste among various publics. That is mostly unaccounted for in the current sociology of taste. References:
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S0195-6663(16)30543-8
DOI:
10.1016/j.appet.2016.10.013
Reference:
APPET 3186
To appear in:
Appetite
Received Date: 12 August 2016 Accepted Date: 10 October 2016
Please cite this article as: Ray K., Bringing the immigrant back into the sociology of taste, Appetite (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2016.10.013. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
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Bringing the Immigrant Back Into the Sociology of Taste Keywords: immigration, ethnicity, cultural sociology, taste
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Krishnendu Ray Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Nutrition and Food Studies New York University 411 Lafayette Str. 5th Floor New York 10003 Email: [email protected] Tel: 212-998-5530
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Introduction United States Census data on occupations and birthplace, which we have since 1850 (Ruggles et. al. 2004), show that the foreign-born have dominated food-related occupations such
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as baker, butcher, brewer, saloon keeper, and restaurateur. Although the source of migration has changed from Northern Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, to the Mediterranean at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, then to Asia, Latin America and the
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Caribbean in the second half of the twentieth century, migrants continue to dominate food-
making occupations. On the eve of the Civil War, for instance, seventy percent of bakers in NYC
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were immigrants, often German and Irish. At that time fifty percent of butchers nationally, and seventy percent in NYC, were foreign-born. And those ratios stay in place, with some variation, through numerous Census, which is taken every ten years in the case of the USA. That is in contrast to lawyers and school-teachers, who among all the occupations had the least number of
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foreign-born, only five to ten percent, understandably as language-dependent professions. By 2010 seventy-five percent of chefs and head cooks in NYC were foreign born, while thirty-five percent were so nationally. Feeding occupations have been dominated by the foreign-born, by
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the Irish, German, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, El Salvadorans and Bangladeshis. Nearly one-half of all small business owners in New York City today are immigrants, including 69
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percent of restaurant owners, and 84 percent of small grocery store owners (Foner 2013: 21, Kallick in Foner 2013: 80). Given this kind of data it would be perverse to be interested in immigrant lives and uninterested in food. Yet that has been the norm.
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The Historiography of Labor and Immigration Although the journalistic material is replete with stories of immigrant restaurateurs there is surprisingly little scholarly work of greater duration that theoretically engages with taste in the
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metropolis from the point of view of the foreign-born. Among scholars, historians have been better at recording the doings of immigrant shopkeepers and grocers, because, often literate, they keep records. Labor and immigration historians are particularly good at picking up the scent of
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food in poor peoples’ records (Levenstein 1988, 1993, Gabaccia 1998, Diner 2003, Pilcher
2012). Of course the task is easier said than done, especially in history, both due to attitudes and
working on the non-literate poor.
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sources, or lack of it. Sometimes, the archives do not collaborate with good intentions of scholars
In sociology there is a robust literature on ethnic entrepreneurship with a number of strong claims: Low capital requirements make it relatively easier for foreign-born entrepreneurs
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to enter into the highly competitive business of feeding others that most native-born do not find desirable. Niche cultural knowledge gives them a competitive edge over better-capitalized mainstream entrepreneurs. Kin or fictive kin networks of loyalty allow the lending of money on a
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rotating basis without collateral. Self-exploitation—long hours of work and unpaid labor of kin and fictive kin—permits these enterprises to compete with better-capitalized businesses. Large
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corporations often cannot respond quickly to fickle changes in fashion but small enterprises can adapt with speed, thus thrive. Finally, both migration and entrepreneurship exhibit serial patterns. People who know each other, typically migrate from the same regions, and work in and own similar enterprises built with money and expertise borrowed from co-ethnics. They effectively develop an informal, intra-ethnic, consulting and banking system. Co-ethnicity is also a powerful labor recruitment and management system that also allows quiescence and exploitation (see
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Zhou 2004; Foner et al. 2000; Granovetter 1985, 1995; Portes 1995; Rogers and Vertovec 1995; Sassen 1995; Bailey and Waldinger 1991; Westwood and Bhachu 1988; Light and Bonacich 1988; Waldinger 1986, 1990, 1992; Bailey 1985; Landa 1981; Light 1972).
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This, of course, is a broad prototype of an explanation, and a structural one, that needs to be fleshed out with the activity of real, everyday people. The structural model cannot explain, for instance, why and how the first Bangladeshi or Pakistani entered the Indian restaurant business
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in New York City. That demands biographies and micro-histories. In Bengali Harlem (2013) Vivek Bald reveals those potentialities in his finely drawn portraiture of about two dozen
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itinerant Bengali peddlers of chikan (a textile) circulating from Hoogly through London, Durban, New York, to New Orleans in fin de siècle nineteenth century, sliding into the interstices between the dying throes of the British Empire and the birth of American emporium.1 As these men left some of their compatriots behind to keep the tethering posts of their networks in place
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in distant cities, they in turn, out of pure necessity and unrestrained desire, built some of the earliest South Asian boarding houses, coffee shops, eateries and restaurants in their places of inhabitance, occupying the “thin edge between Indophilia and xenophobia” (Bald 2013: 46). A
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compelling case is made here for immigrant insertion in metropolitan tastes at the intersection of micro-history and structural sociology.
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Much of the ethnicity and entrepreneurship literature attends to economics and politics,
but only to that, as if immigrants are creatures only of political-economy, who never think about taste, beauty, and how such things might intersect with their practical-moral universe. A recent illustration is Roger Waldinger’s The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands (2015) which is an attempt to update Oscar Handlin’s view of the suffering, 1
According to Claude Markovits (2008) these peddlers may add up to a quarter million merchants and financiers operating outside the subcontinent, mostly in the Indian Ocean world, between 1830 and 1930. Caroline Adams (1987) provides us with an analogous handful of Bengali pioneers in UK.
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oppressed, immigrant in The Uprooted (1951). Handlin was part of the generation of scholars who re-focused the locus of American history from the frontier to the immigrant experience. Handlin famously wrote in the opening lines of his book, “Once I thought to write a history of
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the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history” (1951: 3). Waldinger’s thesis isn’t equal to Handlin’s in terms of drama, but he makes an
important point nevertheless. Instead of suffering and loss, Waldinger turns to migrant agency.
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As a result his focus is on migrant access to resources in the USA (high-wage labor market) and back home (property, kith and kin), the persistence of trans-national connections (instead of
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uprooting), and the extension of societies and cultures of the global south into territories of the north. Nevertheless, while Handlin devoted a whole chapter to “The Daily Bread” and such mundane materialities of immigrant life, Waldinger’s migrants do not eat, drink, sleep, dance or sing. The index does not list food, shelter, or culture.2 Waldinger’s immigrants do remit money
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home, they do talk on the phone, and face the big challenges of law and policy. He makes many interesting points about remittances, telephony, laws and transnationalism (with pointed arguments against nationalist and globalists), but his migrants are purely political-economic
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ideas without bodies and hence innocent of the challenges of nursing them with materials and memories that matter affectively. Waldinger’s migrant is a peculiar inversion of the soulful,
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suffering, uprooted, subject of Handlin. Migrants, of course, do not just labor and suffer, which is often the only way of accounting for them in the socio-cultural sciences, they are also filled with joy and pleasure, and much of that has to do with good food and music. The propensity to ignore immigrant bodies in the broader disciplinary discussion of taste
may be a product of the tendency to see discussions of taste as marginal to the real lives of 2
Combining macro and micro-level analysis Nancy Foner’s edited volume (2013) allows richer attention to material and affective worlds of music, worship and food in sections such as “Eating, Drinking and Acculturation” (pp. 108112) and “Korean Enclaves in New York City” (pp. 155-159), etc.
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marginal peoples. In this conception, poor, hard-working people can teach us about poverty and suffering, hierarchy and symbolic violence, but never about taste. That might be one of the unfortunate consequences of the over-whelming dominance of Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of
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analysis in sociology.
A number of technical and conceptual reasons can be attributed to the blindness about the
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ethnic provider of good food. Low prestige of care-work, unheroic labor of micro
entrepreneurship, the inability to articulate in language the taste of the tongue, limited language
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skills of scholars working with the metropolitan material (especially in the languages of recent migrants), the over-worked migrant without the time to write, and the illiteracy of many immigrants, have compounded our access to that perspective. One example that brings together a number of these reasons should suffice here: although the Chinese have dominated the feeding and cleaning occupations in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century, we do
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not get a book length treatment of their perspective in establishing and running the quintessential American ethnic restaurant until the twenty-first century (J. 8. Lee 2009, Cho 2010). That is an extraordinary deferral. The reason is both the theoretical problem with cooked food in the
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modern Western imagination, especially within academic scholarship, and the subordination of
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the cooking subject. Little else can explain such a notable and durable silence. The Sociology of Taste
In American Sociology – one of the disciplines where urban immigrant communities
have figured prominently -- taste has been studied most extensively over the last decade in the sub-field of “cultures of consumption,” which builds on Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984).3 The 3
Other recent directions of research have focused on practice theory (Warde 2016), organization theory (Rao et al. 2003, 2005), small-group interaction, workplace dynamics and aesthetics of work (Fine 1996), field theory (Ferguson 1998, 2004) and nutrition-related science-and-technological studies (Schleifer 2012, 2013).
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latest iteration of such disciplinary attention in North America is of course, your very local, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann’s Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (2010). Johnston and Baumann argue that in spite of broadening palates, the gastronomic
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discussion in representative newspapers and food magazines is burdened with the quest for class distinctions. This, they contend, is happening despite the decline of old-fashioned snobbery.4 Their book confirms Tony Bennett et al.’s (2009) detailed empirical work on the United
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Kingdom in arguing that taste hierarchies exist, culture irrevocably marks class, and
omnivorousness is a rarefied (but not rare) phenomenon where the rich and the better educated
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devour even working class subcultures, while the working classes (especially men) do not consume highbrow genres such as avant-garde art, classical music, art cinema, or exotic cuisines in restaurants. They corroborate Warde and Lydia Marten’s conclusion that “Familiarity with ethnic cuisine is a mark of refinement” (2000: 226).5
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It would appear from the discussion on good taste in sociology that only the rich and powerful eat well, while the rest mimic and follow, transforming good taste into bad, over time. Tastes flow from the top to the bottom, along inclines of nation, class, race and ethnicity,
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tightening the vice of capital, cultural capital, and culinary capital as symbolic power. Of course that happens, and happens often enough, but not everywhere and not all the time, partly because
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inter-class, inter-racial, and inter-ethnic communication is inadequate, and social values are often incommensurate between groups. I think our research agendas could be strengthened to pay as
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They base their theoretical contention of omnivorousness on van Eijck (2001); Peterson (1997); Peterson and Kern (1996); Peterson and Simkus (1992); Zavisca (2005); DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004); Fisher and Preece (2003); Lopez Sintas and Garcia Álvarez (2004); and Vander Stichele and Laermans (2006). 5 They also show that “Frequent eating out on commercial premises is associated positively with having high household income, being highly educated, being younger and being single, and negatively with being a housewife” (2000: 226).
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much attention to the good taste of poor people, especially immigrants, as we have done to the tastes of the rich and powerful. Current concerns in cultural sociology are shaped by strong theories of closure and
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containment, allowing little room for disruption. I think we could use some newer questions in the domain of taste, such as those posed by Pascale Casanova (2005) in the domain of literature. I think sociological theories of taste posit too direct a political connection between literal taste
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and social hierarchy, reducing the gustatory merely to the political, and passing in silence the actual aesthetic and stylistic characteristics that make food edible and the center of peoples’
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investment in good taste (see Casanova 2005). This is opposite to the error committed by connoisseurs and pursuers of pure taste who cannot see any connection between the real political world riven by race, class, gender and nationality, and the world of good taste. It is possible, I think, to re-establish the link between literal taste and politics while maintaining the relative
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autonomy of good food. It will be productive to navigate between those short-circuits of pure politics and pure literal taste, so that the objects and the subjects acquire their legitimate location. Most social theorists see it fit to exclude immigrant food producers from their analysis of
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the cultural politics of taste, because they cannot hear them in the gastronomic discourse they analyze. In my mind the analogy is this: it is as if we were to write about American music while
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ignoring African-American voices and communities that are central to the production of many of its dominant genres. There is an implication in this work on cultural consumption that immigrant concerns relate exclusively to the labor process and the law, which is to create a peculiarly constricted notion of immigrant selves as only laboring, and to be blind to the role of immigrants in the culture of consumption and the aesthetics of work.
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There are two theoretical transformations proposed here. The first, develops the increasingly potent insight that the difference between palatal taste and aesthetic taste is a theoretical subterfuge that does not account for taste fully in either of those domains. The
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second, confounds post-Bourdieu works that dominate urban sociological analyses. Many
analysts, I think, followed too closely with the presumption, which does not follow, that in every sub-cultural field, the taste of the dominant class is dominant, and the subaltern classes have no
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role in producing culture. The matter is more contested and it changes over time. That is an empirical question that needs open-minded and imaginative investigation and analysis.
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In the American context, I find that just as popular music slipped out of the control of elites in the second half of the twentieth century, so did palatal taste at the end of the twentieth century. The habits of chopsticks and hip-hop music, for instance, are not something that wellbred, traditional, Western elites are trained in. Of course, elite omnivorousness can cover a lot of
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ground (as Johnston and Baumann show), and money and degrees help in making cultural claims, but elites do not always set the standard for culinary taste, which is a clear measure of class hegemony. And let us be specific here, it is about hegemony not just dominance.
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Hegemony, according to Antonio Gramsci, its pre-eminent theorist, is the result of a combination of violence, bribery and consent from the bottom up. That of course does not mean it is a level
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playing field. But our work has to reflect the real democratic openings in spite of the closure of the field of culinary culture.
There is a long-term pattern of ethnic succession in the United States both in terms of
labor and of taste. Food-work done by German and Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century was carried out by Italians and eastern Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century, who in turn were replaced by Latinos and Asians at the end of the twentieth century. Tastes have
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changed too. French cuisine gave way to New American, Japanese and Italian cuisine in America’s most expensive restaurants, which were accented by Asian and Latin American ingredients at the end of the last century. There is a two-fold ethnic succession here: one in the
each other in counter-intuitive ways. Three Great Transformations in American Taste
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ethnicity of the labor force; and the other in the sphere of food served. The two are shaped by
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If we paint with a broad brush (and ignore some of the regional nuances) we see three great transformations in American taste. The first wave of 20 million or so Germanic, Northern
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European settlers and migrants, from England, Scotland, Germany and Ireland, developed the basic frame of the American meat-and-potatoes-cuisine of sausage, hamburger, potatoes (mashed, boiled and fried), cabbage, apples, peaches, butter, cheese, beer and whiskey, pork and chicken, with flavoring herbs such dill, caraway, celery, chives, sorrel, horseradish, and
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watercress. This is the base of the American palate built on Native American produce such as corn, beans and squash (and often written out of the cultural script especially in the case of Native-Americans and African-Americans -- hence the degree of discursive acknowledgement is
1998).
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important to study). Of course, eventually produce and people cross new thresholds (Gabaccia
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With some qualifications, America’s first regional food, Southern Cuisine, can also be
accommodated in this broad picture. What is crucially different about the South is that the 400,000 or so West African slaves brought their own palates, techniques and ingredients to wrestle down the Northern European frame, adding Carolina rice, okra, and smoked ham (in lieu of the fermented oysters, snails and fish one finds in West Africa) to the rich regional repertoire. That would expand with the cooking of 4 million or so enslaved African Americans on the eve of
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the Civil War, who were over-represented among American cooks, and who would eventually disperse across the country, especially into Northern cities by the Great Migration in the early twentieth century. That would hasten what Donna Gabaccia sees as the essential creolization of
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American tastes (1998).
Although the German migration continued late into the nineteenth century, adding to the first layer of American cookery, the next great transformation of the American palate happened
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with the shift in the center of gravity of out-migrating peoples from the Mediterranean and
Eastern European cities, between 1880 and 1924, that brought Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and
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Russian Jews. It is the food of these groups that many Americans first considered different, and retrospectively thought as ethnic, although the word “ethnic” was not used until the 1950s. This is the taste of olive oil, garlic, rosemary, schmaltz, bagels, pizza, olives, pasta, sardines, artichokes, broccoli, anise, coriander, fennel, cumin, thyme, and wine.
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In 1889 when Alessandro Filippini, the chef at Delmonico’s, America’s leading haute cuisine restaurant for over a century, published his cookbook called The Table there were no distinctively Italian recipes in it. Half a century later, in 1955, James Beard – often considered
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the father of the New American cooking and gastronomy – listed Quo Vadis in New York and Perino’s in Los Angeles, as his two favorite restaurants that were owned by Italians but didn’t
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offer much of their cooking. Beard could dismiss Italian cooking with the following words: “My opinion of Italian cookery is not too high,” he wrote from France in 1955. “And getting my first piece of French bread on the train yesterday made me realize again what masters the French are at the art. It seems to me that even the food on the wagon-lit restaurant was better than all the food of Italy” (quoted in Kuh 2001: 61). Addressing what appears today to be the inexplicable disrepute of Italian cuisine Patric Kuh notes:
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The tenets of haute cuisine of limpidity, distillation, and smoothness stand in direct opposition of those of Italian cucina. Where the Italians might grill a whole fish over dry vine shoots, the French must pass a fish mousse twice through
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a tamis. Where the French must chop their parsley to its finest consistency, the
Italians might add their herbs whole or cut fairly large… The problem for Italians was precisely that their best food stood in direct contrast to the aesthetic of
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refinement that was the ideal throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (Kuh 2001: 180).
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Sometimes aesthetic evaluations of food have nothing to do with the nature of the food or the skill involved in producing it. The Italian misfortune -- at least in American eyes -- may have been that Italian-Americans were poor and derided, and hence their food was dismissed for those reasons, rather than for any substantive evaluation of their cuisine. When American Italians
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climbed out of the ghetto and into sports arenas, corporate offices, governor’s mansions, city halls and movie studios, Italian food was re-assessed in the American imagination. The story of Italian food in America gets even more complicated if we get closer to the
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material and expand our time horizon. There are cycles of rise and fall within longer cycles. Paul Freedman shows in his detailed study of menus of elite restaurants in the middle of the
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nineteenth century, how versions of macaroni and cheese (such as “macaroni au gratin,” and “macaroni au Parmesan”) were the most commonly found, along with Escalloped Oysters, Baked Beans and Pork, Oyster Patties ˋa la Béchamel, and Fricassee of Chicken (Freedman 2011; Clarkson 2009). Thomas Jefferson had already popularized macaroni and cheese at the end of the eighteenth century. From that high perch in prestige where northern Italian regional foods were seen as analogues to the Grand Tour, Italian food would be dislodged by the entry of new
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southern Italian immigrants between 1880 and 1924 who were numerous and mostly poor, hence derided by the taste-making elite. That kind of disdain spread down the class hierarchy. An Irish woman conceded that although she had no prejudices against her Italian neighbors, the smell of
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garlic made proximity difficult (Cinotto 2013: 85). Italian Harlem carried the stench of poverty for middle-class visitors. By the end of the nineteenth century Northern Italians had already played a part in racially denigrating the diet of their southern compatriots. In one of the earliest
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references to Sicilian pizza, Carlo Lorenzini (pen name Collodi), the Tuscan author of Pinocchio wrote in 1886, “The blackened aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish sheen of garlic and
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anchovy, the greenish-yellow tint of the oil and fried herbs, and those red bits of tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of complicated filth that matches the dirt of the vendor” (Capatti and Montanari 2003: 27). The reputation of Italian food recovered a little in 1930s NYC with the furious ascent of Italians into white racism as they sought to distance themselves from Blacks
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and Puerto Ricans in East Harlem, with their rhetorical embrace of la famiglia to stem the tide of imagined normlessness among underemployed colored households (Cinotto 2013: 76-86). Yet that kind of rhetoric did not vaunt them into the elite; it just kept them treading water above the
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color line.
Nothing devalues a cuisine more than proximity to subordinate others. That explains not
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only the rise, fall, and rise again of Italian cuisine in America, but also the difficulty of Chinese, Mexican and Soul food to break away, in dominant American eyes, from the contamination effect of low class association. Poor, mobile people are rarely accorded cultural capital. The circulation of taste through the social architecture allows for the creation of a sub-cultural niche, say for the best taco, genuine dim-sum, or the most authentic fried chicken, yet rarely assures a
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position among elite food cultures. Here, many of the claims of Pierre Bourdieu and his American epigones, such as Johnston and Baumann, are correct. It is also a matter of timing. The prestige of Italian food could fully recover only by the
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1980s, after the bulge of poor immigrants had dissipated over three generations. Per capita
income among Italians in NYC as the last white group, below English, German, Russian, French, Irish and Polish ancestry, in that order, and above Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, etc., places
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them just as the right spot to both supply entrepreneurial sweat capital today and shape taste via demand and commentary (Ray 2016: 110). Italians also belong to a very large demographic
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group that carries substantial weight in the marketplace of commodities and commentary. Nevertheless expensive Italian restaurants and high-end chefs had to position themselves rhetorically against what they disdainfully identified as Italian-American, checkered-tablecloth, red-sauce institutions in the 1970s and the 1980s (Leschziner 2012). The rising prestige of Italian
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food in American might show us patterns of upwards mobility among other ethnics. Analogously, in twenty years from now Chinese food may be able to climb in American estimation, but that depends on a lot, including the continuing economic rise of China and the
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decline in the flow of poor Chinese immigrants into the United States. Setting his sights on the role of race in the evaluation of taste, Simone Cinotto
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demonstrates how color was the single most important factor in the consecration of Italian tastes in America (2013). He bleeds the story of the self-congratulation of an upwardly mobile group. He does that by taking a scalpel to an industry -- the Napa valley wine -- that Italians are credited to have almost single-handedly transformed “from a reserve of immigrant groups and urban Europhile elites into a mass national market.” In the process he illustrates how the work of David Roediger (2007), Matthew Frye Jacobson (1999), and Michael Omni and Howard Winant (1994)
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can be deployed with empirical and conceptual subtlety to explain both the centrality of the wages of whiteness in the story of Italian winemaking, and the apparently contradictory power of the margins to explain the remarkable successes of Piedmontese wine-makers.
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Just as the Chinese laundryman or cook did not learn his trade in China to then specialize in cooking and cleaning in California, the successes of Italian wine-makers had very little to do with the so-called Mediterranean ecology of California. Here he deals a devastating blow to the
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historiographical and popular claims of the successful transplantation of an Old World culture and practical expertise to the New World. That sentimental comparison he shows is the product
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of a fallacious touristic gaze on a landscape that hides the labor of Asian, Latino and poor Italian co-ethnics in the laborious transformation of the soil, water, hills and valleys that made the topography fit for the vine.
What is fascinating, in retrospect, is that Italian foods were not embraced as particularly
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flavorful by rest of Americans until the 1970s. American nutritionists, home economists, social reformers, and school teachers, were recorded complaining, especially in the Progressive Era, about how terrible all this food and flavoring was, how dreadful the hygiene of these peoples
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were, and how it provoked the craving for alcohol (Levenstein 1993). They tried to cure Italians and Jews of their food habits. Thankfully the reformers failed.
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Since 1965, Americans have been undergoing the Third Great Transformation in their
taste, when about another 30 million or so immigrants have entered from the vast expanse of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, adding avocados, cilantro, ironically chilies (because chili peppers are originally a New World cultivar), mangoes, jicama, curries, moles, noodles, tacos, soy, sushi, fish sauce, and Siracha. Through these renovations American food culture has become a dynamic domain, analogous to what happened to popular music in the 1960s. The
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medium of TV and new social media have played a crucial role in that transformation, which includes some degree of democratization. Almost no other national food culture is comparable in absorbing alien influences in reshaping itself as American culture. Here American culture may
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be different in reconsidering itself as a nation of immigrants. That realignment happened, as noted earlier, in American history-writing with Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted. I would postulate that American cuisine changes about every forty years, which makes the American palate quite
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interesting and it is a sign of economic and cultural integration of its migrant populations (unlike for instance in Europe). Dynamic and changing tastes may be a good thing for political
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integration. As a result, the virtue of long-standing and unchanging tastes, may appear less beneficial.
Nevertheless, the American world hasn’t become flat and not everything and everyone is equally valued. American taste-makers, that is, journalists, restaurant critics and professional
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chefs, have framed their appropriation of twentieth century culinary cultures in two divergent ways: first, as high-status foreign foods, initially limited to Continental and French cuisines, eventually consecrating Italian and Japanese cookery at the end of the century. Second, as the
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low-status product of the labor and implicit knowledge of the immigrant poor classified as ethnic fare. The appropriation of the first sort is understood primarily in aesthetic terms of taste and
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notions of skill, while the latter is understood as a matter of necessity, primarily in terms of undifferentiated toil.
We have data on price per meal in New York restaurants over the last thirty years that
shows a clear hierarchy of taste that is complicated in terms of race and ethnicity (Ray 2016). Japanese climbs high, along with French, Italian and New American, while Soul, Mexican and Chinese, stays at the bottom of the pile in terms of price they can demand, while other Asian
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cuisines such as Indian, Thai and Vietnamese hover between the two poles. In contrast Spanish, Greek and Korean are climbing in terms of prestige. Figure 1: Zagat: Rank by Average Price of a Meal at a NYC Restaurant for One
Rank in 1986
Rank in 1990
0
Rank in 2010
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[Selected Years: earliest available 1986 to latest 2016]
Rank in 2016
Japanese
2
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French
4
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6 8 10
14 16
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American Continental Italian Spanish Greek Korean Vietnamese Mexican Indian Chinese Southern Thai
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This is where we see the structural difference between haute cuisine and ethnic food. Low respect for one in linked to high hopes for the other. Professionalization of one domain of
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cooking is what makes the field of American cuisine unequal. Most famous American chefs are either white or Asian and overwhelmingly male, although most of everyday cooking is done by women and people of color. So color and gender are not peripheral to the production of the profession of chefs. I cannot think of a field of knowledge that was professionalized in American history without making it more male and white in the first phase of professionalization (medicine, law, dentistry, journalism, and college teaching, come to mind). Cooking is following that pattern with some important difference (for details see Ray 2016). 17
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Can we hear the Immigrant Speak? My broadest argument here is pre-figured in Simon Gikandi’s recovery of sullied blackness at the heart of eighteenth century aesthetic in Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011).
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First, his deliberate and detailed elaboration of how Western culture, even high culture, was never a white, Anglo, monologue is crucial. Subordinated subjects such as slaves, women and ethnics could not be properly excluded, even from the second order pleasure of art (in Gikandi’s
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work), which was in itself a desperate attempt to return sensuousness to life in the first order pleasures of food, shelter, and everyday decoration. Second, we continue to find in the twentieth
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century what Gikandi shows in the eighteenth, the adamant “desire to quarantine one aspect of social life – the tasteful, the beautiful, and the civil – from a public domain saturated by diverse forms of commerce” (Gikandi 2011: 6-7). The ethnic entrepreneur of taste plays an essential and constitutive role in urban, North American, consumer culture, where commerce and culture meet.
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Nevertheless, Gikandi’s reconstruction is inadequate because he never enters the domain of everyday cooking (unlike say Nettles-Barcelon, Clark, Thorsson, Walker, and WilliamsForson 2015) where he could have recovered the depth of the activities of the enslaved than he
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could ever find in oil on canvas. In the twentieth century, working class immigrants, in the cook-
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shop and at home, could develop a counter-poetics of personhood outside the authorized idiom of taste. Just as the black body had to develop a double-consciousness of highest joy and deepest sadness in speech and song, bodily pleasure and literal taste, the subordinate immigrant body had to find its place in a hierarchy of sensuousness and reason (sometimes placing himself in virulent opposition to that very black body that had provided the openings for his emplacement). By the 1970s, at the latest, immigrant entrepreneurs had turned their familiar foreignness into an object of taste. Food, language and everyday decorative arts such as housekeeping 18
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practices, home-building, furniture-making, religious iconography, attire, pots, pans and kitchen tools, those very things exiled from the universe of art in the temple of reason by the dominant (and gendered) classes, would come to represent not only beauty and pleasure, but also secure a
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measure of reflection, be connected to cosmologies and genealogies, and carry the mark of the immigrant as a modern, urban, subordinate, subject. They would undertake concerted attempts to deploy the fragments of everyday life – chopsticks, the wok, the karai (South Asian wok), the
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steamer, the idli maker, the rice cooker, the coconut grater, the boti (squatting Bengali floor knife), and un-interrogated motions of the body -- for an affective possession of alien spaces
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such as the restaurant, the home and the city. Astonishingly, by the twenty-first century, by their durable resistance to measuring themselves in dominant academic eyes, ethnics had turned the table on the everyday aesthetic of the governing classes and races, with their ideologies of mannered order, restraint, segregation, essential racial difference, and the fear of the sensual --
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elements that the culture of taste had tried to control.
The containment of culture in cold and distant spaces of display, reflection and cogitation – museums, classrooms, and libraries – could not match its real implication in the kitchen, the
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home, and the street corner. It is in everyday life, not in museums, where the mundane becomes
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marvelous. Museums are just beginning to catch up to that truth. Enlightenment culture of modernity was articulated in soaring rhetoric as liberation from
tradition, religion and habit, which are all essential to the domain of food. Betraying the nation for good food (which every historian of immigration has shown to be true) could not be accounted for in the high-mindedness of patriotism and freedom. The modern project of freeing men and women from bodily and emotional dependence on others, where individuals were supposedly trapped in un-interrogated communities of faith, habit, and everyday practice, is an 19
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inadequate elaboration of human subjectivity. In the eyes of its central theorists, the culture of modernity was premised on full and singular national belonging. Within that frame, emigration is a betrayal of the nation, and ethnicity a residue of un-meltable difference. That is why the
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rhetoric of choice and freedom had to be inflated. That was not true of most migrants, which is precisely why the migrant had the resources to turn the table on the dominant culture of taste. Literal taste was subordinated to aesthetic taste, but the former has always carried the trace of the
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subordinate, which is precisely why it has been subordinated in the temples of high culture – museums, libraries, academies. That consensus is falling apart today and the air is rife with
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possibilities. Disputing taste has become a legitimate and popular activity, some of which is the doing of the immigrant restaurateur, playing with the presumed triviality of literal taste among various publics. That is mostly unaccounted for in the current sociology of taste. References:
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