Asian food and culinary politics: food governance, constructed heritage and contested boundaries

Abstract

This introduction outlines the conceptual framework of the special issue. Culinary politics involves a contest over the social organization and cultural meanings of food by a variety of actors: both civil and state, the powerful and the grassroots. In particular, we consider food governance as a form of culinary politics entailing a two-way traffic, in which policies and regulations are set by state actors, while the responses of civil actors often reshape the foodscape and complicate the outcome of food policies. Food governance also points to the reshaping and contestation of collective and individual food identities, and how different power hierarchies can be challenged through acts of food-making. While food is an enduring cultural concern in human life, food governance and culinary politics should be two important concepts for researchers to engage with when examining individuals' soft skills of food-making and the exercise of soft power through food.

Keywords:

• Culinary politics
• cultural governance
• contested food boundaries
• food actors

Culinary politics, food actors and food governance

Since ancient times food has been both the object and instrument of politics, both as a source of wealth and power and as means of demarking sacred and social boundaries (Laudan 2015). Materially food sustain collectives while symbolically, as cuisine, it is used to represent them, from families to nations. Culinary politics is therefore one of the most enduring forms of cultural politics (King 2019; Mintz 1985; Watson and Caldwell 2005). As contemporary societies have achieved greater food security, at least for some sectors of the population, the culinary politics of representing collectivities through food has become more central, including the politics of culinary heritage and place branding (Cheung 2015; Cwiertka and Yasuhito 2020) and culinary soft power politics and gastrodiplomacy (Farrer 2010, 2015; Assmann 2017; Rockower 2012; Bestor 2014; Pham 2013; Zhang 2015). However, as we emphasize in papers in this special issue, culinary politics is multidimensional – involving many types of actors – both state and civil, top level ones and grassroots, powerful, and less powered sectors.

One way of looking at culinary politics is as a form of governance, which entails a two-way traffic. While policies and regulations are being set by state actors, civil responses and reactions to such state-led agenda often complicate outcomes of food governance. Much of the food governance literature in the field has been concerned about global food systems, food policies, and issues of food safety, food security, climate change, and the global social movements for achieving sustainable development and food justice (Akrah-Lodhi 2013; Almås and Campbell 2012; Brown 2014; Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014; McKeon 2015; Patel 2007; Yadav 2019). Food governance also works at the cultural level, which is the focus of all the papers in this issue, examining how the meanings of food items and culinary practices and their associated social identities are established and contested through culinary politics. This type of politics of food is neither exclusively top down nor state led. The different case studies in this issue explore the agency of food actors at various scales, including state and business trajectories in the local and global foodscape, migrant business activities, changes of tastes and consumption pattern, as well as home-food-making experiences of migrant workers. Our focus is on how food actors participate in making new foodscapes, giving meaning to food items, and thereby re-inscribe social identities for individuals and the collectives.

We examine the intertwining of different processes of establishing rules – food governance – and actors contesting them – culinary politics. Food is an everyday practice; so the governance of food does not merely depend on food policy makers, but upon any actors who have a relationship to shaping foodways. State policies have an effect on our relationship with food; yet, they are not totalizing. Actors from many sectors remake food spaces through their food practices, despite their varied powers and resources. The governance of foodways and food cultures involves diverse practices and multiple actors, and an inevitable friction among food actors with different agendas. Scholarship on culinary politics and its relationship to cultural governance thus should not limit its focus to acts of the state, but often involves different levels and venues of authority and power enacting in interactive processes in different sectors of a society (Yu 2015; Winter 2006). There are multiple and overlapping interactive spaces for the manipulation of taste and palates, and the reinvention of food traditions associated with nations, regions, and down to the level of individuals and families.

Most of the papers in this special issue focus on the food actors, especially those at the bottom and the less powerful ones, who use food to generate power and accumulate influence. We adopt an actor-oriented approach to understand how people adapt to new tastes, shape their food environment, act as custodians of food heritage (e.g. by perennially infusing new meanings into food) and food “ambassadors,” repackage and spread cultural traditions, and re-position themselves in the professional culinary field. Food actors can be human beings who are either food consumers or makers, or both. In keeping with Latour’s (2005) broad conception of the actor in social life, these food actors may include individuals, but also institutions, objects, and even deities (see Wang’s contribution to this issue for a discussion of local Shinto spirits being called upon in Japanese food politics).

Food is an area of relative cultural freedom, and actors relate to their food environment and structures in the most idiosyncratic ways. They also relay their food experiences to others by sharing, making and reinventing food and interacting with others through food talk (Chan 2016; Cheng 2016; Ferguson 2014). Food actors, such as housewives, migrant domestic helpers, food fans, tour guides, business owners, and restaurant chefs, are all active agents in creating new culinary spaces that generate food discourses and identities, contest positions, and resist dominate cultures. However, they also frequently meet resistance from other local actors, since grassroots food actors do not always share the same agendas.

Grassroots food actors may collaborate to achieve various goals such as linking food-related actions to larger political agendas, home-place identities, and specific economic and cultural needs. Such actions can be enacted in the most private space of home kitchen as well as the transnational market-oriented space of the international “fine dining” gastronomy. The soft skills of food-making not only help governments, nations, and regions to gain influence, they also help empower individuals with lower statuses and fewer resources. Grassroots food actors may also contest and dispute the activities of other actors in their space. There is no automatic consensus about who “owns” a cuisine or a particular food product (see Farrer and Wang’s discussion in this issue). The case studies in this special issue will demonstrate different patterns of food action and culinary politics from below.

Asian foodways and globalization

The context for all the papers in the special issue is the globalization of Asian foodways, or the in- and outflows of foods, concepts, and peoples producing, consuming, and discussing food in Asian contexts. There is nothing new about the globalization of Asian food and foodways (Farrer 2015a; Wu and Cheung 2002; King 2019; Tan 2011; Cwiertka and Walraven 2002; Wu and Tan 2001). Asian cuisines travelled and mingled before the rise of modern nation states, and long before the much more recent idea of national cuisines, a process that can be traced back to millennia of migrations and trading along Asian coastlines (Leong-Salobir, Ray, and Rohel 2016; Ray 2015; Ruddle and Ishige 2010). Recipes for “foreign” cuisines have been recently decoded on Babylonian tablets over four thousand years old, showing that not only foodstuffs but also recipes for preparing them have been shared across trade routes for millennia (Winchester 2019). A distinct phase in the globalization of Asian food began with the European colonization of Asia. European avarice for Asian spices brought wars and subjugation, while vastly expanding global trade in foodstuffs. No one has elaborated more clearly than Sidney Mintz (1985) on the power of a single food item – refined sugar – in the formation a global food market that entailed the manipulation of the global palate for sweetness, the colonization of Asia, and the even greater suffering of enslaved Africans working on sugar plantations. Two centuries of colonization also witnessed the spread of Asian foods and the infiltration of Asian tastes among the people of the imperial powers (Leong-Salobir 2011). While Western powers colonized Asian territories and palates for centuries, Asian foodways traveled the routes of trade and empire to color the Western foodscape, from the spread of Chinese noodles and Indian curry to the global boom in Japanese restaurants (Arnold, Tunç, and Chong 2018; Cwiertka 2005; Farrer et al. 2019; Ray and Srinivas 2012; Wank and Farrer 2015a).

The rise of Asia economically in the recent decades has been accompanied by the spread of Asian cultural influences, including culinary cultures, both within and beyond the region. Asian cuisines and foodways are particularly salient as food trends in the global culinary market. Asian culinary globalization has been accompanied by the globalization or transnationalization of Asian culinary politics. With efforts from different sectors, down from individuals to different parties in the food industry as well as state authorities, Asian food has been promoted as something of extraordinary delicacy, with spiritual traditions and exotic flavors. The cultural competition among nation states, regions, and cities for influence and fame has also resulted in state programs that advance national, regional, and local cuisines within a global culinary field. Farrer (2010, 13) has coined the term, culinary soft power, to describe the “acknowledged attractiveness and appeal of food culture that adheres to a nation, region, or locality.” He also finds that Asian governments seem to be particularly keen in gaining and accumulating national culinary soft power (Farrer 2010, 2015; King 2019; Stalker 2018).

Transnational culinary soft power politics also operate at the subnational level. New food types such as Sichuan style spicy dishes and characteristic noodles (knife-shaved noodles is an example) from northern China are emerging to become iconic Chinese cuisines in the West (Wank 2015). Indeed, food is one of the material/tangible items that most effectively help both governments and individuals to develop and gather one’s attractiveness and appeal. People with gastronomic skills are often able to assert their persuasiveness as cultural representatives in front of others. The nearly universal accessibility of culinary culture means that not only nation states but a variety of actors participate actively in culinary politics (Stalker 2018). As we can see in the networks of Japanese chefs and other Asian migrant chefs spreading the culture of sushi in the USA and Europe, these actors may collaborate with each other in loose networks to establish new taste cultures while simultaneously conflicting among themselves about their standards of taste and authenticity (Wank and Farrer 2015; Farrer and Wang in this issue).

The globalization of Asian cuisines has proceeded simultaneously with the rise of a “transnational culinary field” of high-end restaurant cuisines (Farrer 2015a, 2019) in which two cultural processes are underway: deterritorialization and reterritorialization of foodways. Asian dishes have been produced and reproduced in different food spaces in and beyond the original places they were associated with in Asia. Foodstuffs and food actors encounter each other in the global culinary field where people meet and foods fuse, leading to processes that may blur and contest as well as reinforce food-based identities. Different cases in this issue will help readers understand further how Asian food travels and the processes of collaboration and conflict, and boundary breaking and boundary defending, within various culinary contact zones (Farrer 2015b).

Food memories, blurred boundaries, and constructed heritage

Food provides bodily nourishment and generates embodied memories. The colors, flavors, and tastes of foods evoke visceral memories of things, past events, and relationships. Food informs people through these sensuous memories (Sutton 2001; Lupton 1996). Holtzman (2006) distinguishes the five carriers of food memories: sensuous bodily memories, informer of national and ethnic identity, gastronomic memory of diaspora, marker of social transformation and gender relationships, and ritual and cult. A large part of food nostalgia relates to social and cultural identities and politics (Thomas 2004). This experience of memory shared through food is particularly salient among migrants. The sense of missing home is common among migrants who make “home” food in their foreign “home,” often spending great efforts to find ingredients that evoke the memories of home cooking. The taste of food is the taste of home, and ingesting home food is often a process of rebuilding that lost familiarity and filling the lacuna of disconnections (Raman 2011; Connerton 1989; Douglas 1984).

While food evokes and marks culture and identity, food is also often a medium to overcome differences and soften hard emotions and politics. Food itself has the “power” and influence to soften hardliners and move people to the tables. As Watson and Caldwell (2005, 5) recall: “When all fails people will always talk about food”. Thus, food helps both to set and transcend boundaries. However, culinary boundary crossing itself also may be a contentious political issue, one that can result in charges of culinary appropriation or the inappropriate borrowing of other people’s foodways, especially when economic livelihoods are at stake.

Foodways and food culture boundaries are not rigidly fixed. While there is the tendency to align cultural boundaries with national ones, one must also note that many foodways are common to culture areas (Evans 2002) that cross national borders. Studying the origin of the steamed rice paper roll in Vietnam and China, Chan (2011) finds that the two similar snacks are actually the same dish type of the larger yueh culture area that covers Guangdong, part of Guangxi and northern Vietnam in ancient time. Chan stresses that it is wrong to fix cultural boundaries and consider the nation as a neat cultural entity. At the same time, we must “downsize” China in order to understand China’s food cultures.

Food-born identities also are not neatly associated with ethnic and national identities of the actors who engage in them. As the cases of “Japanese sushi” and “Mexican taco” show, a great diversity of individual and corporate actors are engaged in the spread of these iconic “national dishes” while also changing their forms, tastes, and meanings and raising questions of cultural appropriation, not only among Mexicans and Japanese but other food actors who position themselves as taste authorities (Farrer et al. 2019; Pilcher 2017; Sakamoto and Allen 2011). In some contexts, “non-native” actors become deeply invested in the culinary authenticity of “foreign” cuisines and become the chief arbiters of taste, as we can see in the example of Japanese chefs spreading high-end “authentic” Italian cuisine to Japan (Sawaguchi 2015). We also frequently see the use of global (or “foreign”) standards to legitimate or authenticate “local” Asian cuisines as we see in the case of global wine-tasting standards applied to the culture of sake (rice wine) in Japan (Wang 2019) or the use of Michelin stars to validate Chinese restaurant cuisines in the Chinese global city of Shanghai (Farrer 2019).

Food memories are also manufactured or remade through culinary politics, the clearest example of which is the process of constructing culinary heritage. Japanese traditional cuisine – or “washoku” – and Korean “kimjang” – the making and sharing of kimichi were both listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Both are examples of the “heritagization” of food,1 or the construction of culinary heritage as a form of state-led place branding (Cwiertka and Yasuhara 2020). All over Asia, foodways are subject to vigorous state-led culinary politics (Bestor 2014; King 2019; Pham 2013; Zhang 2015). Grassroots actors and local governments also get involved in this form of culinary place branding. Sidney Cheung describes how coalitions of merchants and local officials collaborated in making the “spicy little lobster” (actually a crayfish) a type of local culinary heritage for a small Chinese city, even though the main ingredient in fact was an invasive species from North America and the spicy recipe itself might have had origins from migrants from other Chinese regions (Cheung 2015). We also find many examples in which “foreign” foodways are domesticated and even recognized as “local” cultural heritage, for example milk tea in Hong Kong or grape wine in Yamanashi Prefecture in Japan, both examples of culinary heritagization (see Mak in this issue; Wang in this issue).

Grassroots culinary politics is not only about setting and defending boundaries, but also blurring and blending them. Gastronomic art has come to be defined as a new type of soft skill that deliberately blends foodways and creates new cuisines. Fusion food not only stands at the high end of the global cuisine market; however, it is also present in the most quotidian way in the dining rooms of many families where foreign nationals (such as migrant domestic helpers) are hired to make food, a process that has a very long history in Asia, though one that has not been well documented. This included the spread of some “Western” foodways to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century by Chinese household servants Western expatriates brought over from Shanghai (Cwiertka 2006). In contemporary Asian global cities, adding Southeast Asian flavors to the food experience of middle-class and wealthy families can be a strategy employed by Southeast Asian domestic helpers to exercise a type of “domestic soft power” and to gain the favor of the ethnic Chinese employers. Dishes such as adobo, gado-gado, and nasi kuning have ascended the dining table of Hong Kong families as specialty dishes (see Chan in this issue). Many migrant domestic helpers also smartly combined different Chinese and Southeast Asian food types to forward their identity in Hong Kong’s domestic kitchen spaces. In short, contemporary Asian kitchens – whether in fine dining restaurants or urban homes – all may be culinary contact zones in which a variety of individual actors engage in culinary politics that may have a very personal impact or one that also crosses many borders.

Organization of papers

James Farrer and Chuanfei Wang’s paper on the spread of Japanese restaurants in Europe looks at grassroots culinary politics as an example of simultaneous collaborations and contestations. On the one hand, Japanese chefs and restaurateurs have made use of Asian culinary workers to man their restaurants and create an atmosphere of “Asian ethnic” authenticity. On the other hand, many of these workers have gone onto open Japanese restaurants that spread versions of Japanese cuisine that Japanese nationals characterize as unauthentic forms of culinary appropriation. This process becomes more complicated as second-generation Asian migrant entrepreneurs in cities such as Berlin hire Japanese chefs to work in their restaurants and reintroduce elements of authentic “Japaneseness.” Authenticity is both performed and contested in these restaurant spaces. It is de-ethnicized and re-ethnicized strategically to achieve business and marketing goals. “Soft” culinary politics in this case cannot be dissociated from the “hard” politics of restaurant labor and wages.

Hong Kong-style milk tea has been boasted by both the local people and the Hong Kong government as part of Hong Kong food traditions. A localized food type adapted from the British-style tea with milk, Hong Kong milk tea carries a notion of British colonial legacy. In 2014, it was officially recognized as an intangible cultural heritage. Veronica Mak explores the two-way traffic of cultural governance through the heritagization process of milk tea making. While the top-down approach enshrines the tea-making skills and techniques, and emphasizes the hard-working and difficulty-enduring qualities of Hong Kongers, the younger generations of consumers consider milk tea culture part of the lost prestige and prosperity of a freer Hong Kong. Drinking milk tea, to them, denotes a rebellious and resistant local spirit. The varied interpretations of a rediscovered heritage demonstrate the kind of heritage politics in a restless Hong Kong.

In her paper on the food-sharing and food-making experiences of the migrant domestic helpers in Hong Kong, Yuk Wah Chan examines two food “contact zones.” Many have studied the disadvantaged plights of female domestic workers, but few have researched into their food-making experiences and how their food knowledge and culinary skills would help them gain influence and power. By exploring the migrant workers’ food experiences in both of their leisurely and workplace, Chan finds that food not only helps the female migrants gain solidarity and release work pressures, but also creates new power dynamics in Hong Kong’s kitchen space. The ethnic dish-making process has helped these grassroots workers challenge the structured powers and hierarchy in their workplace.

Chuanfei Wang’s article on wine production in Japan examines how the Japanese government has partially discovered and partially invented a local wine-making “heritage” in one region of Japan by collaborating with private businesses, local religious institutions, and other non-governmental actors. Based on an ethnographic research in Japan’s most important wine-making region, Yamanashi prefecture, Wang finds that the idea of wine as local cultural heritage is the product of an interactive process of cultural governance of grape growing, wine brewing, image making, and tourist site development. Wang argues that such a process has involved a national agenda for the revival of Japan’s rural economy. However, this national agenda was actualized by the concerted efforts of various local level actors in boosting the reinvention of local traditions to authenticate the wine culture in Yamanashi.

James McDougall explores the transformation of the Sichuan hot pot from a regional Chinese food to a national and global cuisine. He finds that the propagation and appropriation of the regional dish has been backed by huge state efforts and achieved by ambitious franchise restaurants, which also produce industrial mala (numbing and spicy) food products. Challenging the taste buds of world food consumers, the Sichuan hot pot is part of the national trajectory that aims to enhance China’s culinary soft power. McDougall argues that despite the long existing phenomenon of the spread of Chinese foodways by migrants, the globalizing hot pot is a different kind of Chinese food globalization in a new era.

All these papers thus engage with the concepts of culinary politics and cultural governance at various levels, from the national and transnational, to the local and domestic. Recurrent themes in these studies are culinary heritage, food identities, and culinary power, and seemingly fixed or inherited cultural categories. The processes they foreground are about the blending, contesting, and reinvention of these categories. The papers emphasize the role of both grassroots and state actors in food governance and globalization. Overall, they make a contribution to understanding Asian culinary politics both within Asia and in the transnational spaces of Asian cuisines abroad.¹

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuk Wah Chan

Yuk Wah Chan is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests cover international migration, crossborder governance, food, and identity.

James Farrer

James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. His research focuses on urban culture in China and Japan, including cuisine, nightlife, sexuality, and expatriate communities. He is author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and coauthor with Andrew Field of Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Notes

1 The term heritagization has been used in tourism and heritage studies for many years with the earliest usage on Google scholar being Hughes (1992).