Cookbook confidential: global appetites, culinary fantasies, and Thai food

ABSTRACT

Thai cookbooks offer a productive lens for examining the inequalities at work in contemporary processes of cultural commodification. In the past, these ethnic cookbooks often imagined their non-Thai readers’ encounters with Thai cuisine in sharply hierarchical terms, crafting neo-colonial fantasies that normalized cosmopolitan appetites for cultural difference. Today, English-language Thai cookbooks remain similarly entangled in a global hierarchy of value that privileges a culturally unmarked “West” over its subordinate and culturally marked “others.” Nevertheless, a number of recent Thai cookbooks reveal a greater awareness of the inequalities involved in eating difference and related processes of cultural commodification. Such cookbooks offer invitations to eat otherness that, if not ultimately transformative, suggest both the potential and the limitations for ethnic cookbook narratives to craft models of more equitable, anticolonial ways of eating.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic cuisine
• hierarchies of value
• cultural commodification
• food discourse
• cookbooks
• nostalgia
• consumption
• desire

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited from the comments and thoughtful questions of several friends and colleagues, most especially Jill Gordon and Julie de Sherbinin. I am also grateful for the insightful suggestions of an anonymous reviewer who pushed me to extend this argument in a productive direction. Any remaining errors or failures of interpretation are mine and mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Black 2010, Highmore 2009 and Witt 2004 for relevant exceptions.

2. I also recognize how this identity entangles me in related global hierarchies of knowledge production and cultural commodification—particularly those that shape the history of my own discipline, anthropology, and that enable me (as a white, Western woman) to write and publish about Thai experiences of marginalization and displacement.

3. Restaurant numbers are compiled by the Thai government’s “Thai Select” program: http://www.thaiselect.com/main.php?filename=about_us (accessed June 12, 2018).

4. This analysis forms part of a larger study of more than thirty English-language Thai cookbooks examining the representation of Thai cuisine from the 1960s to the present.

5. For a discussion of Thai cookbooks written for Thai cooks and in the Thai language see Van Esterik (1992). The present essay does not address these texts as they are not generally accessible to non-Thai consumers.

6. A search on the WorldCat database produces nearly 500 records for Thai cookbooks, including many duplicates as well as texts published in numerous languages: Japanese, Russian, Spanish, among others. This list also includes numerous cookbooks published in Thailand for expatriate or tourist consumption. I have not included any of these latter texts in my analysis because, although relatively easy to acquire inside Thailand, they do not typically enjoy much circulation outside the country.

7. I want to emphasize that cookbook authorship is complex. Even when a text appears to be entirely single-authored, the acknowledgments often reveal debts to testers, photographers, teachers, and other consultants. Others note the separate contributions of recipe authors, descriptive text writers, food stylists, and landscape photographers. The present essay focuses its analysis in large part on cookbook narratives that showcase the personal experiences and stated motivations of named authors. However, my goal is not to analyze these as evidence of biographical realities but instead to explore what these narratives contribute to the cross-cultural encounters that Thai cookbooks imagine for their audiences.

8. I make no claims about the technical or practical value of the cookbooks discussed here. Assessing cookbooks for accuracy of recipes, ease of use, or any other measure of functional utility is beyond the scope of this essay. It also greatly exceeds the limits of my own unremarkable culinary talents.

9. It is the rare Thai cookbook that does not explicitly state its goal (often on the frontispiece or back cover) of “demystifying” the cuisine for the consumer.

10. For example, the recent deaths of Los Angeles food critic, Jonathan Gold, and food media star, Anthony Bourdain, prompted numerous public reflections on how their work had shaped and reframed cosmopolitan appetites. Both built careers that disrupted conventional hierarchies of value, particularly as applied to ethnic eating in the United States, and made visible many of the inequalities associated with ethnic dining and food production around the world (see, for example, Arrellano 2018; Rao 2018).

11. Martin Manalansan (2010) provides a vivid portrait of such multi- and cross-ethnic dining practices among Asian residents in some of New York City’s most diverse immigrant neighborhoods.

12. These three cookbooks are unusual in that they give only limited if any cultural details and name no Thai sources for the culinary expertise presented. Instead these texts rely solely on the ethnonym and attractive food-styling photos to entice their readers to buy (and buy into) their culinary pleasures.

13. The treatment of these indigenous collaborators contrasts sharply with Gabriel’s careful crediting of ten Thai and non-Thai “guest chefs,” each of whom contributed 4–6 recipes from their world-renowned restaurants (in London, Sydney, New York, and Bangkok), recipes that make up a final celebrity section of the cookbook (Gabriel 2014, 475–505).

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Notes on contributors

Mary Beth Mills

Mary Beth Mills is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, USA. She is the author of Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves (Rutgers University Press), and writes about labor, mobility, gender, and commodification, particularly in relation to Thailand and other Asian contexts.