EAT, DWELL, ORIENT

Abstract

Through a comparative analysis of Julie and Julia and Ginger and Ganesh, this paper examines a pair of culinary texts, similarly organized, that turn to digital media in order to build a narrative about a year-long experiment with food. Through this juxtaposition of two very similar texts, the essay sets in motion a debate about how Asian Americanist critique can open an important window into understanding this sub-genre of Internet-based writing. Though my analysis remains critical of the latent racial implications of each text, I am not denigrating the value of either text or dismissing the potential that either text has to articulate female subjectivity through the lens of the culinary. Rather, my interest in these particular texts derives from wanting to make sense of how texts by avowed feminists who make use of the Internet in order to construct a form of gendered solidarity that ostensibly crosses lines of age, race and class, might also produce familiar Orientalist orthodoxies that continue to marginalize communities of colour, particularly women of colour, in ways that mark a deep anxiety about the position of the middle-class white feminist in the contemporary racial moment.

Keywords:

• food
• blogging
• social media
• consumption
• orientalism
• dwelling

Notes

1. In an article about the use of the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter among gourmet food trucks in New York City, Alison Caldwell (2011) argues that Twitter has met with similar criticism. In particular, critiques have been levied as to Twitter being an ‘irrelevant waste’ and space for ‘pointless messages’.

2. One can perhaps deem this function of blog to be Derridean partly because the world of food blogging, in the most expansive sense, can allow for a strong counter narrative to emerge. Because blogs are interested in the supplementary narrative often excised from the printed review, it also provides a space for articulating ideas that might seem tangential, but are as important to developing a narrative about food. Instead of privileging the master narrative tone of published food reviews that appear in the pages of the New York Times, for example, the supplement allows for the idea of authority so central to food reviewing to be decentred.

3. Trivedi-Grenier's conclusions are part of a larger study exploring how consumers use food blogs and its effects on print journalism. The research conducted in January 2008, surveyed 1,800 adult food blog readers.

4. The recipe Powell appears to use from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, is for Bifteck Sauté Bercy, a pan broiled steak with shallot and white wine sauce. A variation of Bifteck Sauté au beurre, the poached beef marrow is an optional addition to the dish.

5. In the popular television show Sex and the City, an episode finds lead Carrie Bradshaw turning up her nose at an apartment because it smells too much like Indian food. Similarly a moment from Lauren Weisberger's Devil Wears Prada anchors protagonist Andie Sachs’ decision to move out of her apartment in a culinary register. See Mannur (2010).

6. The SEAC and OSS headquarters where tactically located in Kandy, Sri Lanka, because a fleet base in the Indian Ocean could provide the United States with easy access to the sea in order to launch an attack on Japan. With a high security clearance to file and process classified dispatches for the SEAC concerning US military manoeuvring in the Indian Ocean, Child's relationship to place was very much politically oriented to safeguard the interests of US imperialism. See Fitch (1999).

7. For more on food pornography and its valences within Asian American Studies, see Wong (1993) and Xu (2008).

8. I have argued elsewhere that in the late 1990s a familiarity with the easy multiculturalism of fusion cuisine and a willingness to experiment with different culinary styles marked the emergence of a form of cosmopolitan modernity in which, for example, French ingredients easily intermingle with Indian spices. To be a cosmopolitan urban foodie was to be willing to consume difference in the form of the kinds of dishes one might find on the menu of Tabla, Floyd Cardoz's former restaurant or in the pages of his cookbook, One Spice, Two Spice. To be a cosmopolitan foodie was to jettison the excesses of both heavily butter-laden French sauces and overpowering Indian spices in favour of dishes like rawa-crisped skate with rock shrimp, seared striped bass with lime jaggery gastrique. Arguably such tendency to prefer ‘lightened’ versions of Indian food are also what helped Floyd Cardoz win the title of Top Chef Master during Cycle 3 of the show. His Wild Mushroom Upma Polenta with Kokum & Coconut Milk dish, notably reworking a common breakfast dish, became a quick favourite for incorporating more sophisticated tastes into the basic dish of upma.

9. In its fetishistic desire to master French cooking while also dreaming of an elsewhere that is not Queens, Powell's rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of another avid foodie from the early twentieth century who also sought refuge and comfort amid the texture of and tastes of French cuisine. Literary modernist and American exile in Paris, Gertrude Stein, famously proclaimed about Oakland that there is no there there, and there is something very resonant about the way Julie Powell sees no here in her here – Queens is her Oakland, a space that she cannot imagine being in; and the refuge, not unlike Stein herself is in Paris. And, if there can be no living in Queens, there can be no dwelling either.

10. See Maira (2002) and Prashad (2001).

11. I thank Sue J. Kim for helping me to think about the theoretical nuance of this point.

12. See Williams (2011).

13. One can cite many examples of nineteenth century American and British women's travel narratives as predecessors to Powell's and Power text. The general genre of travel narrative in US nineteenth century lit often features women's (real or imaginary) escape from the restrictions of domesticity (and the illness caused by it) in nature. For example, Kate Chopin's narrative which presents travel to Latin America as an escape from a stifling marriage, Mary Austin's writing about the native Americans of the US southwest and Mary Rowlandson's classic narrative of captivity during colonial America all exemplify this particular trend of fomenting a sense of subjectivity against the subjectivity of the woman of colour. Indeed, the trope of ‘rescue’ and disciplining of racial difference can also be understood to be a way of finding oneself. Within the British literary canon, the writings of Flora Annie Steel and Mary Kingsley are among those that deploy the figure of the woman of colour as a foil against which to articulate white female subjectivity.

14. One might also remark here on the convergence between Dai's project and Monique Truong's Book of Salt. The latter is a fictionalized account of Thin Binh, the Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their Paris home. In its work of reimagining the texture of the Steins’ Parisian life by recovering the voice of their Vietnamese cooks, Truong's work disturbs the seamless whiteness of Stein's Paris or modernist fiction projects, much as Dai's attention to Julia Child disturbs her imagined whiteness as anchored in her penchant for French cuisine.