Old tastes, old stories: Gourmet magazine’s representations of Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War

Abstract

This article examines how Gourmet, the nation’s most influential food magazine, covered Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. Between its first article in 1969 and its last issue in 2009, Gourmet published 56 pieces on the region’s nine countries over 40 years. The tone and scope of this coverage changed very little, demonstrating how Gourmet failed to evolve in its stated purpose of using food as a lens for the thoughtful inquiry and exploration of people and culture. This article examines three important characteristics of Gourmet’s Southeast Asian coverage. First, it focused on a romanticized history of French, Dutch, British, and American empires that ignored the region’s modern development, particularly its booming economies and detestable dictatorships. Second, it embraced tourism as a means for these dictatorships to rebrand themselves by removing the stench of questionable human rights and environmental records. Third, it homogenized the entire region into a collection of a few hotels and resorts that left little voice or agency for Southeast Asian people. Gourmet thus made Southeast Asia into a safe, anodyne, and ultimately bland space that relied on representations of historical and contemporary selectivity, the destructive amnesia of colonial hagiography, complicity with dictators to rebrand through state-funded tourism, and the danger of transforming diverse regions and peoples into interchangeable parts of a repetitive trope. Rather than use food as a lens for a better engagement with society and culture, Gourmet perpetuated the racial hierarchies and exploitative relationships of the past through the seemingly innocuous genre of contemporary food writing.

Keywords:

• Southeast Asia
• food writing
• Gourmet Magazine
• media
• travel

Acknowledgments

Many kind and generous mentors and colleagues helped guide this article for over a decade. Ronald G. Walters, Peter Martland, and Owen Dudley Edwards supported the piece when I was still a former kitchen grunt struggling to find my voice in graduate school. Yasmine Ramadan, Patricia Melzer, and Willeke Sandler gently but surely encouraged a more focused analysis. Jeffrey A. Johnson, Steven Carl Smith, D. Colin Jaundrill, and John Holland reminded me to let the voices speak for themselves. Carole Counihan and the anonymous reviewers at Food and Foodways challenged me to write a piece that asked and answered big questions. And Erica Holland reminded me many, many times that the story mattered. All omissions and oversights are mine and mine alone.

Notes

1 This study examines the 56 articles published between 1969 and 2009 in the pages of Gourmet. Using the indexed collection of Gourmet’s complete run at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, I examined each of these pieces. A note on years: 1969 was the year that the first long piece on Southeast Asia appeared—a piece on Indonesia; and 2009 was the year the magazine ceased publication. Ranging from feature-length articles on cities and resorts to short pieces that simply listed recipes from Southeast Asia, these articles covered the people, places, and foods of Southeast Asia. As a qualitative analysis, this piece examined narrative tropes that emerged as distinct trends over the 40 years of Gourmet’s coverage of the region.

2 By 2018, Boracay was so overrun with tourists that the Philippine government shut it down for six months to repair environmental damage and untreated effluence from a crumbling infrastructure that serviced tourists while ignoring the island’s local residents. See “Duterte: ‘I Will Close Boracay.’” Accessed August 10, 2018. https://www.rappler.com/nation/195703-duterte-warning-close-boracay.