Maybe We Don't Talk About Food Enough
Gratitude, Food Provenance and Industrialization
Food is often a place of comfort. I’m sure there are plenty of folks reading this who have binged a pint of Ben & Jerry’s or had a pecorino-forward bowl of carbonara in the last couple days.
My culinary comfort of choice this week?
Watching LA chef Evan Funke wielding a mattarello while making handmade pasta.
If you haven’t tuned in to Netflix’s new Chef’s Table: Noodles, Funke is the star of episode one. And - as he notes - making handmade pasta is hard work. It’s a lot of standing, repetitive movement and painstaking precision. I found watching and hearing the rolling of the pasta dough and precise folds, flips and cuts like watching waves hitting a beach. Ahh…
Funke is a master of what he does. And what he makes (in its most basic, accessible ‘dry’ form) is quite universal. 96% of U.S. households consume pasta and 86% eat pasta once a week. In a pretty divided country at the moment, pasta might be the meal most people agree on.
At this point, you might be rolling your eyes - not another post about sitting down to a meal to bring us together.
It’s a pretty well worn path in the food world from Anthony Bourdain - “You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.” - to Wendell Berry - “A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.”
If you haven’t seen one of these quotes in the form of a meme this week, your algorithm has let you down or spared you the frustration, depending on your perspective.
So no, I don’t want to go down that path, but I do want to focus on the last word of the quote from Berry - ‘gratitude’.
What struck me about Funke’s episode is that it is only kind of about Funke. It’s mainly about all of the amazing women in Italy who taught him how to make pasta (he apparently can now make 155 shapes in total).
The respect and gratitude he has for these woman is clear, going as far as to share the ‘provenance’ of each pasta shape - the region of Italy from which it hails and who taught him how to make it - on his menu when he opened Funke in Beverley Hills.
The opposite of that respect and gratitude is a video clip making the rounds this week from a television show from chef and restauranteur Eddie Huang.
In 2017, Huang sat down for a meal with white supremacist Jared Taylor in his ‘Huang’s World’ episode in Washington D.C. around Trump’s first inauguration. To save you the frustration of watching the clip, Taylor says he voted for Trump in 2016 because he would “would slow the dispossession of whites in the United States.”
While infuriating, the kicker is that Taylor says this while clearly enjoying a meal at Peking Gourmet Inn - a Chinese restaurant opened in 1978 by Eddie Tsui, a native of Shandong, China. Peking Gourmet Inn was also a favorite of American political dynasty the Bush family.
It highlights a frustrating reality of the food world in the United States in particular - many Americans want what immigrants bring to our meal, but not the immigrants themselves.
The challenge is people like Taylor have been aided in their ability to feign ignorance and forgo gratitude by the industrialization of our food system.
As Michael Pollan has said, “Industrial food is food for which you need an investigative journalist to tell you where it came from.”
Immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented, have “held the restaurant industry together” while mostly missing out on the notoriety and profit of restauranteurs and celebrity chefs.
Going further behind the scenes, 50% of meat packers are immigrants. 75% of farm workers are immigrants. And as Tina Vasquez writes, immigrant farm workers have been rendered mostly invisible.
However, my Instagram Explore tab - and probably yours - is filled with celebrity chefs and food influencers, recipe videos, and people stuffing their faces with culinary delights from all over the world available right in their own American backyard. One recent survey found that cooking is the most popular form of influencer content.
We clearly talk about food a lot. Yet, 41% of people rarely or never seek information about where their food was grown or how it was produced. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A survey in 2017 by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy found that:
16 million people think chocolate milk comes from brown cows
40% of California 4th-graders (5th and 6th graders, too) didn't know that hamburger comes from cows
The industrialization of our food system has brought about incredible efficiencies. It has saved us time and money while giving us access to ingredients regardless of seasons and location. But that industrialization has also carved a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between us and the people whose labor fills our refrigerators and supplies our favorite restaurants.
While food illiteracy by an individual can be forgiven thanks to the inequality of food access and education, the ultimate sin of the separation caused by industrialized food might be the disappearance of respect and gratitude.
The more layers that industrialization has added between the farm and your plate, the harder it is to have any gratitude for the people who made that happen. So no, I’m not asking you to sit down for a meal with someone you don’t see eye to eye with right now. I’m asking you to show a little gratitude and talk about the immigrants and migrant workers who got that meal to your plate at a time when their presence is threatened.