Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 86

82 Popular Culture Review supermarket ethnic food, but the problem doesn't have to do with a loss of authenticity. One of the real problems with supermarket ethnic food is that, like "mainstream" fast foods, they encourage a quick-meal mentality. Most families today are pressed for time, and a few microwaved burritos~or for that matter, an ostensibly healthier pre-packaged Oriental Stir Fry mix—might provide some relief to an overburdened day and even allow for more time spent together at the dinner table— but at what cost? The best family meals, I would argue, are not an event but a process: conversations woven among chopping and washing, pauses to taste for seasoning, a swirl of aromas, the comfort and pleasure of "family-iar" tastes. Supermarket ethnic foods contribute to a hurried eating experience that lacks dynamic human interaction, nuance and sensuality. Furthermore, supermarket ethnic foods in Pocatello and elsewhere often compel consumers' desires for the exotic, passionate and nurturing by offering them a "taste effect" rather than a layered, differentiation of tastes. In "Hygiene and Repression," Octavio Paz has described both the bland uniformity and the absence of erotic pleasure in U.S. eating-except for what he calls the "pregenital" (75) satisfaction of such indulgences as ice cream. Americans are concerned not with sensuality, but with "health, not correspondence between savors, but the satisfaction of a need" (76). Rather than truly encouraging diversity — the pleasures of difference — "nutritional," "low-fat" supermarket ethnic food perpetuates a narrow notion of what it means to eat well. Idaho State University Notes DanShiffman 1. Drawing on a study of Chinese restaurants in Athens, Georgia, Shun Lu and Gaiy Allen Fine have described how those restaurants with largely white, middle class patrons alter their dishes, such as Mongolian Beef and Chow Mein, to meet more mild mainstream American tastes. Lu and Fine's analysis could easily describe restaurants in Pocatello. 2. Herbert Cans explains that since many white ethnic Americans are fully integrated into the mainstream, ethnic identity amounts to "feeling ethnic" rather than carrying on cultural traditions. Since concrete ethnic connections are fading over time, ethnic Americans maintain "symbolic" attachments to immigrant roots, such as attending an ethnic festival or occasionally serving an Old World dish at a holiday meal.