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