Authenticity, Nostalgia, and Cultural Commodification in Contemporary Diasporic Foodways
Mallika Khanna
A misconception that haunts much writing on race and food is that food production and distribution are somehow siloed away from race, and that it is only in the stages of preparation, access and consumption that racialization rears its head. Over the last decade or so however, scholars like Ashante Reese (2019) and Hannah Garth (2020) have astutely demonstrated how food production and distribution practices are tied to racialized histories, positionalities and desires. I examine these production and distribution practices by investigating the deployment of strategic nostalgia through interviews with the owners of diasporic food brands in the US. The brand owners I interview here connect foods from their cultures with longer histories of struggle against colonial land expropriation, deliberately declining lucrative white-labeling opportunities with large retailers and opting to source ingredients from sites to which they are indigenous. Their “critical nostalgia,” (Mannur, 2007) I contend, is crucial to re-envisioning the potentials of contemporary BIPOC diasporic foodways.
The notion of critical nostalgia pushes back against historically stifling frameworks of authenticity and tradition that peddle in stultified tropes about immigrant and diasporic food and food creators. Food writer Sejal Sukhadwala’s (2021) incisive critique of the trope of the “mythic grandmother” in immigrant food writing illuminates the specific pressures put on foods made by BIPOC to appear “authentic” through the invention of ancestral narratives even where there are none easily available. Sukhadwala describes an encounter with an editor who jokingly suggested that she “invent a grandmother” to give her recipes the veneer of tradition. This expectation centers a mythic, lost past that must constantly be soothed and mourned through diasporic foods.
What would change if we were to understand nostalgia as not “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) at all? The diasporic brand owners I speak to here use critical nostalgia to disrupt conventional practices within the food industry and broader food system through a kind of producer activism. Unveiling the complex negotiations the diasporic small business owners I spoke to perform, I show how they use the notion of authenticity to push back against the limitations of a static, corporatized food system and to challenge calcified power structures across the gamut of food production, distribution and consumption practice. By changing sourcing practices, educating consumers about ingredients, histories and land, and advocating for necessary political change, these producers remind consumers that food comes from specific places with specific histories and that these histories, far from being stuck in the past, always carry with them the potential for different food futures.
The desire to disrupt a status quo that pigeonholes and homogenizes “ethnic foods” was apparent in my interviews with Nona Lim, founder of Asian street food brand Nona Lim foods, and Chitra Agarwal, founder of Indian-American pantry staple brand Brooklyn Delhi. Agarwal shared with me her frustrations over the similarities between a Roasted Garlic Achaar (pickle) made and released by her company Brooklyn Delhi and the garlic Achaar sauce subsequently sold by the much bigger grocery chain Trader Joe’s. Agarwal found it particularly frustrating that the similarity in packaging and flavors made people think that her brand was simply white labeling for Trader Joes: “We spent years educating the consumer base about something that people had never heard of here only to be ripped off. It does make you question the ethics of marketing and selling foods from our cultures.” (C. Agarwal, April 27, 2022)
Nona Lim had an uncannily similar experience with her Pho:
Years ago, I launched a packaged Pho [in the US], and now more mainstream brands have taken the flavor, created not very tasty versions of it and then profited way more from it because they have a lot more distribution.
If you launch a product that’s high quality, there will be copycats. Is it right? Should they have done it? No. Can they do it? Yeah, they can and they are. It happens a lot… That’s one of the big reasons it is important to respect origins and roots and acknowledge them, acknowledge where the food has come from and how it has inspired us and given to us. [my emphases] (N. Lim, April 19, 2022)
Battles over ownership are a crucial part of the cultural landscape in which small diasporic food businesses work. Here, Agarwal and Lim center a specific kind of authenticity that prioritizes the contemporary ethics of ownership and appropriation over recourse to the “truth” of tradition. Authenticity for them is tied to origins and ancestry, and is a way to push back against commodification and cooptation. They do not claim that identity confers the “right” to certain foods, but rather that when these foods are made with care for the traditions they emerge from, they engage with context, histories and questions of identity that push back against the Trader Joe’s [insert ethnicity here] model.
Prioritizing cultural ties to the originary source of an ingredient impacts not just marketing and distribution, but also production and sourcing practices. When asked about why he chose to sell Fonio, a crop indigenous to West Africa and Senegal (where he is from), Chef Pierre Thiam, owner and founder of Yolele foods, offered a beautiful reflection on origins, movement and diasporic foods:
Food is something that travels. We have it with the middle passage. Sometimes it is forced travel. It reinvents itself wherever it goes. If there’s one thing we tend to take with us as human beings when we move from one place to another, it is our food. You know, we come here and we look for it because that’s what we grew up eating and we miss it and then when you don’t find it, you recreate it. I wanted to share the resilience of this crop with others. (P. Thiam, Personal Communication, April 4, 2022)
Thiam then gestured to the logo on his website:
So you see there’s this map of Africa, and you have all these countries that are described in the segmented parts. Different colors are the part where we source our fonio. But if you see these countries, they are written like this in so many different ways without any borders, immigration. These borders, first of all, have been imposed by the colonizers and they’re not real. They never existed until colonizers got here. I believe in open borders. You build a wall, stop Mexicans from coming in. Well first of all, YOU stole part of that land. Food should be accessible to and credited to the people that grow it. (P. Thiam, April 4, 2022)
As Thiam highlights here, ancestral memory plays a key role in the material practices of Yolele foods. Sourcing from Senegal is crucial to Thiam because he sees it as righting a historical wrong: “food should be credited to the people who grow it.” The brand advocates for immigration reform on social media, using imaginaries of pre-colonial history as templates for a world without borders and different (or no) immigration systems.
I asked Danny Dubbaneh, co-owner of the Palestinian-American food brand Z&Z, about a video on the brand’s Instagram channel titled “Arab Grandmas try Trader Joe’s Za’atar.” The brand posted the video in response to Trader Joe’s marketing its version of the Palestinian spice mix Za’atar, which contains none of the actual Za’atar plant in it. The video shows three Arab women (presumably grandmothers, based on the title) tasting the Trader Joe’s spice mix and reacting to it:
Danny: There were some visceral reactions and I think that was very relatable to a lot of people in the States and beyond the States. [] we thought it was super important for people to understand that just because someone calls something Za’atar that doesn't mean that it’s actually it. And it could just be a form of, kind of capitalizing on the market. (D. Dubbaneh, April 28, 2022)
In Danny’s telling, the figure of the grandmother acts as both carrier and determiner of authenticity. While there is a troubling gendered dimension to the assumption that the “grandmother” is the most tied to tradition and thus the most intrinsically “authentic,” the women’s “visceral” pushback against Trader Joe’s Za’atar in the video nonetheless acts as an embodied reification of the importance of origin and terroir in diasporic food. One of Z&Z’s current practices is to use Za’atar sourced directly from Palestine. This comes with certain extra costs for shipping, as well as marketing. The occupation leads to further logistical difficulties, for example, additional fees and delays. Yet, for the Dubbanehs this is an ethical choice, a choice that resonates with their notions of authenticity. Nostalgia for the “authentic” taste of Za’atar works to reaffirm their relationship to the land in Jenin from which they source the spice. The material practices emerging from this relationship take on particular value and intensity in moments of heightened surveillance of Palestinian identity such as the one we have been in post October 7th 2023.
Both Pierre and Danny thus use ancestral knowledge and symbolism as productive tools for both imagining and developing different practices within the food system. Unwilling to resign themselves to understanding authenticity as a purely stultifying or limiting concept, they play with the term in creative ways to reorient it toward situated ethical practices. Authenticity here does rhetorical work to provide an ethical compass for company practices.
While all the owners I spoke to sourced at least some of their ingredients from outside the US, not all of them were invested in this to the same extent, or in the same way. As I highlight above, Lim and Agarwal see their fight as one that resists the mass corporatization of ethnic foods. For the Dubbanehs and Thiam, sourcing from the land of Palestine and West Africa respectively constitutes a form of reparations, a way to disrupt colonial legacies in the food system, as well as an indicator of terroir and quality. This is an ethically-laden choice that raises costs, makes supply chains even more uncertain and requires consumer education to effectively execute. It is not the most immediately profitable choice. It is instead a choice that sustains these producers and allows them to grow at their own pace, setting their own benchmarks.
While the two models above do not neatly overlap, taken together they highlight a collective desire within diasporic food spaces for a more nuanced understanding of authenticity in diasporic foodways. Although these brands’ capacity for radical transformation may be questionable, tied as they are to the practices and diktats of both the contemporary food system and the neoliberal entrepreneurial marketplace, they push us to consider the possibilities embedded within small business models in a rigorous and thoughtful way. Our work, as scholars, advocates, and practitioners invested in the food system is to decenter the romanticized imaginary of diasporic foodways and replace it with something that takes seriously the diverse and multifaceted goals of producers, consumers and creators of diasporic foods.
Works cited
Garth, H. (2020). Food in Cuba: The pursuit of a decent meal. Stanford University Press.
Mannur, A. (2007). Culinary nostalgia: Authenticity, nationalism, and Diaspora. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 32(4), 11–31. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/32.4.11
Reese, A. M. (2019). Black Food geographies: Race, self-reliance, and Food Access Washington, D.C. University of North Carolina Press.
Sukhadwala, S. (2021). Why do Indian recipes always have to come from some mythic grandmother? | Sejal Sukhadwala. The Guardian. Retrieved May 2, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/indian-recipes-mythic-grandmother-burden-tradition
Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15