anthrodish transcripts: shailee koranne
on racial food stereotypes, cultural identity, and david chang's ugly delicious
I started AnthroDish podcast in 2018 at my kitchen table with friends, and friends-of-friends, who were trusting enough to sit with me for conversations about food, identity, and culture from their experiences and research around it.
As a way to celebrate five years of the podcast, I’ve begun to transcribe some of the show’s most loved episodes. This month’s AnthroDish Transcript is the most downloaded episode of all time, with food and culture writer Shailee Koranne. As one of the first guests I’d ever interviewed, I am eternally thankful for her agreeing to be interviewed when I was still just learning how to do this all.
This episode first aired on September 4, 2018. The following is the transcript of the show, only lightly edited for clarity. If you want to listen instead, you can check out the audio link below, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Show Intro:
This week on AnthroDish, I am interviewing freelance writer and journalist,
who writes Midnight Snack on Substack. Based out of Toronto, ON, she writes widely across arts and culture topics and has written for CBC Arts, Chatelaine, VICE, Canadaland, Bitch Media, and more. A round-up of Shailee’s 2022 writing can be found here, and her posts on CBC Arts linked here.I was introduced to Shailee through a mutual friend and read a piece she wrote for Bitch Media called “The Fried Chicken Dilemma: Ugly Delicious wants us to love our foods and ourselves," where she explores the negative role that food-related stereotypes have on the relationships between people of colour and their cultural foods. She has a writing style that expertly intertwines her personal experiences of racism and food stigma with broader themes of racial stereotypes and identity.
In this episode, we discuss how food stereotypes inform and maintain historically racist attitudes and biases, particularly for Asians in North America, as well as the role that food plays in everyday racial micro-aggressions. We also talk about how cultural foods are sterilized and removed from their contexts in order to present them to white and Western diners, and the implications of "trend" culture (i.e. charcoal ice cream, superfoods, and any restaurant with a line up around the corner in Toronto) on cultural foods. Shailee discusses how she learned to unpack and unlearn some of the harmful attitudes through her writing on the topic as well.
Sarah: To start off, can you provide some background on who you are, what you do, and some of the early food influences that you might've had?
Shailee: I'm Shailee. I'm a Toronto based writer and student. Immigration and being part of the diaspora is a really big part of my identity, and also influences kind of everything I do. My family immigrated to Canada from India in 2004, and as a child growing up in India with parents from two pretty different Indian cultures — my dad Marathi and my mom's Gujarati — I ate a lot of spicy food that's known by Marathi folks and a lot of sweet foods that Gujarati people are known for. And I know I'm biased, but Indian food is the best, and I still find a lot of happiness in the food that I ate growing up. Though when I was old enough, or rather I was old enough when we moved to Canada to be able to understand, when people treated me like I was a little bit different.
And unfortunately food was something that set me apart from other kids because, I would bring things to school that they didn't immediately recognize. Everyone from my classmates to my teachers would sometimes make negative comments. When that becomes something that you're hearing as a child, I think it really creates a kind of shame that you keep around your food and by extension, your cultural identity. Thankfully that's something that I've been able to unpack as I've gotten older, but I think it's a big part of how I feel about food, and how I think about it.
Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, that definitely sounds like it would have a very lasting impact, the very process of like normalizing the way that you were treated, or maybe not normalizing it, but kind of internalizing that over time.
You’ve written a lot of really amazing and thoughtful pieces for news outlets like Huffington Post Canada, Bitch Media, The Aerogram and loads more. What brought you to journalism to begin with?
Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words. I started writing at a pretty young age because I always felt like it was a really wonderful outlet for me to work through issues that I was trying to understand myself. And once I got a grasp on them, I used writing to spread awareness about those issues, because it's really important to me that people understand the personal experiences and the nuances of people's lives where they have different upbringings and, identities from them. But more importantly that the people who feel a bit lost find writing that validate them. I cover themes like pop culture criticism, bodies and identities, cultural production, politics, like things in that vein.
When did you first star writing for different major outlets?
My first experience publishing something in a more recognized outlet was probably around first or second year of university. I had been writing for a while before then for stuff like the local newspaper and student newspapers. But around first year of university I sought out blogs that took kind of volunteer postings and things. So one of the first blogs that I wrote for was The Aerogram, which is a South Asian American arts and culture blog. After the Aerogram, I found some success in some of the writing that I did, moved to kind of the blogger platform of Huffington Post. And as it goes, there have been some kind of like long breaks in between me writing. I think I started actually kind of freelancing and things in the past couple of years.
What was the reception like when you first started putting out the like the major themes and issues that you cover? Were these outlets super responsive or receptive to that, or did you find that there was like a little bit of a struggle for you?
Thankfully there was – like I said, it's important to me for people to read really personal writing because I think that it does a good job of like actually explaining the differences that are in between people. And so I was writing things that made me pretty vulnerable because it felt like I was telling secrets, all these things that I really internalized for a lot of years. One of the earliest things that I wrote that I think, or that I published that is still probably my favorite thing that I've ever written was this chronology of microaggressions and different bullying that I experienced growing up in Canada that impacted how I felt about body hair and brownness and my femininity. And the response that I got to that was just overwhelming.
Like, I still have random, young teenage girls finding my Instagram and DM-ing me about that. Which is truly like the best feeling ever because not only do I have that really nice satisfaction of knowing that my writing is impacting people, but it also helps me validate this ongoing thing that I have to unpack and live with. On the other hand, when I wrote things that were less personal and more critical of a general culture itself, that's kind of where the criticism did come in. But it's really just part of it, and for every negative comment there is definitely a positive one. So it's not so bad. <laughs>
Fair, yeah. And I mean, having those young women and young people reaching out to you and sharing that they've had similar experiences, I feel like you could take all the criticism in the world, but that sounds so special to be able to create that community for people.
Totally. It's priceless.
Nice. All right, let's move into the realm of food a little bit. One of your recent articles was this really powerful piece in Bitch Media about the Netflix show, Ugly Delicious. And in it, you're looking at the negative role food related stereotypes have on relationships between people of color and their cultural foods. So what are some of the ways that food might be used to propagate harmful stereotypes, and who or what perpetuates these stereotypes?
I really recommend the show Ugly Delicious to anyone who's interested in food and traveling, because I think it really seeks out to explore food past the taste and presentation of it. It looks into the food's histories and how the people who who created and eat this food feel about it. In particular, it's episodes on Fried Chicken and Fried Rice are really great. The show is created by David Chang, who's known for the Momofuku Restaurants. He speaks with a lot of experts throughout the show about how food can become something that people of color have kind of volatile relationships with. So in Fried Chicken, he has the writer Lolis Eric Elie, and the scholar Psyche Williams-Forson. Together they dissect the fried chicken stereotype and the anti-Black origins of that stereotype.
So, they refer to movies like Birth of a Nation from 1915 in which white actors put on blackface and they're rude and loud and drunk, and one actor is eating fried chicken in that movie. So that stereotype has persisted for now over a hundred years. So much so that Chang mentions in filming the fried chicken episode that he was talking to a Black friend about fried chicken, and his friend told him that he wouldn't be caught eating fried chicken on camera.
I also shared a story in my article about when I was just eight years old, like had just moved to Canada, that my third grade teacher pointed at my lunch and in this like really disgusted voice - which I'm not even sure that she knew that she was doing this - which maybe makes it worse because it's such an internalized thing to look at food you don't recognize and immediately think that it's gross. She really made me feel different for bringing food to school that I had been eating since I was a baby. And like I said earlier, interactions like that punctuated my childhood, but they also are really, I think, a part of a lot of people of color's childhoods, especially when they grow up in diaspora around people who don't eat what they eat. And that really dictates how you feel about your food, and that then becomes something that you internalize about your cultural identity.
So, this is your teacher that had said that to you when you were younger, right?
Mm-hmm.
What strikes me about that is that it's not just the kids within your community. I mean, kids say a lot of awful things anyways, but the fact that you have this authority figure calling you out and making you feel different really sets you up.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's also important to note that these kinds of things, they weren't just about like the food that I would bring to school. Sometimes it would be about my accent or the fact that I didn't understand cultural in-jokes or references to the things that kids here had grown up watching. So food is one part of it, but in general, I think that there are a lot of ways that people are made to feel different. And so when food becomes part of that, it's all the more debilitating because it's not like it's the only thing about you that is being kind of set apart.
Right. And it's kind of like that accumulation of all of that together. And particularly, I mean, food is something that you have to eat every day to survive, so when you're in a situation like that, this is the food of your family and your community and your culture, yeah. It definitely, you can't avoid that.
Totally. And it's really heartbreaking to contend with how that might make the people around you feel. So I think that it's worse when you're younger and you're not really able to understand that, of course, it's fine that you are eating what you're eating. Because like you said, yeah, like kids say a lot of awful things. So my mom never understood like why I didn't eat the food that I brought to school because she wasn't able to really like, understand what that bullying was doing to the relationship that I had with food. Something that we would have a lot of fights about is like me bringing my untouched lunch home every single day or like hiding it from her. I think that she understood this when I got older and like found the language to explain the micro-aggressions to her, but I think it really complicated our relationship in a sense when it came to food as well.
Yeah. Especially as a mother, you just want your kid to be healthy, happy, and eating their lunch every day.
Mm-hmm.
Moving into the idea of fine dining, can you speak to the role that white chefs or that idea of fine dining has in maintaining some of the cultural assumptions and stereotypes that you've brought up today? And do you see a shift starting in the restaurant industry at all with more chefs coming out in shows like Ugly Delicious and sharing these experiences? Are these discussions becoming more mainstream or not so much?
I think that if you look at fine dining in particular, which is sort of this realm of food culture that you have to be a pretty high social class to even access because it's almost always expensive. If you look at the restaurants that are Michelin-starred and you look at the chefs that work at these restaurants, even the restaurants that don't serve like white Western food, sometimes will still have white Western chefs. So I think that on a pretty big level, the realm of food that's seen as this authority on what makes food good is still pretty heavily saturated with a bias towards white Western chefs and white western food, especially French chefs, Italian chefs, and French and Italian food.
Speaking specifically to Ugly Delicious, in the Fried Rice episode, the writer Serena Dai talks about how she came across a restaurant review for Kings County Imperial, which is a Chinese restaurant in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. And the restaurant reviewer, Andrew Steinthal declared that this was the best Chinese food in New York, even though it was a white-owned restaurant that didn't serve traditional Chinese food. And that same reviewer later said that if you want to eat -- so what he liked about this restaurant is that it removed what he thought was an uncomfortable aspect of eating Chinese food, which he basically boiled down to going to "gross neighborhoods" like Flushing or Chinatown, which are areas of New York that have large Asian American populations. And his idea of traditional Chinese restaurants is really tied to a historical bias about Chinese people. That led him giving praise to a white chef for cooking food from an entirely different and diverse culture that actually continues to build upon that food every day.
So I don't think that white chefs shouldn't be allowed to cook food from other cultures, but when they get credit while the people that invented the food become the brunt of such negative stereotype, that's a pretty big problem. In that same episode, Serena Dai and Jennifer Lee discussed the relationship between that historical idea that Chinese people are "dirty or gross," and how that led to a devaluing of Chinese food. And they do a really good job of laying out how when Asians started immigrating to America in the 1800s, the newspapers (even big ones like the New York Times) would run stories that spread the idea that Chinese people eat strange food. In the 1800s the New York Times ran an article asking, like, actually asking in all earnest if Chinese people eat rats. And Jennifer Lee says that idea of people eating strange things was used to drive a wedge between us and them. And that is something that has really persisted because in America, in North America in general, Chinese food is viewed as this cheap inferior cuisine, I guess, until it's cooked by a white chef. The most problematic part of all of that is the incredibly negative impact that it's having on both our cultural perception of Chinese Americans and their perception of their own food and themselves
I mean, what’s astounding to me is the endurance that these early news articles or films or things like that have had and like lasted and really shaped how people think even without acknowledging that they think that way or that that's kind of been the main Western message.
Yeah. I think it's because they've been reproduced so much. It's not necessarily the same stereotype from 1915, Birth of a Nation that's carried over, but that fried chicken stereotype and the character, character, I can't say that word—<laughs>
—Caricature?
Caricature! <Laughs> Yeah, and the caricature of Black Americans that that stereotype creates that has been reproduced like over and over. And I think that now that people are calling it out, there might be some unpacking happening from the community on like, 'Oh, we really shouldn't make those jokes.' But I think it's also tricky because we have this very essential idea of what racism looks like, but it's not always so overt as a rally or a violent crime. Sometimes it's a joke about food. And the latter still affects people.
Yeah. And I think particularly in the political climate these days, it's maybe more so in Toronto and like within the realms of people that we hang out with, but those sorts of conversations are coming forward a lot more. I think because there's so much more violence that these sorts of micro-aggressions are also -- there's more space to talk about those and more space to address the smaller everyday ways, like the seeds that have been planted that are kind of continuing on and shaping these ideas without really recognizing them as problematic.
Mm-hmm.
We kind of talked about this a little bit in terms of looking at foods as being strange or othered, but what are some of the ways that food acts in the reverse as an assimilator for people of color and immigrants? And what are some of the repercussions that this has for a person's sense of self or a sense of identity?
Assimilation takes a lot of forms, and a lot of the time it's just an act of self-preservation. I really don't blame anyone for throwing out their lunch at school like I did, or refusing to bring their cultural foods to the office because no one wants to feel like an outsider, refusing to publicly eat the food of your culture like I did. Or like Chang mentioned, his friend said he would never eat fried chicken on camera. Things like that. Or even people of color who own restaurants, sometimes they tailor their recipes to satisfy white consumers. In the Fried Rice episode, Serena Dai interviews Chen P. Ren, who is a Chinese restaurant owner in Tennessee. Obviously, there's not a lot of Asian Americans in Tennessee and even though Ren is from the Sichuan part of China, he serves American Chinese food to his customers, because he feels like he would lose customers if he sold food that he actually grew up cooking and eating.
I think it's really great that we focus on these kind of difficult stories of people molding their identities, because it allows us all to confront how we internalize these things, but then also how our external biases affect people. Food absolutely is one of the ways that people of color may choose to assimilate, and again, really don't blame them, because there's enough going on without having to deal with, like just rude comments about food and things. But this definitely, I think, can create an inner turmoil because I think it produces a feeling of guilt within people when they shun these parts of themselves, because on every level, I feel like we're always aware that we're doing it.
Yeah. And there's definitely, like, do you find that there's a, a constant disconnect or a sense of disconnect, internally, when you're doing this? Or is it more of a, like reflecting back you kind of start to see it as a disconnect?
I think it becomes easier over time to understand why you're doing this. As a kid there's probably not that much going on in your head, except like an understanding of it makes me feel bad when people make me feel different for eating this food, so I'm not gonna eat the food and they won't make me feel different. As you get older and start to unpack feelings of racial anxiety, I think with some hindsight you can figure out what about your relationship with your food you can change in the present day.
Thinking about food trends, this is something particularly as Torontonians we see a lot in like BlogTO and places like that. So you hear a lot of places like that proclaiming that certain foods are the “Next Big Thing" And this is particularly seen for different cultural foods, particularly in places like Toronto. So does eating food from a different culture always translate into a respect for the people and the community where that food comes from? Or not so much?
I think it really depends on the person and the awareness that they have about the food that they're about to eat. I think in general, trend culture in food has negatively impacted a lot of people and a lot of cultures. There are definitely some studied and like widely understood repercussions to that culture. For example, when white Western countries find a new like super food obsession, you can always trace back to the country or the culture to which that food has always been like really integral, and, and see kind of how it's changing their own consumption of that food. I just think it's always a little bit disingenuous when places will say that certain foods are the next big thing because they're not really the next big thing. They're just new to a certain group.
But when we kind of treat these foods as we've discovered them, we're erasing possibly centuries cultural attachment that some people have to that food. And that's where that respect for the people in the community gets lost. And I think that that's maybe one of the biggest negative implications of that kind of marketing. I think another kind of problematic thing too is that a lot of food trends for kind of like silly novelty foods like, I don't know, rainbow bagels or like black charcoal ice cream or whatever. I feel like people are willing to pay a lot of money for that food, but when it comes to food of other cultures, they're not willing to shell out a lot of money for it.
I've seen a lot of things on Twitter and Facebook and all these other places that are like, 'If you're paying more than, you know, $2 for a taco, then you're getting ripped off.' Or 'If you're paying more than 50 cents for a samosa, then you're getting ripped off.' And I think that we're so used to treating some cultural foods as the cheap option that we don't appreciate when chefs want to take them further and make them creative worth more. And that's another negative aspect of this "Next Big Thing" food culture, is this unwillingness to give the same respect in the form of money to these long-lasting cultural foods as opposed to Instagrammable food.
That's a really good point. Particularly some of the food examples that you brought up you're thinking quite often this is kind of like roti or tacos or things like that kind of seen as street foods and I think even that kind of context sterilizes the history and the ability for chefs to take it and kind of elevate that as well. That's a really good point.
Thank you. Yeah, and there is a lot of that elevation happening. Like there are a lot of chefs taking these things that are seen as generally quick street foods, and turning them into these beautiful creative things, using amazing local ingredients and things like that. But because someone sees a taco and then sees like a $12 price tag and immediately thinks, 'Wait, why would I pay $12 for this if I could pay like a dollar 50 at Taco Bell?' That's another thing that I think people should be aware of. Just because it's cheaper or you can generally find it for cheaper doesn't mean that you shouldn't afford people the chance to be creative and really properly compensate them for the amount of labor they put into the art that is food.
Yeah, exactly. The art and like the time and the history and everything that they're bringing to it, really. Yeah. I think the example, like the difference between people lining up for charcoal ice cream versus a $12 taco is pretty striking.
Yeah.
So this is kind of a big question, but, do you think that there are ways that people can unlearn harmful food stereotypes throughout their lifetime?
I'm pretty optimistic that they can. I think that I didn't used to feel this way until I started unpacking those stereotypes myself. And a lot of when I unlearned kind of my own shame around my own food and unpacked the ideas that I've internalized about other cultural foods as well, like knowing that I could understand that this thing that I thought was true for a long time came from all these bad places, it actually made me a little bit more optimistic. Because in the end I was able to understand that I can be proud of the food that my mom makes and I can be proud of all these things. Ugly Delicious also has like a nice optimistic note. The Fried Rice episode also has the Master of None co-creator, Alan Yang.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, he and David Chang have this nice conversation where they talk about the different ways in which they help people confront the biases they have. Alan Yang says that he does it by putting brown and yellow people on tv, and David Chang says that he does it through food. And I really appreciate that optimism because it's really only through opening ourselves up to the idea that we might hold these stereotypes and then might be able to unlearn them. That's kind of the only way that we can proudly proclaim that we love our cultural foods and ourselves.
Beautiful. Yeah. And I guess one thing that I always wonder about, particularly for people of color, is the burden of having to unpack this for white people. You know what I mean? I wonder about how much of a toll that takes.
Yeah. I think it's kind of a catch because I think that people of color should be the ones who are leading these conversations because they have a unique knowledge of how those things actually impact them. I think that the burden comes when people of color are saying things like 'Please don't make me feel bad about my food because of all the repercussions that it has,' and people don't listen. I think that's where the bigger burden lies, because that leads to having to reassert yourself and you feel really invalidated. I feel like is where the general kind of exhaustion comes from, is feeling like you wanna share how you feel about something, but people might think that it's silly or trivial to get caught up in a stereotype about food.
Right. Like the moment that you have that first negative reaction, then you find you don't necessarily have a space of comfort to have those further discussions.
Mm-hmm.
I mean you talked about this a bit, but have you found that through your researching and all your writing on these issues, has this really changed or influenced your personal relationship with food?
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the best ways, like I said earlier, writing has always been something that primarily has been a way for me to understand these things that I'm kind of mulling over. And in writing and researching, I find all of these stories from all these different people that make me feel really validated in what I'm feeling, and also open up my viewpoint and my worldview to things that I never even considered. And that's definitely changed how I feel about my relationship with my food. I mean, I can honestly say that I never thought that I would be able to unpack all the shame. But as you kind of learn where the shame comes from and find a better place to trace back your negative feelings to, and understand that there's nothing actually essentially wrong with you or your food, that's pretty powerful. Because I almost could like move my feelings around—
—That's pretty intense <laughs>
Yeah! I mean it's a really slow process and it happens over like many years. I started off feeling comfortable eating certain foods in front of my friends because they were Indian foods they could recognize. But I never thought that I could bring my white friends home and have them try the food that my mom made. I was just like so afraid they would not like it. Like in the Fried Rice episode, Alan Yang says to David Chang, I used to wish I was white because of the acceptance of the food, because there was so much to explain with Asian food, and if you hung out with a lot of white people, you tried not to eat Chinese or Korean food around them. And like that feeling of racial anxiety is so familiar to me, but thankfully it's something that I've been able to unlearn like slowly, just for my own betterment.
That's really great. That's wonderful that writing has helped with that as well.
Mm-hmm.
Shailee, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story and your experiences and your research.
Thank you. This was a lot of fun. <laughs>.