Historical Reflections on Culinary Globalization in East Asia

THE ART ICLES IN THIS SPECIAL issue on East Asian food present a view of how the proponents of traditional culinary practices are encountering the forces of globalization and change today through the examples of Chinese pork banquets, Okinawan clams, the styles of preparation called “Kyoto cuisine” and the hansik of the Korean court, government-sponsored food education (shokuiku) programs in Japan, and culinary documentaries broadcast on state-owned television in China. All of these references to “tradition” are efforts to connect people through food to a locality, whether it is to the ancestral home, a region, or the nation. In these examples, food is the glue used to try to join people to a sense of place, but food is an object, not a subject. Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas (1991: 4) notes, “objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become.” In other words, an object’s meaning is not inherent or stable, a point especially true where food is concerned. Objects need to be physically (and intellectually) processed before they can be consumed as food. One could go so far as to ask: When does something become food? Does food appear when a pig is butchered or a clam is harvested? Or, is the recognition of food something more sensual that occurs between the teeth? An object will never become “food” if we spit it out. From that perspective, it can be said that nothing is intrinsically Korean, Taiwanese, or Chinese in a given food except in the way it is identified as such, and that may have little to do with the degree to which that food was or is actually consumed in a given country. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) noted that rice was an enduring metaphor for Japanese identity despite the fact that a large portion of the population never consumed rice as a main staple. Indeed, from its introduction in the first or second millennia BCE until the seventeenth century CE, rice supplied only around 25 percent of the food needs of the population; nonetheless, starting in the seventh century, rice became the medium for taxation and exchange, and thus was the focus of state records that failed to include other types of grains and gathered foods which were not taxed but comprised a larger portion of the diet (von Verschuer 2016). Even when rice became a more prominent staple in the first half of the twentieth century, the heterogeneous ways of consuming rice, which varied depending on the degree to which it was milled (brown, white, or in between), how it was cooked (boiled, steamed, or both), and what it was mixed with (other grains, tubers, or vegetables), meant that Japanese people experienced rice in their everyday lives as much as a marker of differences in terms of gender, status, wealth, and locality than as a singular grain that provided a common sense of national identity (Rath 2016). It is thus problematic to assume that the signifier of national identity in certain foods outweighs all other meanings. A recent study examined recipes submitted to Japanese websites for “Japanese” pasta dishes defined by their use of miso, soy sauce, cod roe, and other native ingredients. The study concluded that “the recipes testified that ordinary people take part in the creation and maintenance of national identity through their everyday acts” (Ichijo and Ranta 2016: 41). The assumption that uploading a “Japanese” recipe to a website is a way to reaffirm national identity should also promote inquiry into the identity formation of a Japanese who submits a recipe to the same website for Kansas City–style BBQ sauce. If the recipe includes soy sauce, then one could point to the ingredient to say that it expresses “Japaneseness,” even if it is only a tablespoon’s worth—except that a tablespoon of soy sauce is what the recipe for Kansas City–style BBQ sauce on the Food Network website also suggests. My friends in Kansas would never defer to the Food Network to teach them about Kansas City BBQ. They would instead turn to famous local restaurants like Arthur Bryant’s or Gates (or allude to their own “secret” recipes). Both the Food Network and restaurants have a financial stake in claiming the superiority of their BBQ recipes, but the motivation of the Japanese author who uploads a Kansas City BBQ recipe to a Japanese website CULINARY GLOBALIZATION AND HERITAGE POLITICS: CHINA, JAPAN, AND SOUTH KOREA | Eric C. Rath, University of Kansas