Food History

Today I feel like exploring the difference between exotic food and the everyday. As you might guess, it’s pretty subjective and very strongly culturally/regionally/family based. When I teach about this I normally tell the story of the rabbi who banned pineapples in his congregation, because they were so unfamiliar he couldn’t place them on the food spectrum. Today I want to try a slightly different approach. I want to explore (briefly) four blogs and see how what they say in their everyday posts illuminates the subject.

Let start with Victoria Garson, who gives an overview of the food possibilities for mothers’ day in San Diego, CA. It’s a good place to start because the post was about a foodway that screams ‘exotic’ at me. Why are restaurant brunches exotic? My mother won’t even eat breakfast in bed on mothers’ day - a phonecall and a cup of tea is all she wants. Whether we go to restaurants for big events is very much driven by family habits.

Let’s move from that to the more familiar. Mark Woodgate at All About Fatherhood gives a list of things not to do for Mother’s Day. The things he suggests as ‘ought to be done’ are closer to home than the brunch out. They’re familiar for more people simply because when he suggests a picnic we can replace the word ‘picnic’ with the stuff we know and love for picnics. Our own customs back up his words and so his suggestions are homey and comfortable. My favourite picnic might be exotic to someone else (chicken sofrito, pitta bread, chummous and tabouli, for instance, served in a Thai layered container that keeps each food separate) but the word ‘picnic’ makes us think of the familiar and hides family and cultural and regional differences to an extent. People who don’t take picnics wouldn’t be deceived into familiarity, of course.

Bobbi Chukran, guest writer at FictionScribe, points out that for writers the details are what counts ( say this regularly on my other blog - every now and again I rant about ‘telling details’ and their use in world building - this is why I chose Bobbi’s post). This is just as true for foodways as for fiction - it’s the detail that creates the sense of the familiar and help us identify with a food. The exotic is partly exotic because we don’t have that familiarity and link to the details. If you sample a dish and can say exactly where the cook has gone wrong, you know the dish is part of your foodways and is no longer exotic.

It all comes down to familiar vs unfamiliar. When global warming was something none of us were familiar with (see Environmental Talk for more on global warming) we treated it as something exotic. You know, not part of our lives. As we learn more about it and how it touches us everyday, it becomes more familiar. One day taking measures to cut down on global warming will be a standard part of more people’s lives, just as one day you might eat chicken sofrito on a picnic. Or maybe not.

The trick is that there is a continuum. At one end is the impossibly exotic. Food so strange it’s something we think aliens eat. At the other end is the stuff of everyday life, so familiar we don’t think twice about it.