"Our palate has undergone something of a renaissance over the past century, evolving to incorporate the cuisines of the immigrants who have made the United States their home. But we have incorporated these foods on our terms — not on theirs. We want "ethnic food" to be authentic, but we are almost never willing to pay for it."
"Despite complex ingredients and labor-intensive cooking methods that rival or even eclipse those associated with some of the most celebrated cuisines — think French, Spanish and Italian — we want our Indian food fast, and we want it cheap."
"The word ethnic has this complex history of both trying to reflect changing relationships and understandings of culture and trying to avoid more taboo terms. "
"It's the fact that we are not willing to pay the same price to get the same level of quality. And frankly, that's why you get so much crappy foreign food in the United States. There is so much bad Indian food here. Here in the United States, when you buy "ethnic food," you're essentially buying it from people who learn to cook it on the fly, mostly men, who have often never cooked back home. What ends up happening is they hide technical deficiencies behind salt, butter, and fat. That's the food we have gotten used to."
'A really good example is the fact that most Japanese restaurants in the United States are run by Chinese, most inexpensive ones anyway. At expensive Japanese restaurants, this isn't the case — those employ skilled Japanese chefs — but those are few and far between. If you want to lure a skilled Japanese chef to a place like New York City, you have to pry them from a high-wage market in Japan. "
" If you're going to pay $8.99 for sushi, which is the bottom of the market, there's no way you're going to get a Japanese chef to do it. That price cannot pay the opportunity costs for this chef to leave Japan. So instead we get poor immigrants, and not ones from Japan. Often that means a Chinese chef, since to most Americans they look similar."
How Americans pretend to love ‘ethnic food’ - Roberto A. Ferdman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/22/the-great-ethnic-food-lie/
--------------
I found a study that sort of relates to what you found above:
Ethnic dining: Need to belong, need to be unique, and menu offering
by Stephanie Qing Liua, Anna S. Mattila
"findings
suggest that mainstream American customers respond negatively
when an authentic menu is not offered to them. Furthermore,
our findings indicate that customers’ decreased satisfaction manifests
through two fundamental psychological needs of human
beings – the need to belong and the need to be unique. The ethnic
composition of other customers plays an important role in influencing
customers’ psychological responses to the unavailability
of an authentic menu. Specifically, the presence of Asian customers
activates the focal Caucasian customer’s situational need
for belongingness, while being surrounded by fellow Caucasian customers
induces a situational need for uniqueness. These heightened
needs consequently dampen mainstream customers’ satisfaction
with their dining experience."-The study was based on offering two menus (one inauthentic, one authentic). They offered the authentic menus to the asian people and the inauthentic to westerners.
-When the westerners were surrounded by asian people in an asian restuarant the westerners felt that they needed to belong and wanted to order authentic foods like the asian people.
found from the massey library:
Liu, S. Q., & Mattila, A. S. (2015). Ethnic dining: Need to belong, need to be unique, and menu offering. International Journal Of Hospitality Management, 491-7. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2015.04.010
------------ Below a video on how a chief learnt Japanese values from food in Japan:
How to
focus on the benefits from what Japan’s society maintain. Things such as longevity and
reduction in a lot of problems that western countries tend to have.
- Applying techniques under the radar. Westerner view of being too used to eating ‘dead food’.
No comments:
Post a Comment