Food Bloggers Lack Nuance Towards Cuisines of Asia

Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words - Mei-San Janey Wong

Can all you white recipe developers and food bloggers stop using ‘Asian’ as an adjective for your dishes? This usage is rampant and problematic. It is an erasure and oversimplification of a vastly diverse group of cuisines. All over Instagram and food blogs, “Asian chicken salads,” “Asian noodle bowls”—and even worse—the “Buddha bowl” are now ubiquitous. Nothing grinds my gears quite like the thought of a Buddha bowl. Imagine a Jesus Christ bowl becoming the next food trend. 

There is a dish in the Chinese and Buddhist food canon called Buddha’s Delight or luóhàn zhāi. Although it can be found on Chinese restaurant menus the world over, Buddha’s Delight is traditionally eaten on the first day of the Lunar New Year. The dish typically consists of ten main ingredients, with an unabridged version containing 18 ingredients. Numerology is an important aspect of Chinese culture. This dish omits any sort of allium, as they are taboo foods in Buddhist belief. Ingredients may vary from recipe to recipe, but all the vegetables included symbolize luck and success. This intentionality is a far cry from the often haphazard fridge forage that results in a Buddha bowl. 

It’s not that I don’t want folks to enjoy, celebrate, and get creative with our food, it’s that there’s something intrinsically wrong with slapping the ‘Asian’ label on something just because it was marinated in soy sauce, seasoned with ginger and sesame seeds, or slathered in peanut sauce. Whenever I see something to this effect it makes me want to scream, “You don’t deserve to enjoy our food or visit our countries!” Would you make some small meatballs with brown gravy and call them European meatballs?? Of course not, those are obviously Swedish meatballs. When this same simple respect and nuance isn’t afforded to food from Asia, it’s not only hurtful, it’s harmful. 

For those unfamiliar with the world of food blogging, high profile recipe developers create free content that is accessible to anyone, but generate income via brand partnerships and ad revenue. I’m sure most of the bloggers in question don’t even realize that what they’re doing is problematic, which is why I feel compelled to speak on it. This is a seemingly innocuous issue, but it is part of a broader spectrum of racism that sees those with white privilege benefitting from the proud, rich traditions of people of color. I think white people either haven’t grasped or often forget that individual racism exists on a continuum. Microaggressions that are seemingly innocuous lead to macroaggressions. Individual racism exists in a loop with systemic racism. 

I call these issues out with great respect for food bloggers—the majority of which are female. Recipe development is no cakewalk. It is largely an under-appreciated and thankless job for which many hats are worn; chef, food scientist, photographer, social media manager, copywriter, etc. Everyone’s a critic, followers can be super demanding and downright rude, often not taking into account the intensive labor bloggers undertake to produce their service. 

But if someone is taking all the time and energy to produce something, I propose that they also take the extra step to do a little background research on what they’re trying to emulate and credit the cuisine/culture accordingly. If you can make the effort to figure out what bagna cauda, bottarga, and tonnato are, I daresay you can also learn that your “Asian inspired meatballs” are in fact an approximation of Vietnamese xiu mai.      

There are an innumerable amount of cuisines within the 48 (by the UN’s count) countries in Asia, and they are vastly different. Just think of the regional cuisines we have in the United States. For someone to be so reductive in regards to “Asian food” and to then profit off of the “recipe development” is cultural appropriation. And this appropriation is quite simply an act of violence. It is the seizure of our cultural inheritance. It is the pushing aside of BIPOC narratives and the re-centering of whiteness. In most cases food bloggers add nothing to the existing recipe. In others, our treasured dishes are diluted—sometimes beyond recognition—to make them palatable to white audiences. This causes pain that’s hard to measure.

I hold people accountable as an act of care. If the folx that want to enjoy and uplift ethnic foods aren’t invested enough to acknowledge the problematic part they can play in tinkering with and profiting off of dishes that aren’t theirs to inherit, I have little hope that these same people have truly grasped what it means to be anti-racist. Anti-racism requires an ongoing deep introspection and reflection on how your actions are multi-layered and tricky at best, and dismissive and damaging at worst.