about an Anti-Colonial Food Writing
In the autumn of 2014, I spent a month in Turkey. Travelling with a Turkish expat friend, we started in Istanbul, journeyed south to Göreme in the central province of Nevs¸ehir, then west to the coast of the Aegean to visit her family home, cat, and quince trees in a tiny town called Çes¸mealti. In the months, now years, that followed, I found it very difficult to begin to write about the trip. As one should imagine, it was not for the lack of material—my entire time there was one of almost uninterrupted culinary richness, from tart, thick-skinned yogourt to sweating glass chambers of steamed hamburgers on Taksim Square, incredible lamb ca˘g kebabı to incredibly tripey kokoreç off the street, ayran every day, tea every hour, spicy pickled turnip juice, lamb omelette in Urla, eating stuffed mussels on the street corner and oranges from Elif’s parents’ backyard one hundred feet from the saltiest sea that has ever had me, mint and freshly hulled pinto beans, olives, mint, olives, mint, more yogourt, cucumbers, wine made from grapes with names so laden with umlauts that I could not bear the mortification of attempting and failing to pronounce them. Listening to Bolt Thrower and Goat Horn in a bathroom-sized metal bar inBeyog˘lu. Watching Bergman on a laptop, drunk in a cave hotel in Cappadocia. Seeking, but being too ill-prepared to know where to look for, some trace of James Baldwin’s life in Istanbul four decades ago.
But I don’t I know how to tell these stories—or how to tell them responsibly—to relate the experiences without succumbing to the sly, earnest, dishonourable exoticism of so much cultural tourism. There is, at best, a perverse self-consciousness at work in the minds of the usually white, usually anti-touristic cultural tourists as they move through an unfamiliar landscape attempting, as unobtrusively as possible, to find meals defined to a greater or lesser extent by their authenticity (even, as discussed earlier, their highly contingent, local, and multiple authenticity), experience them, and subsequently celebrate them (also as respectfully as possible) in their book/blog/travelogue of whatever persuasion. How does one convey the excitement of the unfamiliar respectfully and without lapsing into caricature when one has only the limited palette of the outsider with which to render it? Or conversely, how does one avoid the eating-of-the-other, the appropriation into which the insider or quasi-expert can so unintentionally slide? It is sometimes difficult to know how to dig oneself out of this quagmire of still quite narcissistic, if well-meaning, ethical/aesthetic paralysis.
It calls to mind, in a roundabout way, the furor generated a few years back by Adam Gollner’s unfortunately-titled Globe and Mail article, “Why You Should Eat in Parc Ex, Montreal’s Ungentrified Food Paradise,”1 and the inevitable response published only days later in Maisonneuve magazine, which called Gollner out for pulling a “cultural gentrifier’s hat trick” by “blending Orientalist generalizations, frontier-colonialist mentality and ironic detachment in order to obfuscate the structural violence of daily life in the neighbourhood.”2 The question of gentrification is slightly to the side of my main concern here, albeit an extremely important and salient one for food writing that is rarely addressed with sufficient nuance.3 What struck me was more a matter of style and, I suppose, the politics thereof. Gollner has written ably and with inspiration and rigour about everything from Hungarian wine to the Arab underpinnings of Sicilian cuisine, fruit-smuggling to the quest for literal immortality.4 “Why You Should Eat in Park Ex” served as a reminder of how easy it is for even a very accomplished writer to slip into a discourse of exoticization when writing about the food of “other” cultures—at least when one is attempting to write with some literary sensibility that extends beyond dry reportage.
Notions of wildness, of pre- or contra-modernity, noble suffering, or uninhibited celebration, even or especially of authenticity, all have their place in the elaborate discursive architectures of colonialism and Orientalism, and in their contemporary iterations. One may think of these as literary technologies—narrative, discursive technologies—for fixing Otherness in a fictional alterity (or fixing alterity as a fictional Otherness?) for our consumption. Now, we may debate the “real” impact of such symbolic violence, and the extent to which Western cultural analysis itself reproduces the silencing and dispossession of the “other” in whose defence it presumes to speak when it presents Orientalism as a totalizing discourse, but for the moment I want to keep things a little more reined in.
It suffices as a reminder of how accessible and salient are such colonial tropes for (especially white) authors writing within a Western literary tradition—perhaps all the more so for food writing, which is always balanced precariously between fluff, formal blandness, and something that occasionally pretends to literary merit, and so is especially susceptible to hackneyed sentiment and cliché, yet all the while dealing with something quite intimate and fundamental to survival and pleasure both (as much as I like to use food mostly as a vehicle for jokes and self-loathing). The challenge, then, is how not to fall into this trap when such tropes are so ready to hand for the making sense, and indeed the structuring, of our encounters with difference?
There is, of course, a risk in using these terms—colonialism, Orientalism—too freely, thus blunting their critical edge and the specificity of the histories and relationships that subtend them. The relationship between Canada and Turkey, for instance, is not a colonial one. Istanbul is not Urla is not Göreme, let alone Erzurum, Antep, et cetera. Colonialism and Orientalism cannot be reduced to one another. Nevertheless, with Turkey a predominantly Islamic country and Istanbul the smoky jewel of the Western imagination for about the last fifteen hundred years (arguably since there has been a West), it should not be a stretch for me to feel colonial and Orientalist tropes remain as major structuring elements for any attempt to produce a literary account of my experience there. Hell, the very books that opened my eyes to the possibilities of travel writing were Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which relate his youthful exploits en route by foot from “the hook of Holland to Constantinople” on the eve of the Second World War. And I have read far too much W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene to emerge untainted by the aesthetics of colonial nostalgia.
There is another dimension of this discussion that has less to do with Turkey or Parc Ex specifically and more to do with the colonial history of Canada itself. Lisa Heldke, a philosopher and food studies scholar, has used the term “food adventurer” to describe the kind of (mostly intra-national) culinary cultural tourism evoked by Gollner’s article. She has her own ideas about “strategic authenticities” that at several points dovetail with my own, and her book Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer is devoted to navigating these issues as an aspiring “anticolonialist eater.” In doing so, Heldke arrives at a sort of modified localist, sustainable agriculture-focused notion of “foodshed fidelity,” which attempts to evade the essentialism and occasional xenophobia of such approaches by way of temporal and cultural pluralism. “In short,” she writes, “I think the sustainable agriculture movement already stands in a position to give adventuring anticolonialists the opportunity to forge the kind of deep, significant links to our food that many of us have been seeking in our ethnic food forays.”5 Conspicuously absent from this formulation is any acknowledgement of the fact that agriculture in the U.S. and Canada, however sustainable, is intimately bound up with the history of settler colonialism, the seizure of First Nations and Native American land, and the Occidental terraforming project that underpins the two countries’ existence. Although in her later work Heldke attempts to move away from the binary of localism versus cosmopolitanism, Native and First Peoples are all but erased in her account of “anticolonialist” eating, just as they are similarly absent from much of the discourse around localism and foraging in North America, that is, when they are not serving as fodder for appropriation by probably well-meaning foodies and restaurateurs. That’s pretty bad.
If an anticolonial food writing is already a daunting prospect, that of a decolonizing food-writing practice seems positively overwhelming. The mythologies, symbolic registers, and material institutions that perpetuate these dynamics are substantial. They are ubiquitous, perhaps not inevitable, but they will not be evaded, let alone dismantled, without some imagination, humility, and force of will. I do not flatter myself that I am possessed of that imagination, or that honesty. But it’s something to work on.
1 Globe and Mail, April 2, 2013.
2 Fred Burrill, “Orientalism, Gentrification and Irony in Parx Ex: A Response to the Globe and Mail,” Maisonneuve, April 6, 2013.
3 The title of the accompanying photo gallery, which I don’t expect was Gollner’s doing, reads: “Montreal’s Park Ex, an edgy hidden gem ripe for gentrification.” Parc Ex is indeed on the cusp of gentrification, as the much-vaunted cheap rents of Montreal move ever north from the centre of the city, and with them the hipsters and artists and so on who serve as the (usually, hopefully) unwilling vanguard or sturmtruppen (in the WWI sense) of the process. Gentrification is of course a complicated social and economic process that indeed sometimes does involve the improvement of municipal infrastructure and economic revitalization its champions promise, albeit usually at the expense of its previous inhabitants being pushed out by rising rents. We may debate the relative “badness” of seeking out far-flung neighbourhoods in which to dine on the best (ethnic) ________ that is otherwise invisible in the culinary cartography of a city, but there is no denying the role that food writing/blogging plays in rendering such entire neighbourhoods more visible, attractive, and hence viable for predatory development. Is it a small role? Maybe. For my own part, as a white, middle-class resident of Parc Ex who is neither a Montreal native nor member of any of the communities—Italian, Greek, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, to a lesser extent Haitian —that have defined and continue to define the neighbourhood, I am of course implicated in this process, and I have no intention of trying to talk my way out of. So far the least conflicted actions I have come up with are shopping at the neighbourhood markets and not geo-tagging my Instagram posts. I’m basically a hero.
4 See “Hungary’s Forgotten Wine Region Is Finally Getting the Respect it Deserves,” Saveur, January 7, 2016; “Eating the Arab Roots of Sicilian Cuisine,” Saveur, March 17, 2016; The Fruit Hunters, (Random House, 2009); The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever (Scribner, 2013).
5 Exotic Appetites (Routledge, 2003), 206.