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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT IMMIGRANTS DO EAT  
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Anand Giridharadas
September 18, 2024
The.Ink [[link removed]]

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_ There may be no better case for the multi-racial, multi-ethnic,
multi-everything society America is becoming than the flavors. What
would America eat, and be, without immigrants? _

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There appears to be some confusion about what immigrants eat. As a son
of immigrants and a native Ohioan, I want to help to clear up this
confusion.

From far-right demagogues, we hear suggestions that immigrants prey
on dogs and cats
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smacking their foreign-born chops on 100 percent, all-American pets.

This week, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance,
doubled down on his petivore allegations, while admitting that he was
lying
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he was asked to respond to another claim, this by the conspiracy
theorist and Trump groupie Laura Loomer, who said that, if Vice
President Kamala Harris were elected, the White House “will smell
like curry [[link removed]].” This is
presumably because Harris is descended from immigrants on both sides
of her family, from two notably flavor-blessed countries — India and
Jamaica.

Vance, as ever caught between the rock of white nationalism and the
hard place of having a brown wife and children, answered with the
culinary equivalent of having a Black friend: “I make a mean chicken
curry.” Only the “mean” part was convincing.

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So here, at the highest levels of politics, were questions of what
immigrants eat. Your pet dog? A cat near you? Stinky curries?

This is, of course, classic, straightforward Othering, straight out of
the white nationalist and authoritarian playbooks. The far right is
always a little scared, because the number of people who are more
interested in hating others than seeking a better life for their
families is not a majority. To win elections, you have to rouse a lot
of people into anxieties about fantasies built on lies premised on
smoke and mirrors.

With apologies to Kendrick Lamar, the right wants people to think:
“They not like us.” And eating is so visceral, so quotidian, so
central that it is a fertile place to sow these seeds of dehumanizing,
of justifying your proposed “cleanse
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If you have spent time in certain parts of the world, you know that
food can be serious political business, and the matter of what people
eat and what people smell being cooked and allegations of impurity and
different ideas of clean and dirty and holy — these can get people
killed
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Because of these high stakes, it’s dangerous to lie about what
immigrants eat. So I thought it might be useful to offer some
reflections about what immigrants _do_ eat.

For one thing, immigrants tend to eat the spices and flavors that
everyone else eventually adopts and capitalizes on financially and
before long cannot seem to keep out of their cookbooks and restaurants
and home pantries. You know how suddenly gochujang is in all these
recipes you see? Yeah, immigrants eat that. That’s how you know
about it! You know how fish sauce seems to be in everything now?
Immigrants! As the critic Navneet Alang once wrote
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_We are living in the age of the global pantry, when a succession of
food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of
international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North
American mainstream — the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would
have labeled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst.
This phenomenon is why you now see dukkah on avocado toast, kimchi in
grain bowls, and sambal served with fried Brussels sprouts. It’s a
kind of polyglot internationalism presented under the New American
umbrella, with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western
cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar
Americana._

If you want to know what immigrants eat, in other words, look at what
fancy restaurants serve some years after immigrants arrive and stink
up the place: “squash tahini…with burrata, sumac-galangal
dressing, pickles, and dukkah,” to cite one of the prestige dishes
Alang mentions; or “a ‘Turkish-ish’ breakfast of vegetables, a
sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented
labneh”; or “a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called
huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with
fried eggs.”

What do immigrants eat? They eat what others _will_ eat when they
stop being scared and recognize the commercial opportunity.

And while it is common to use the fear of foreign flavors to gin up
fear of immigrants themselves, sometimes it backfires because the
flavors are so good. When Trump promised a taco truck on every corner
if immigrants were allowed to flow in, many Americans begged for a
corner near them to be granted one of the early trucks
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Indeed, there may be no better case for the multi-racial,
multi-ethnic, multi-everything society America is becoming than the
flavors. Yes, pluralism is hard. But, damn, it’s tasty. America, if
you want our spices, be prepared for our flavor.

And what else do America’s immigrants eat?

Does swallowing their pride count? Because so many immigrants know
that, to rise in this country, you must first fall. Computer
programmers over there become gas station clerks over here, trading
C++ for 87 octane, because they are chasing a star no one else can yet
see
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Graduated doctors redo medical school to prove themselves in a place
on the cutting edge of research. People with bustling
multi-generational homes and layers of care and support abandon their
kin and go it alone here because they dream. People who were somebody
in their faraway town or village — known entities, trusted,
grandmother-verified — leave the social capital of there for the
anonymity of here, on the faith that there are different rewards to be
reaped in being seen with fresh eyes by people who will not say,
“But you don’t come from a business family…”

What do immigrants eat? As little as they can sometimes, the cheapest
rice and beans sometimes, the cheapest rice and lentils sometimes, the
cheapest ground meat they can find, food bought in bulk at Costco or
somewhere like it — food that does the caloric minimum to fuel them
for tomorrow, so that one day their descendants can eat like kings.
Immigrants often have special powers of eating one thing and tasting
in their mind’s mouth another: even as they chew the gruel, they
taste future greatness.

I am a son of immigrants from India. I’ll tell you what we ate
growing up. Sometimes we ate unfussy Western food, like penne with
tomato sauce, because my mother wanted to prepare us for the new world
my parents had brought us into — and because she didn’t mind the
freedoms she had gained as a woman in America to spend less time in
the kitchen, less time toasting coriander and cumin seeds and crushing
them and making a tadka and on and on and on. But on other nights she
went to those lengths and made us Indian food — Punjabi, in the
tradition of her people; or Tamil, in the tradition of my father’s
people; or from some other place in that vast republic of tastes. She
went to this effort because she wanted us not only to be at ease where
we were but also to carry certain things onward. And sometimes, when
she didn’t feel like cooking, when we all felt like a change of
scene, we went out. And we usually found ourselves eating food made by
immigrants, in restaurants owned by immigrants: restaurants that were
modest and little-known, but someone’s wildest dream.

So the question we should ask is not: What do immigrants eat? It’s:
What would America eat, and be, without immigrants?

_The.Ink is created by Anand Giridharadas. Subscribe.
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_He is the author of four books “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines
of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy
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“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
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“The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
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Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
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* Immigrants
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* Immigration
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* food
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