Wednesday January 21, 2009
I’m fucking tired of demands for authenticity.
This is an ill-formed and poorly considered rant, triggered by the comments and regular recurrence of such demands for authentic ethnic food and you know what? I just don’t give a fuck any more if this is the same sort of food that I would get if I sat down in a restaurant in Mexico I’m concerned about whether or not it actually tastes good.
It’s possible for ethnic food to not be authentic yet still be fucking tasty. Lets take the ethnic out of the picture for a minute and just talk about hamburgers. I fucking love hamburgers, and I fucking love talking about hamburgers.
In a general sense, my favorite sort of food is sandwiches, which I describe basically as anything I can eat with my hands that contains two or more types of food – it is a nice, inclusive definition that includes things like layered cakes, pizza, and open-faced turkey sandwiches, the prince of the sandwich family.
The lord-high might fucking emperor of the sandwich family is the hamburger, and hamburgers themselves are an entire sub-family of the sandwich. There are a million kinds of hamburgers including McDonald’s (which is arguably the canonical hamburger, the hamburger by which all others are measured) and its fast-food brethren, cheap-ass frozen patties that disintegrate in ash and haunted souls if you cook them for too long and the upper echelon of finely-crafted homemade freshly ground cow-and-pig miracles-on-a-bun that I strive towards.
Hamburgers are fucking great.
Now, from that family of hamburgers, which one is the authentic hamburger? I posed the McDonald’s hamburger as the canonical hamburger (which is not to say it is the best, far from it) but I don’t think that detracts from the authenticity of the rest, even the cheapest of the cheap more-wood-than-meat kind you get at things like college activity group fundraisers. Those are authentic hamburgers and they serve a very specific purpose and when combined with a hot sunny day and enough mustard even they are desirable.
So. A hamburger is a hamburger. General Tso’s Chicken as Jennifer Lee so expertly explains in the linked video, is about as unauthentic a chinese food as you can get. Chinese food, as we know it in North American (and indeed any region outside of China), is about as unauthentic a foodstuff as exists. But it’s good fucking food, whether or not it’s the same thing I would eat in Beijing (which it isn’t).
Authenticity, used a metric of quality, is bullshit. Authenticity is a completely separate property from tastiness and worth and I’m sick and fucking tired of it being used as anything other than an elitist and exclusionary device.
And here I was thinking I didn’t have anything to say today.
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