Where do we go from here? With Bettina Makalintal
Welcome to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newsletter by Becca Thimmesch. This week, we’re continuing Where do we go From Here? a series where I interview cool people.
I don’t know how to put this without getting all “I have 90% of a sociology minor” on you so I’ll just say this: everyone is SO horny for authenticity.
Authentic this! Authentic that!
But like, what does that even mean?
(do not spend an our trying to find a specific syllabus from 2014, Rebecca! I repeat, do not spend an hour trying to find a specific syllabus from 2014, Rebecca!)
We live in a globalized world, meaning we have access to elements of pretty much every other culture on earth, if we want to look for it. But we also live in a colonized world, meaning not only that we see those cultures through the intense and enduring lens of colonization, but also that what we see reflects us. The idea of an “authentic” experience lets us pretend that’s not real, that there remains an escape left in this world from McDonald’s or the other tourists who were on our plane over.
The discerning American foodie is always on the hunt for authenticity. He scoffs at store-bought tortillas or ingredient swaps. He eats where the locals eat, you know, where all those other tourists would never dare enter.
But again, like, what does that even mean?
I’ve wanted to talk about this in the Hive for some time, and I knew from some brief Twitter conversations that Bettina Makalintal was the person to talk to. She’s been on my dream interview list since she put out one of the best, labor-centric pieces on the fall of Bon Appetit back in June (though her portfolio at VICE is full of must-reads, like this one or this one). We spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, our conversation presented below, edited for clarity.
We’re talked before about this idea that there’s no such thing as authenticity in the context of food, what do you mean by that?
I feel like, a lot of the times, authenticity is used as this sweeping designation that either a food is or it isn’t, and it’s often almost a value judgment—food is good because it is authentic or bad because it’s not authentic. But my perspective on it is sort of that authenticity doesn’t exist, because things can be authentic to the individual experience or one person’s memory or recollection of a place, but I don’t think you could really ever say that one thing is definitively authentic to a large group of peoples’ experience—which is why I’m skeptical of the term as a whole.
From an outsider’s perspective, it feels like there’s a lot of nuance within a diaspora in terms of who was born in the home country and who was born elsewhere, and how they conceptualize home and how idealized that image becomes. As someone who was born in the Philippines and immigrated here, what does it mean for you for food to conjure up images of home?
I feel like this gets at my fundamental problem with the idea of authenticity, that food is inherently a way of returning to something. And I do think that for a lot of people in diaspora, food does feel like a way to go back home, but I also think that, sometimes, that notion of what home is is misplaced. Like, for Filipino Americans, there’s this perception that cooking Filipino food is about trying to return to the Philippines, but for me a lot of the food that we make is more about our experience as Asian Americans living here. So the framing of home often feels incorrect to me.
There’s this conception of Filipino food that it’s like, the perfect encapsulation of “East meets West” and the blending of cultures, but that glosses over a really violent history and legacy of colonization. Authenticity and colonization are sort of seen as at odds but being colonized is really authentic and central to the experience of what it means to be Filipino, so how do you personally lift up that this gorgeous, dynamic food is so deeply inextricable from colonization?
This is really difficult! I feel like it’s really easy to romanticize this idea of the Philippines as this melting pot because there’s this narrative that the people were resilient and resourceful, but the reality is that was forced upon us. It’s an interesting form of erasure to spin that into an entirely positive thing.
It’s easy to tell people that we love eating Spam and rice in the Philippines, but it’s problematic on a certain level—we eat Spam because of colonization and because of the presence of the US military, but that is what’s authentic to our experience. That’s something I struggle with a lot because, often, this idea of authenticity really disregards the actual lived experiences of my family growing up in the Philippines. Spam is more authentic to my own experience than this decolonized diet that goes back to how people ate before the Americans were in the Philippines. I think processed and “western” food is this really interesting tension point in the authenticity conversation. Soup bases and instant flavoring packages get such a bad reputation in the food world because they’re so processed and therefore seen as not authentic, but if you think about a lot of the iconic Filipino soups, that’s the way my family would make them. We’ve never made them from scratch, but that doesn’t necessarily make it less authentic.
This also feels very gendered, like the idea that mostly women back home don’t take shortcuts.
Yeah, that’s why I feel like this idea of authenticity creates a standard that you can never actually live up to, because everyone is trying to aim for this very specific point of nostalgia or memory, and those clearly aren’t shared across the diaspora, much less the wider world. It’s a goal with constantly-shifting posts, so I don’t really see it as something I ever really want to strive towards.
In terms of diaspora chefs and food writers in the US, there’s this very fine line between lifting up people from a certain community as the owner and the expert of that experience, and boxing them into it. Like, Indian chefs who fought so hard to even be highlighted as Indian chefs who now find themselves relegated to our narrow conception of that cuisine. How do you personally strike that balance?
I think for me, I try to look at the specificity of my experience. My experience is that of someone whose family was middle class in the Philippines and then moved to Pennsylvania. The idea of Filipino food in this country is still really stuck in this sort of catch-all which really ignores the level of regional specificity, like there are so many distinct regions within the Philippines and so much variation in the way dishes are prepared. Even calling it broadly Filipino food or Filipino-American food sort of erases that. And this gets at one of the fundamental challenges of food media. We have to push so hard just to get representation for Filipino food that can feel impossible to push that step further for any sort of real nuance. And so I do the best that I personally can in terms of making my own experience clear, but I also acknowledge that I’m not an expert, I have this specific experience.
That Epicurious piece by Tara O’Brady really spoke to me about the way writers and recipe developers of color end up standing in for the whole culture they’ve been called upon to represent, even though they never said that they wanted that responsibility.
It seems like, because of perhaps lack of knowledge or ingredients, Filipino food in the United States is really prone to edits and swaps. For you personally, where do you draw the line between a riff and a bastardization?
Honestly, I’m accepting of anything that anyone in the Filipino diaspora wants to do with our food, like it’s our culture and we’re entitled to play with it. Where it becomes bastardization to me is when it’s people who don’t necessarily have a stake in our history and culture and they’re taking things really far from what the original form was. I often wonder like, if it had been a Filipino recipe developer who put out the BA halo halo recipe, would it have been received as badly? I think a lot of people in the diaspora would have still been upset, but I do think it would have been viewed as a little more acceptable.
Filipino food is sort of trending right now in this country, from the expansion of Jollibee to multiple Michelin starred restaurants. What is your hope for Filipino cuisine in the US?
My biggest hope is that we’ll get a chance to explore the regional specificity of the cuisine. And a lot of what’s popular here right now is sort of these big party foods and celebratory dishes and so, partly because I want to learn more about it, I’d like to see more of a focus on home cooking, especially in the Southern Philippines where there’s a larger Muslim population. The food there is really different and it’s something I’ve never seen here yet. So I hope that, as we open the door for Filipino food, we’re opening it in a way that makes room for all of those things.
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Just vibin, folks!