Indiatimes|The Times of India|The Economi
Americans pay a pittance for Indian food as it has low culinary prestige: Krishnendu Ray
Apr 23, 2016, 11.07 PM IST
Krishnendu Ray
Why are New Yorkers more willing to spend twice as much on French food
than Indian? Turns out, their attitudes are not so much swayed by spice,
but by popular perceptions of a cuisine's ethnicity and associated
class, suggests Krishnendu Ray, the chair of the
department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, in his
new book The Ethnic Restaurateur. He tells Joeanna Rebello why we're at the near bottom of New York's food chain
From political science at DU, to food and nutrition at NYU...when and how did you detour?
I came to the US in 1988 to work on questions of development but was waylaid by nostalgia, which expressed itself through food. I realized that I had to cook Indian food if I were to eat it. Which led to the even starker realization that not only did I not know how to cook, but as a good Indian middle class male, I had never given it a thought. That and the inadvertent running into three books, Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad, Harvey Levenstein's Revolution at the Table and Jack Goody's Cooking, Cuisine and Class made me realize that I had an opportunity to think seriously about what is good to eat. What was going to be new about my work was that most of the writing on food had been done with attention to cultural roots with relatively little on change and how immigration influences our choices.
In your comparative price rankings (of 14 popular cuisines reviewed in the Zagat New York restaurant guides in 1986 and 2014), Indian food has fallen from 8 to 9. What does this demotion tell you?
I make the argument that culinary prestige has a lot to do with class, race, and nation. Most Indian restaurants in the US, and in New York City, are run by Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and some Indians who are neither very rich, nor fluently Anglophone, nor highly credentialed, which creates the contamination effect for mainstream, middle-class, Americans. Like Mexican or Chinese food, most Americans refuse to pay more than a pittance for Indian food, which cannot buy the skilled labour, the good ingredients or the decor to create an upscale place. Of say the 350 or so Indian restaurants in NYC, only a dozen are upscale. That was the fate of Italian and Greek food too until immigration from the Mediterranean dried to a trickle and there was upward mobility of third-generation Italians and Greeks. Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Soul... are all stuck at the bottom. That will change when the source of immigration of poor people to America changes. I see that happening to new-style Chinese food such as at Jonathan Wu's Fung Tu. Similarly, better credentialed Indian chefs and entrepreneurs like Floyd Cardoz, Hemant Mathur, Surbhi Sahani, Suvir Saran, Sanjeev Kapoor, Jehangir Mehta, among others, are straining to upscale American notions of Indian food. There is an opening there because more than half of Indian immigrants to the US are entering engineering, management, medicine and the academy. So clever interpretations like the restaurant Babu Ji (in NYC) are playing to those possibilities.
Can you give us examples of how the improved social status of a country has made its food more coveted?
From political science at DU, to food and nutrition at NYU...when and how did you detour?
I came to the US in 1988 to work on questions of development but was waylaid by nostalgia, which expressed itself through food. I realized that I had to cook Indian food if I were to eat it. Which led to the even starker realization that not only did I not know how to cook, but as a good Indian middle class male, I had never given it a thought. That and the inadvertent running into three books, Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad, Harvey Levenstein's Revolution at the Table and Jack Goody's Cooking, Cuisine and Class made me realize that I had an opportunity to think seriously about what is good to eat. What was going to be new about my work was that most of the writing on food had been done with attention to cultural roots with relatively little on change and how immigration influences our choices.
In your comparative price rankings (of 14 popular cuisines reviewed in the Zagat New York restaurant guides in 1986 and 2014), Indian food has fallen from 8 to 9. What does this demotion tell you?
I make the argument that culinary prestige has a lot to do with class, race, and nation. Most Indian restaurants in the US, and in New York City, are run by Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and some Indians who are neither very rich, nor fluently Anglophone, nor highly credentialed, which creates the contamination effect for mainstream, middle-class, Americans. Like Mexican or Chinese food, most Americans refuse to pay more than a pittance for Indian food, which cannot buy the skilled labour, the good ingredients or the decor to create an upscale place. Of say the 350 or so Indian restaurants in NYC, only a dozen are upscale. That was the fate of Italian and Greek food too until immigration from the Mediterranean dried to a trickle and there was upward mobility of third-generation Italians and Greeks. Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Soul... are all stuck at the bottom. That will change when the source of immigration of poor people to America changes. I see that happening to new-style Chinese food such as at Jonathan Wu's Fung Tu. Similarly, better credentialed Indian chefs and entrepreneurs like Floyd Cardoz, Hemant Mathur, Surbhi Sahani, Suvir Saran, Sanjeev Kapoor, Jehangir Mehta, among others, are straining to upscale American notions of Indian food. There is an opening there because more than half of Indian immigrants to the US are entering engineering, management, medicine and the academy. So clever interpretations like the restaurant Babu Ji (in NYC) are playing to those possibilities.
Can you give us examples of how the improved social status of a country has made its food more coveted?
Top Comment
World calls American food as junk. Do you want anything more. Why are Indians so much bothered how US citizens treat Indian foods. As such they are dying of diseases like cancer and depression. Highe... Read MoreAmericans were full of disdain for Japanese culture, especially food, almost into the 1980s when the rise of Japan and contact with Japanese managers completely transformed American posture towards sushi that American elites had both disdained and were unable to appreciate.
Why is haute cuisine such a male-dominated world?
On every Western top chefs list, it's still mostly men, who rarely do the everyday cooking at home. That is women's work, poor people's work, which is why the modern world of chefs is so masculine, and so white. That is not a coincidence, but constitutive of the process of professionalization of a field. Women and people of colour will eventually break into the field too but not in my lifetime, I think.
Food studies is a growing discipline in America and Europe. Why not in India?
There is a long tradition of anthropological studies of the food ways of the poor, the rural, the marginal, and the non-literate. What is new with food studies is the attention to urban, literate, non-poor, at the centre of our systems. Sociologist Amita Baviskar is doing fascinating work in that domain — see her work on Maggi and the Indian working class. There are new PhDs being written in Delhi School of Economics — on sweetmeat makers for instance — that is going to open up that part of the field.
Recommended By Colombia
Recommended By Colombia
World calls American food as junk.
Do you want anything more. Why are Indians so much bothered how US
citizens treat Indian foods. As such they are dying of diseases like
cancer and depression. Highest number of people on cocaine, drugs and
what not? So called advanced culture. Bull sh!t
Let them pay a bomb for junk food.
Non sense article
View more comments
Combating food illiteracy | Minnesota Public Radio News
www.mprnews.org/story/2010/03/23/food-literacy
America Is Filling Up With Dumb People - Rense.com
www.rense.com/general88/dumb.htm
Americans are still scientifically illiterate — and scientists ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../americans-are-still-scientifically-illite...
America The Illiterate - Rense.com
www.rense.com/general84/amrr.htm
20 Comments