Culinary Tourism

Chapter 11. Pass the Tofu, Please: Asian Food for Aging Baby Boomers

CHAPTER 11 Pass the Tofu, Please Asian Food for Aging Baby Boomers Liz Wilson We all know that you are what you eat. Grandmother said so. And now experts like Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, and others appear regularly on various media outlets offering evidence to support nutrition-based approaches to health. Weil even confirms the wisdom of our grandmothers' cod-liver-oil fixation in discussing the nutritional benefits of the ingestion of certainfishes high infatty acids.! Clearlynutrition-based approaches to health have well-established roots in the West. This essay suggests that more affluent segments of America's postwarbaby-boom generation have contributed to a revival of interest in diet as a means of self-care.2 But baby boomers' concerns about the quality and purity of food ingested do not simply amplify traditional beliefs about diet as the key to health. Wedded to health issues are status issues. Affluent boomers take the dictum , "you are what you eat" in its declaratory sense, declaring their social identity through the choice of diet and by favoring foods that connote cosmopolitanism and educational attainment. Enjoying a level of income that allows them to spend a little more on the everyday necessities of life such as food and toiletries, affluent baby boomers are adventurous eaters, conducting culinary tourism in their homes and in the restaurants they patronize. Where the consumption of meat served as a marker of status for many prewar Americans, the cosmopolitan baby-boom ethos favors plant-based foods as a substitute for or supplement to meats. Thanks to the mainstreaming and mass marketing of Asian vegetarian foods that were first popularized by members of the counterculture in the 1960s and 246 I Pass the Tofu, Please '70s, many baby boomers have developed a taste for bean curd, fermented beans and vegetables, seaweed, and other foodstuffs that their parents and grandparents would likely have considered exotic or even inedible. Certain Asian foods, especially those based on traditional Japanese cuisine, are especially in vogue among the baby-boom generation as a healthy alternative to the mainstream, meat-heavy American diet. In this essay, I briefly sketch some of the historical precedents in American culture for the current vogue that Asian vegetarian foods now enjoy, and attempt to identifywhat is distinctive in current ethnomimetic food-consumption trends among baby boomers. With the tremendous recent growth in the availability of Asian convenience foods-beverages, food supplements, and soy products-designed to substitute for meat and dairyfoods, culinary explorations ofAsiahave never been easierfor American consumers. But just as international tourism can often take the form of journeys to faraway places and encounters with exotic others that shed light on the tourist's own constructions of self and formulations of selfidentity , so too culinary tourism can shed light on the self-images of those consumers who are inclined toward adventuresome eating. I analyze material from contemporary women's magazines as well as information gleaned from the marketing and packaging of ethnic and New Age food products, suggesting some ways in which the more romanticized images of Asia these materials reveal serve to confirm consumers' cherished constructions of self. And, finally, I suggest some of the paradoxes that come with the gentrification of the Woodstock generation. While many baby boomers seek to affiliate with non-Western values and express emancipatory social agendas through their choices about what foods and beverages to consume, these declaratory functions of diet operate within a consumer culture that has, since the 1960s, increasingly appropriated the anticapitalistic rhetoric of the '60s to serve corporate interests. Countercultural America and the Development of Countercuisines The late 1960s spawned several countercultural movements that contributed to the rise of alternative diets or "countercuisines" as statements of opposition to dominant cultural values.3 Probably the most significant was the ecological movement, which focused on food as a powerful outlet for activism. Time magazine declared the environment "Issue of the Year" for 1970, and Gallup polls showed that pollution surpassed race, crime, and other issues of concern to Americans in late 1969 and early 1970. Liz Wilson I 247 Food selection and preparation came to bear a new political significance in light of the warnings of ecological activists about the environmental cost of pesticides, monocropping, resource-wasteful food packaging, and energy-wasteful global food distribution channels. Concerns about overpopulation and the sustainability of the world's environmental resources also focused attention on meat production. As statistics were...