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5 / Eating America: Culture, Race, and Food in the Social Imaginary of the Second Generation
- Temple University Press
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5 / Eating America: Culture, Race, and Food in the Social Imaginary of the Second Generation In this food-obsessed world, Anthony Bourdain has carved out a distinct place as a gastronomic Indiana Jones. —discovery.com1 Thanks to the Immigration Act of 1965, Roosevelt Avenue is the sort of place where someone who has just downed some Filipino barbecue may emerge from the restaurant, and in the next block or two, be tempted to follow that up with an Afghan shish kebab, a Mexican torta, an Indian dosa, and a Tibetan momo before making the decision about whether to go with Korean or Uruguayan baked goods. For devout chowhounds, the route of the No. 7 is El Camino de Santiago. —calvin trillin, “new grub streets” For the last three years, I have taught Nilesh Patel’s A Love Supreme to my students in a seminar titled “Food and Culture.” As they watch this film, brought to them from across the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, many students respond with delight to see samosas prepared with love and care on-screen. If Patel’s loving homage to his mother’s samosas speaks to members of the second generation, it is in part due to the fact that Patel’s film recasts Indian food as something to be viewed with desire, love, and care. SucharenderingoffoodpreparedwithlovehasclearechoesinJhumpa Lahiri’s much-acclaimed debut novel, The Namesake. As Ashima Ganguli , the mother of second-generation protagonist Gogol Ganguli, prepares to leave her home in suburban Massachusetts to take up residence in India, thus enacting a form of return migration, she holds a dinner party at her home to bid farewell to her community of Indian friends and to the house she has inhabited for thirty years. Her final act of communion with the desi community is one that, unsurprisingly, centers on sharing food. Lahiri painstakingly takes us through Ashima Ganguli’s careful culinary preparation for the evening’s celebration: Ashima Ganguli sits at her kitchen table, making mincemeat croquettes for a party she is throwing that evening . . . Alone, she man- 148 / theorizing fusion in america ages an assembly line of preparation. First she forces warm boiled potatoes through a ricer. Carefully she shapes a bit of the potato around a spoonful of cooked ground lamb, as uniformly as the white of a hard-boiled egg encases its yolk. She dips each of the croquettes, about the size and shape of a billiard ball, into a bowl of beaten eggs, then coats them on a plate of bread crumbs . . . Finally she stacks the croquettes on a large circular tray, a sheet of wax paper between each layer . . . She remembers making the first batches in her kitchen in Cambridge . . . her husband at the stove in white drawstring pajamas and a T-shirt frying the croquettes two at a time in a small blackened saucepan. She remembers Gogol and Sonia helping her when they were small, Gogol’s hand wrapped around the can of crumbs, Sonia always wanting to eat the croquettes before they’d been breaded and fried. (274–75) With loving attention to the process of cooking and the labor involved in producing these seemingly commonplace Indian snacks, Jhumpa Lahiri ’s and Nilesh Patel’s portrayals of culinary practices stand in stark contrast to the more staid but commonplace images produced by Hollywood films such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (hereafter The Temple of Doom) in which Indian food might be presented as distastefully spicy or simply inedible. For second-generation Indian Americans raised on a diet of Hollywood film in the 1980s, The Temple of Doom occupies a curious and painful position within our cultural psyches. The second installation of the Indiana Jones Trilogy was, after all, released in 1985, when the post-1965 generation was in early adolescence. One of the most infamous scenes in the film is the banquet scene set in the sumptuous dining hall of the Maharajah of Pankot. While Indiana Jones is engrossed in a conversation with Chattar Lal, an Indian member of the court intent on keeping the Thugee cult a secret, Jones’s two sidekicks, Short Round and Willie Scott, are fixated on the food before them. A succession of stomach-turning delicacies are presented before the American guests. The main course, “snake surprise,” a large python stuffed with live snakes that crawl out of its belly, is followed by a plate of dead beetles. While the Indians at the table greet the dishes with oohs and...