Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA by Robert Ji-Song Ku (review)

For many, especially the more food conscious among us, the mere mention of Spam, dog meat, California roll, Chinese fast-food takeout, and the food additive monosodium glutamate evokes condemnation if not absolute disgust. These foods, commonly known as bastardized hybrids of more authentic “true” and “pure” Asian foods, are at best tolerated and at worst loathed as ghastly or, in the case of MSG, even as toxic to one’s physical well-being. Robert Ku’s text, Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA, challenges these associations by arguing that these foods are not only delicious but also important avenues to debate the problematic double bind of authenticity as it impacts Asian American identity in the contemporary moment. Along with kimchi, Ku uses these six foods to examine the “dubious” cultural construction of the Asian and Asian American presence in the United States, be it culinary or bodily, as simultaneously constructed as watered down, counterfeit, and synthetic reproductions of an unadulterated “real” Asianness while at the same time remaining perpetually alien and outside of normative Americanness.

What links the six foods that compose the chapters of Ku’s text—the California roll, Chinese takeout, kimchi, dog meat, MSG, and Spam—is fairly simple. Each is associated with Asians and Asian Americans; each is commonly found beyond Asia, particularly in the United States; each was at one point an object of ridicule, scorn, or disgust; and perhaps most important, each provides the opportunity to ponder the question of authenticity and its importance to Asian American identity. In his fascinating examinations of these often overlooked cultural productions, Ku examines the evolution of these foods in places such as New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Baton Rouge and weaves an intricate narrative that involves chefs, home cooks, food journalists, restaurateurs, grocers, food scientists, authors, celebrities, and even his family into the development and popularization of these foods. The six chapters, each dedicated to a particular food, reveal long, complex histories that not only involve the circulation, production, and consumption but also unearth stories of migration and exclusion, revealing much about the complexities of definitional power over authenticity and the construction of multiple boundaries of Asian, American, and, most important, Asian Americanness. In doing so, Ku grapples with the complex role of food in the making and unmaking of borders and systems of order including national order, systems of belonging, order of the body, family belonging through the passing down of culinary knowledge, hierarchies of taste and palatability, and the very ordering of what is acceptable for human consumption.

Ku’s Text follows up on several fairly recent texts including Anita Mannur’s Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Krishnendu Ray’s Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia, Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (of which Ku was among the editors) that explore the role of food in the construction of diasporic Asian identity. Ku makes several interventions that are of great importance to the now solidly established field of food studies as well as to several overlapping disciplines including Asian American studies, cultural and literary studies, diasporic studies, and material studies.

Perhaps the most crucial of such interjections stems from use of the term “dubious.” Dubiousness as a theoretical concept allows us to look beyond the binary framework of authentic and inauthentic, which often leads to a frustrating dead end because, as Appadurai reminds us, authenticity functions as a mirage, constantly being pursued yet never truly being able to be reached. However, as opposed to the more popular term “hybridity,” (which implies a historical purity that has since been altered by cultural exchange), dubiousness offers a way...