Although
they do not have colonies proper, there can be no doubt that America is an
empire. Food is part of that, and our palates in Australia reflect the soft
power reaches of the Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Kansas City
tastemakers. One need only look at the
lure of In-N-Out Burger, whose pop-ups here have drawn adoring crowds in a
spectacle of salivating desire.
But
America is a colony too, has a colonial history before it exported its Coca
Cola, its Big Mac, its Kentucky Fried Chicken. When it comes to food, France
has been the biggest influence on American cooking. You might point out the
melting pot in the south-west with the former lands of Mexico now mingling with
America. But I am talking about empire and the palate as it is constituted in
big cities, especially on the East Coast. Both America and France seem to be a
rejection of Britain, and even those New England Boston Brahmins have clam
chowder and not only boiled vegetables and bone broth. If the French have
exerted an inestimable influence on America from Alexis du Toqueville to
Marquis de Lafayette to the Louisiana Purchase to the Statue of Liberty to
French fries, it lives on now in dishes, restaurants and bourgeois holidays to
Paris in August.
What
brought France and America together was not only a rejection of the British,
but a shared revolutionary heritage. However, their revolutions
are something distinct, with France perceiving itself to have a tradition to
uphold; an empirical reality that means good taste is to be found in the palate
of every citizen while America regards itself as exceptional and wholly new.
However unenlightened the average Frenchman gets, he will always know how to
dress a salad. The same cannot be said in America, notwithstanding that, at the
top end, they are able to do it with the very best. Rather than excelling at
delicate croissants, it is the processed donut that becomes the apotheosis of
common taste in the US.
What all revolutions share however is a desire for the new, a
reset button that marks a year zero and allows the people to re-boot. This is
there in Paris to which one only needs to cite Adeline Grattard’s restaurant
yamT’cha that fuses French and Cantonese into something wholly original. In the
American case, this has meant the proliferation of new dishes and the
re-working of flavours into distinct combinations. This comes about is in
fusion food such as the celebrated Korean-Mexican.
And yet, French and American is the dominant fusion, at least when
it comes to the meeting of cultures (rather than chefs and New World
ingredients). It is there most explicitly in the dishes from New Orleans, but you
can find it in other places and not only as Creole. If French has influenced American cuisine,
what does something similar look like in Australia given that our reference
point and our era is somewhat different? To think about this is
not to highlight individual flavours that differ between Americans and us – how they like
cinnamon gum, how we like vegemite, how they have squash, corn, pumpkin and we
have kangaroo, emu, crocodile, how they like their pies sweet and we like them
savoury. I do not think you can get to the essence of a thing by pointing out
the particularities. What matters is the root of the cuisine, and while both
places have Indigenous heritage that continues to matter, for the national
palate we need to parse the difference between Puritans and Convicts.
Where one is righteous, the other is irreverent; where one is
moral, the other is questionable; where one seeks religious freedom, the other
seeks material liberation; where one is driven, the other seems relaxed. But by
looking at these ideal types, these caricatures, the question of national
character won’t be solved. What matters is how we have inflected American
cuisine and made it our own, how we have innovated just like they did with
French Dip.
So, consider the burger. David Chang is simply wrong about
Australians having the worst hamburgers in the world. He makes this claim on
very little evidence. To prove his point he cites of the use of tinned
beetroot, canned pineapple, grated carrot. These might be typical ingredients,
even vernacular, but they are not the only options you get here, not since
brioche arrived in a big way. Australian burgers are not stuck in the 1950s at
a roadside servo somewhere between Darwin and Dubbo. Today’s Australian burger
is superior to America’s precisely because we get all options – you cannot even
find that beetroot in America. This means we have more choice, something that
Americans pride themselves on, to which you will need to know what kind of
salad dressing you like before you order because they will give you a list as
long as you like.
Between
choice and tolerance, you get a fair idea of what counts as liberalism in
America. These are values I imagine Chang subscribes to given he is a New
Yorker and the other side of politics means voting for Donald Trump. Plus,
Australians are now doing American style burgers as good as anyone on the
coasts of the United States, maybe not as good as people in the heartland. But choice
and mimesis is a start, and I have no doubt that our colonial desire to
overturn the master can propel us beyond the horizon established so far.
The
problem as I see it with burgers here is not specific ingredients despite the
fact that Australia needs a better pickle game. It is that Australians tend to make
junk food taste bourgeois. This does not mean it tastes worse, but there is a
problem of gentrification. It never gets as dirty as in America – think chilli
on a hot dog, cheese whizz in a can, the average all you can eat buffet in Las
Vegas. Those things do not exist in Australia, which means you cannot reach the
same pit of self-loathing and despair in quite the same way. That might be a
good thing, but it also means we miss out on happy hour buffalo wings.
Gentrification,
and with it, cultural appropriation, are major concerns for the middle class
diner in America and Australia. That is where the concerns of empire find their
internal motor. What happens to all the grit, the appeal, the ‘culture’ when
aspirational hipsters take over working class, minority dominated enclaves?
What happens to the food?
In
my youth, I participated in that wave. I lived in West Philadelphia, being part
of the frontier that moved into a black community from the centre that was the
University of Pennsylvania. I could justify it by the rent I was paying, but in
reflection, it seems possible to find cheap places to live that do not
encourage encroachment (think of this as retrofitting the middle class with the
bohemian). However, in West Philadelphia the lines were easily seen in the bar
culture, of which there were three kinds– young, white, hipster; working class,
middle aged African Americans; and Ethiopian and Eritrean men. I think I was
too young to really make sense of what was going on, and I felt Australian,
which gave me license to go and order Fosters in any establishment. Plus, I had
been surrounded by dark skin since I was a child and it did not feel that
different. In retrospect, that seems naïve, earnestly innocent and I have come
to know my place a little better.
What often goes unsaid in
conversations around gentrification (and appropriation), is how they reinforce
the structural position of marginalised people and the power-privilege relationships
we are used to. Minorities are routinely expected perform their dislike as
though they were representatives for the group in question rather than as
individuals who happen to be broadly similar. It can be a heavy burden for your
only ethnic mate to speak on every matter about our borders. What that means is
person X is simply ‘the Indian community member’ who will be framed as outraged
at neighbourhood changes from the restaurants to the bars to the property
prices. It then becomes an expectation that I will defend Indians from attacks,
or police the boundaries of my culture in such a way that a special few can
feel permitted to enter given my standing in the community and my authority in
the wider world. But, it is about having the knowledge, empathy and imagination
to respect what is good taste and to know that every problem can be answered
with creativity.
Diners want to feel
comfortable and be accepted in a world that is diverse. For me, cultures and
cuisine benefit from being open rather than closed, from simply having a
conversation, and we know as much because they thrive when people engage and
interact. Restaurants close if you do not go to them. To my mind, it is a good
thing if you want to come over for a chicken curry and then try to make it at
home afterwards. It is innocent enough to want to understand different people
and places, but we must respect rules of engagement and contribute to a future where
everyone is truly welcomed. The future that we are making in Australia is one I
am optimistic about, precisely because I think we can make burgers that are
delicious, because we can make fried chicken without performing a kind of
‘blackface palate’, because we can transform Puritanical revolutionaries into activist
communities that like the taste of wattleseed, desert lime and wallaby.
I see that here more in
donut culture than I do in burgers, fried chicken or Southern barbeque. Donuts
have a greater license for creativity, maybe because we are getting used to
them as a new paradigm of innovation. At the crest of this wave is a range of
flavours that are made for Australian taste in such a way that they speak back
to the empire of Modern Americana. Donuts suit our collective lifestyle, and
not only because they are not fast food in the same way burgers are, but
because the bakery is an institution that matters in the history of Australia.
Donuts
that I have seen recently include – jasmine, green tea, matcha; mocha, Tim Tam,
s’more; hazelnut, walnut, maple; pumpkin, pineapple, crème brulee; blueberry,
blackberry, mulberry, raspberry, strawberry, lingonberry, passionfruit,
vanilla; trifle, honeycake, jaffa; white choc, peppermint, birthday, sprinkles,
orange, lemon, mandarin, cinnamon. I have also seen lemon myrtle, russellberry
and Gerladton wax, all of which are Indigenous flavours to this place. I could
go on, but you get the idea. Quite simply, the entire world is here, in our
donuts.
What should not be forgotten is that donuts are not only American,
and, if anything, their empire only returns us to the world at large rather
than isolating us further. Think here of churros, criollo, bomboloni, let alone
the salty egg fried dumplings you get at yum cha. The burger might have our
attention for now, but it is the donut where we might begin to re-discover
something about ourselves and our place in the world that is a welcome return
to what is possible.
