Courtney Cook eggs. Brothy rice. Spa water.
If you recognize any of these terms, you might want to look twice at your screen time.
While viral foods and drinks are nothing new (remember unicorn Frappuccinos?), a new social media trend has popped up in recent years of taking cultural dishes (like Korean mayak eggs, congee, and agua fresca), giving them more algorithmically friendly and significantly less “ethnic” names, and watching them become the next viral thing as they move further and further away from their origins.
More people from all walks of life are trying these new foods and finding flavors they might not have known they enjoy. Enjoying and respecting food from cultures outside your own is not an issue. But making these dishes at home is becoming less about trying new foods, and more about being “chronically online” and testing the “viral trend” versions of dishes that have been around long before they were first recorded and posted.
Not calling dishes what they are doesn’t just stop you from connecting with other cultures. Sometimes, it can even disconnect you from your own.
As I was researching the wild world of culinary appropriation and food gentrification, I remembered why this topic meant so much to me. I was born to a Trinidadian mother and an Italian-from-Staten-Island father. I was picky the way that most kids are, and I’m still working on my spice tolerance. But whenever I ate more traditional dishes, they were always called… something else.
Stewed chicken and macaroni pie was “brown chicken and mac and cheese.” Chow was “cucumbers with lime.” Gulab jamun was “footballs” because to be fair, that is what Trini gulab jamun looks like. I didn’t learn that “falafels” were actually kachori until about two years ago. When I asked my mom and my grandma about it, they said they did it to make it “easier for me to understand.”
But even as I watch Foodie Nation on the couch with my mom now (real ones know), it feels almost empty. Maybe, if my family called these dishes what they were, I’d feel like I could proudly call myself Trini instead of having to preface that it’s just on my mom’s side and I’m American more than anything else. I’ve tried and loved my fair share of viral foods (shout out to the jar of chili oil in my fridge), but I’ve also experienced what it’s like to erode the identity of dishes that could make you feel more connected.
After decades of labelling foreign cuisine as unhealthy, the ever-so-common experience of children of immigrants being told their lunch looks or smells “weird,” and living in a political climate where red meat and soy have become symbols of affiliation and “power,” it is more important than ever to call these dishes what they are, and understand each other just a bit better — one plate at a time.
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