![]() The self-consciousness is often wrapped in a joke, but it’s there, nonetheless, like a particularly sensitive phantom. ![]() Creators’ and consumers’ anxiety of getting it wrong hangs over much of the cooking content on the app, present in recipe developers’ videos defending their seasoning practices and in the ubiquitous “here before the ‘where’s the seasoning’ comments” comments. In these videos and among their spectators, there’s a hypervigilance about the appearance of flavor. It’s so common to open the comments section of a food video and spot the remarks about the lack of seasoning and spice that it has become a trope in and of itself. Meanwhile, the flavor binary continued to solidify online as a meme, even becoming enshrined in Urban Dictionary definitions.īut it was TikTok that amplified the idea to a new degree. In 2016, Beyoncé’s “ hot sauce in my bag” lyric sparked widespread conversation about the significance of hot sauce to Southern Black identity, as well as the question of who gets to authentically claim a love for spicy food. ![]() In 2015, an Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom made international headlines for reportedly writing the words “VERY MILD, WHITE PPL” on the receipt for a white customer who had indeed ordered his curry very mild ( similar incidents go briefly viral every so often). Riffs about all “white people food” being casseroles or mayonnaise or mild in flavor started appearing in the annals of content farms, food publications, and comedy videos. What was once an inside joke on Black Twitter and in diaspora communities has become a common rejoinder on social media, boosted into a mainstream culture that has embraced all things hot over the past decade. The slice of midcentury suburban fare as “white people food” has endured as a stereotype, and, over time, has become even more entrenched in popular imagination. Somehow, whiteness became associated with this specific genre of American cuisine, even though both white and non-white Americans were also buying packaged foods sold by migrant or second-generation entrepreneurs at the time, like Goya Foods and Chinese American frozen-food company Kubla Khan. That 1950s image of frozen TV dinners and mass-produced, shelf-stable blandness became an “iconic stereotype of what ‘American’ food was,” even if it wasn’t accurate to what everyone in the United States was eating, Smithsonian food historian Ashley Rose Young tells me. “At school and other institutional settings, American food was coalescing into a middlebrow mess of perfect squares of white bread fried in margarine with melty processed cheese inside, instant potatoes, casseroles, and fish sticks,” Annaliese Griffin writes in Quartz. The postwar years helped homogenize “white” food further. “Ethnic food” has been side-eyed for years now as a shorthand for cheap and exotic “minority food” is easily met with the retort “who’s the real global minority?” “immigrant food” is laughably hegemony-centric and I’d sooner crawl under a rock than refer to anything as “BIPOC food.” There’s not really one term for this culinary grouping that encompasses what could easily be hundreds or thousands of regional varieties of cooking, all crammed to fit under one convenient umbrella. Think aromatic curries that light up your taste buds, juicy fried chicken lacquered in a fiery sauce, crispy vegetables tinged red from paprika and cayenne. In this popular imagining, the opposite of “white people food” is bursting with seasoning, spice, and everything nice. Anemic-looking meat and potatoes garnished with a single speck of salt, almost anything with excess mayonnaise-this fare is commonly greeted on social media with “where’s the seasoning?” or some variation on “white people colonized half the world for spices and still don’t even use them.” This cliché has been widely embraced as a joke, a meme, a barb that even white people throw at themselves with a self-deprecating chuckle. You probably know the stereotype of “white people food”: bland, pale, unseasoned stuff, so flavorless it could make you cry. Welcome to You Are What You Eat.or Are You?, a mini series about the ways that we project our identities through food.
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