It’s a Small World After All

I am standing on a narrow sidewalk in Oaxaca next to a shallow, rectangular charcoal grill where Raquel Garzón is grilling thin pieces of beef for tlayudas, large crispy tortillas spread with asiento (pork lard), black beans, Oaxacan cheese and salsa. Buses whiz by, too close for comfort, the filled tlayudas are folded and crisped over the fire, and then we repair inside for dinner with the Garzón family, welcomed with numerous glasses of mezcal.

The same scene is repeated all over the world daily. Stroncatura in Calabria. Maqluba in Palestine. Stir-fried beef with mango and cilantro in Hong Kong. Vindaloo in Goa. Shkmeruli (garlic chicken) in Georgia. Pot roast in Vermont.
Transported to foreign shores, this is called “global” cuisine, but locally it is just whatever someone is making for dinner. Global is simply the point of view of a stranger, a foreigner who finds the familiar unfamiliar.

Milk Street has its offices at 177 Milk Street in Boston, just a few blocks from the Old State House and across the street from the rallying point for Boston’s favorite tourist ride, the Duck Tour. Every day, I encounter tourists on the Freedom Trail or visiting the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, a tour leader dressed in colonial garb with a tri-corner hat.

Boston is not what you see from the Duck Tour and Mexico City is not a visit to a taqueria or a walking tour of Roma or Condesa, two of the more picturesque neighborhoods.

Neil deGrasse Tyson answers the question of the existence of God by pointing out that the unfamiliar is only a mystery until science figures it out. Before Isaac Newton, the motion of the planets was in the realm of the gods. Before Einstein, the universe was more faith than science. Mysteries still abound, such as what existed before the Big Bang, but our lack of understanding does not necessarily support a faith-based worldview.

The same is true of food. We worship what we do not know and have not tasted either by manning the barricades of authenticity (rigorously defending the unfamiliar) or by turning the ordinary into a form of religion. Pho, guacamole, coconut curry, sashimi, dal, biryani, hummus, kofte, paella and the many dishes of kaiseki are not legendary foods to be worshipped, they are to be prepared and eaten.

I have been in outdoor kitchens (including barbecue setups behind a shed next to a discarded toilet), historic kitchens at Hampton Court in England, super modern kitchens in Denmark, immense kitchens at China Club in Las Vegas, rural kitchens with hand pumps in the sink and wood cookstoves, bread ovens in the middle of the Sahara, and simple kitchens in places from Taiwan to Fez, but in the end, they all serve the same purpose.

When you point at something and call it exotic, you are taking away its humanity and putting it on a pedestal. Just like with physics, we transform the foods we do not understand into an unyielding religion. Guacamole is not a holy relic, it is mashed avocados. Go to Mexico City and you will find that every cook, every chef, prepares it their own way—throw chopped peanuts on it, add pureed cilantro, use tomatoes instead of lime juice, add a chipotle, or char some onion and mix it in.

Let people defend their own culinary traditions, or not, as they see fit. If you did not grow up with thieboudienne (the national dish of Senegal), please don’t volunteer to defend what it is and what it isn’t. For most Senegalese, it’s dinner, it’s what one serves to family as a celebration and many locals in Dakar may be perfectly happy to have other cooks make it the way they like it.

Someday we may understand the universe and its origins, we may decide that it is unknowable, or we may all replace science with religion—who knows. But what we don’t know about the cooking of other cultures should not be turned into a culture war, as if recipes are the unquestionable tenets of a didactic culinary religion. The Catholic Church branded Galileo as a heretic despite the facts. When it comes to food, the facts are that recipes change and adapt over time.
As I said, a recipe is just what someone else around the world is making for dinner.