Representation in Food Media, Why You Need to Check Your Bylines
Having been trained as a journalist in Australia and the UK, lecturers and tutors would often prompt bright-eyed first years and post-graduates to look up to “established” news outlets. For me, those typically included The Guardian, BBC and The New York Times.
But having “grown up” and “grown out” of the “accepted” mainstream narratives, storylines that we so often hear, I became extremely disenchanted with the “West is best” perception, an unfortunate view, so often carried by ex-colonial countries like mine, Malaysia.
Articles like ‘Jackfruit is a vegan sensation — could I make it taste delicious at home?’ published by The Guardian last year was yet another reaffirmation that West does not always know best. The Guardian columnist, Zoe Williams, writes, “Five years ago, jackfruit was just a spectacularly ugly, smelly, unfarmed, unharvested pest-plant native to India. Some people ate it, but only if they had nothing better to eat.”
Then there are shows like Masterchef UK, with its “acclaimed” and well-travelled judges, who swiftly proved, in one episode, that they really were no experts at all — no matter how many television shows they were picked for and publishing houses they were signed on for.
And all these moments of microaggressions in food media happened not too long ago. With uproar on the Twittersphere, I’m told (I have left that realm for the constant chatter and now occasionally favour the ‘gram) from 2018 to 2019, you would think that the mainstream media would have learned.
But nope.
Last month, The New York Times, coveted for their “best sellers” lists and restaurant reviews, published, by far, one of the most offensive articles on fruits. Yes, fruits.
More specifically, fruits that were endemic to Southeast Asia, such as durian (of course, what’s a microaggresive article about Asia without the polarising fruit), jackfruit and rambutan.
Its Southeast Asian bureau chief, Hannah Beech, who appears to be reporting from Bangkok, rather lazily berates all the fruits that she came across, peppering the article with the keyword “Coronavirus” three times (SEO purposes). And in the most unimaginative way possible, likened the appearance of the rambutan to the Coronavirus.
Interestingly, since I last posted about the NYT article on my Instagram Stories, and together with a big enough backlash on other social media platforms, its NYT team probably peppered its older durian articles with more keywords for that SEO boost, so that they, too, would appear on the first page of the Google search page in order to come across as “impartial” or somewhat “balanced”. But those articles were not on the first page of the Google search result for “new york times durian” when Beech’s article first broke.
Are Asians being too sensitive, you ask?
No.
How many times have we heard someone comment about “smelly” “Indian food”, or the “vomit-like” stench of “durian”, or that a dish is “gross” because the person saw, saw her meal in its entirety, for the first time in her life (surprise, fishes have heads).
If you can’t see anything wrong with The New York Times article, I strongly suggest you speak to more people of colour and if possible, the people who grew up with those fruits, or better yet, the farmers who grow those fruits.
Microaggression has existed for far too long. It has been passed off as industry standard; where it’s no longer surprising, but a standard Youtube clickbait thumbnail to have a white person pull a disgusted face next to a durian.
Microaggression in food writing cuts deep. To think that a “softer” topic like “food” and “travel” would go unscathed, it appears untrue, unfortunately. Food is undoubtedly the easiest entry point into a culture that we may be unfamiliar with. And as an easy entry point, it also makes it susceptible and an efficient carrier of infectious ideas, stereotypes and prejudices.
I founded Plates because I know and have experienced first hand, food as a medium that connects two individuals, who don’t share the same language or cultural background — be it on a remote beach in Albania or on a train to Mandalay. How a person treats and reacts to food is telling of their personalities.
Likewise, on the flip side, as easily as it can bring people together, to a setting or to a table for nourishment and discussion, food can divide — class, race, ethnicity, cultures and beliefs.
If you’re tired of reading misrepresented stories and narratives about “exotic” cultures and “the other”, I would like to invite you to consider reading Plates, a print publication that uses food as a conversation starter. More specifically, the Durian issue, where microaggressions in food media is further discussed in detail as well as the cultural stories and symbolism of the durian in Thai culinary history and the indigenous groups of Borneo and Malaysia.
No celebrity chef interviews, no listicles and no restaurant reviews; just human stories from the field — one plate at a time.
